[xionja]

So what books do you keep handy all the time?

I don't think its representative of what you read all the time, or what your favorite books are, but the books that people keep next to their bed seem to be an eclectic mix.

So what books do keep at the most convieniet location?

I have a little wooden crate next to my bed (on the ground) so I keep a few books in it:

The Holy Bible
"Fires", "Will you please be quiet, please", and "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver
"The Sun also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway
"The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe
"The first Third" by Neal Cassady
"One flew over the Cuckoo's nest" by Ken Kesey
"Pulp", and "South of No North" by Charles Bukowski
The first three 'Rabbit' books by John Updike
"The Crossing" by Cormac McCarthy
"Naked Lunch" by William Burroughts
Basic Writings of Nietzsche
"Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintnance" by Robert Pirsig

and my favorite, the iChing, Richard Welhelm translation

[Naderfan]

Well, I'll see what I can remember. I have a lot:

-Anna Karenin and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
-The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexander Dumas
-The Phantom of the Opera (can't remember who it's by at the moment.)
-The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
-A whole bunch of books by Elie Wiesel (one of my most favorite authors ever)
-The Harry Potter series
-Crash!ing the Party by Ralph Nader
-In Defense of Marxism by Trotsky

That's what I remember off the top of my head. Oh, and of course, my Onion books.

[PhenixReborn]

I actually have so many books in my bedroom, I have two shelves and draw full. The draw contains a LOT of Terry Pratchett novels.

The shelves contain some hardback fiction, but mostly Christian books, everything from C.S. Lewis to hardcore Philosophy and Apologetics. I'll just list the C.S. Lewis books here since I've read those the most:

Mere Christianity
The Screwtape Letters
The Four Loves
Pilgrim's Regress (I also have Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan)
The Weight of Glory
The Great Divorce

Also, some other interesting ones:

Dismantling Evolution by Ralph Muncaster
God's Smuggler by Brother Andrew (Missionary in post-WWII USSR)
The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer
The Art of Meditation by Jerry Goldsmith
The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges

Of course, then there's my closet with all the fantasy books like Dragonlance, Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, etc.

Then the coupe de grace:

The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkein (Red Leather, single volume edition). And of course, the accompanying Green Leather edition of The Hobbit.

I love Reading!!

[PhenixReborn]

Naderfan,

Is the "Phantom of the Opera" book the same story as Weber's musical? Either way, can you please find who wrote it (I'm too lazy to Google right now)?

Also, what kind of literature does Elie Wiesel write?

[Spart]

Originally Posted by PhenixReborn Of course, then there's my closet with all the fantasy books like Dragonlance, Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, etc.

If you consider the works of Terry Goodkind to be lumped merely with other works of fantasy, you've missed the entire point of his writing.

:smokey:

[Mac+]

Originally Posted by xionja So what books do you keep handy all the time? I don't think its representative of what you read all the time, or what your favorite books are, but the books that people keep next to their bed seem to be an eclectic mix. So what books do keep at the most convieniet location? I have a little wooden crate next to my bed (on the ground) so I keep a few books in it: The Holy Bible "Fires", "Will you please be quiet, please", and "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver "The Sun also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe "The first Third" by Neal Cassady "One flew over the Cuckoo's nest" by Ken Kesey "Pulp", and "South of No North" by Charles Bukowski The first three 'Rabbit' books by John Updike "The Crossing" by Cormac McCarthy "Naked Lunch" by William Burroughts Basic Writings of Nietzsche "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintnance" by Robert Pirsig and my favorite, the iChing, Richard Welhelm translation

That's an impressive assortment xionja - have you read "On The Road" ? (Kerouac) What got you into the beat style of writing anyway?

[murbot]

A big ass stack of Hubert Selby, Jr books.

[NosferaDrew]

Bookshelf?
The internet is my bookshelf.

[autodata]

I have a TON of books, but right now the ones on the table in front of me are:

Modern Latin America by Skidmore & Smith

*A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson

The Future of Ideas by Lessig

[_Ω_]

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
120 Days of Sodom by de Sade

and about 600 others.....

[kretara]

I have a library of ~ 150 books at home. A lot of Anne McCaffrey, David Eddings, Tom Clancey and other Scifi/fantasy writers.
At work I have lots of O'Reilly books. The books I "use" the most are:
MySQL & mSQL
MySQL Cookbook
PHP Cookbook
Perl DBI

I am currently rereading Rainbow Six by Tom Clancey

[Moogs]

Actually I'm more prone to having backlogs of unread magazines laying around than books. Most of those are on the shelf at all times. Some recent ones I've accessed:

Photoshop CS Studio Techniques
National Geographic Atlas of the World (awesome book - if you don't own a copy, get a copy)
The Way Things Work

[psmith2.0]

Holy cow, I read all these responses and realize what a dunce I am. Threads like this make me feel quite stupid.

I have no fiction books. The stuff I have is mostly stuff about graphics, design, software, etc. Just not a big reader, I guess. Not books, anyway. Magazines, journals, online stuff, etc. is my bag.

However I do have two that I cherish: Alex Ross's "Mythology" and "Batman Animated" by Paul Dini and Chip Kidd.



Somewhere between Bruce Timm and Alex Ross is that perfect kind of illustration that just thrills my soul to no end.

[staph]

Well, I have a range of stuff which I use often at the moment:

A complete set of Jane Austen novels, and assorted other Victorian novels (The Moonstone, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones etc);

F**kloads of Asimov, Pratchett, Jack Vance (including the complete Alastor, Dying Earth, Lyonesse and Anome series, and incomplete sets of the several other series), and assorted other sci/fi by McCaffrey, Silverberg and others;

The Ray brothers' excellent Mac OS X Unleashed (ed. 1) was retired last week and given to my significant other, after substantial use;

on my bookshelf at the Safari online library I have about four books on Perl (which I'm currently trying to achieve competence in, with mixed success) (Learning Perl, Perl Objects, References, and Modules, Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and Perl and CGI, off the top of my head), and various other tomes, all published by O'Reilly.

A couple of Bibles (Authorised and Jerusalem) (reference tools mind you — I'm an atheist);

the Mediaeval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources, Glare's Oxford Latin Dictionary, the Cassell's Latin Dictionary, Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer, Woodcock's New Latin Syntax, and Gildersleeve & Lodge are all tools I constantly use for my history stuff. I'm auditing Caesar's Gallic Wars Book VI, so I have that too... apparently the Latin reading group is going to have a look at Statius' Achilleid, so I might try to track down a copy of that as well.

I'm currently reading the Dark is Rising series again.

I keep meaning to read Das Kapital and Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but never have time.

There are lots of other books, but I tend to touch them rarely.

[LoCash]

I'm not going to go into my bedroom and check my wooden bedside book crate (I thought I was the only one that did this), so I'm going to go from memory...

20th Century Warfare Strategy by Doughty I believe
Famous Military Essays on Warfare Strategy
Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jameson
Einstein's Dreams
Saints and Villains
The Thesaurus
Being and Nothingness

[ast3r3x]

Eh, mostly compuer books.

Only non computer book I can be sure is on my book shelf is "The Richest Man In Babylon" (excellent book!)

I have another financial one, not sure of the name.

Basically don't read stories, informational is me. Movies are for the imagination

[xionja]

Originally Posted by PhenixReborn Also, what kind of literature does Elie Wiesel write?

Elie Wiesel writes mostly memoirs, I think . . . He's most famous for Night, about his experience in the Holocaust, and has also written Dawn, though I'm not sure what it is about. I've only read Night, but personally I wasn't impressed with his writting style, it almost seemed like a summary of somebody else's holocaust experience.

[xionja]

Originally Posted by Spart If you consider the works of Terry Goodkind to be lumped merely with other works of fantasy, you've missed the entire point of his writing. :smokey:

What is the point of Terry Goodkind's writing, just out of curiousity, I think I read the first 6 of them, when I was 12 yrs old. I definatly recognized that his writing was worlds better thatn your typical fantasy books (and in fact couldn't ever go back to any other fantasy after his) but what do you consider special about it? I've considered rereading a few now that I'm a bit older, so if you wanna give me a good reason

[thuh Freak]

my sisters gave me 'a clockwork orange' (burgess i think is the author), and something by rand. i also have 'beyond good & evil' nearby. of those books, i've read a clockwork. i cracked open the rand and the nietzche, but haven't gotten into them. oo, 'what is called thinking' (heideger) is also somewhere over in that area. i got about half way through that one then i spilled soda or something on it, and left it to dry, for a few months. not quite sure where it is anymore, but i know its in that general area.

my book shelves are full of volumes of squiggly lines which i've never bothered to look at. i do know i have a disproportionate amount of bibles. the bible to other book ratio is like 7:1. i'm not much of a reader. most of those books were from school, or from my siblings. i think i'm gonna pick up something by dr. thompson today though. my friends all read f&l in las vegas and apparently the book throws some jokes onto the story over the flick.

[Naderfan]

Elie Wiesel's books take a lot of energy. He definitely has a unique style. But if you like CS Lewis (who I also love....his books are next to my bed as well) you'll probably like Wiesel. His books weave theology and philosophy into fictional stories based off his experiences. Technically speaking, Night is listed as fiction. But it is based so closely to his personal experiences (including names and everything else) that it is often considered an autobiography. If you do want his complete autobiography, it's in two volumes: All Rivers Run to the Sea and The Sea is Never Full. Both very good...he's lived an interesting life. My favorite of his fiction (besides Night) are Twilight and A Beggar in Jerusalem.

Gaston Leroux is the author of The Phantom of the Opera (although I may not have the spelling 100% correct). I've only seen the musical once, long ago, but the stories are the same. I believe (and someone correct me if I'm wrong) but the book came first. It too is well done.

Well, back to work for me. Hope this helps, Phenix

[curiousuburb]

I have more than one bookshelf .
Stuff cycles from one shelf to another depending on mood/time/topic.

Technically not on my bookshelf anymore, since I'd borrowed it from my Dad, but I just finished The Music of the Primes by Marcus de Sautoy. Dense with facts and the occasional formulae that caused a bit of glazed eye, but richer in historical weave about the way mathematics develops. Recommended.


In a similar vein, if somewhat more macabre, I'd previously finished Possessing Genius: The Bizzare Odyssey of Einstein's Brain by Carolyn Abraham

Next in the queue in my Sci/Tech/Teaching shelves:
Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science by Amir Aczel
The Difference Engine:Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer by Doron Swade
(and yes, I loved the William Gibson & Bruce Sterling sci-fi novel of the same name)
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

My bedside shelf currently includes:
Esoteric Teachings of the Tibetan Tantra by C.A. Muses
The Tantric View of Life by Herbert Guenther
Te Tao Ching - Lao Tzu Robert Henricks translation with original Chinese
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
The Holographic Paradigm and other paradoxes - Ken Wilber, editor
The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde
Trickster Makes This World: Mischeif, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde
The World of Pooh by A.A. Milne
William Blake: Collected poetry and letters Jacob Bronowski, ed

[curiousuburb]

Holy only one linking, Batman! I make life too easy for you slackers.

[synotic]

Warning: The post below contains a lot of what some people might consider uninteresting or even outright boring. If web development and art books aren't you're thing, scroll right on. I won't be offended

Edit: Apparently AppleNova won't let you use encoded characters like MacNN I also believe I used the wrong thing anyways, should be emdash. And I'm on an azerty keyboard right now and I can't figure out how to get an m dash. So for now you'll have to live with it.

Like a few people here I don't read many stories anymore. Although I'd like too During my childhood (ok, young childhood, I'm 16) I used to read quite a bit, and have rather full collections of Goosebumps, Animorphs, that kind of stuff. Recently story wise, I've read through all the Harry Potter books. I've also read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart quite recently. Quite pathetic, I know. In the last two or three years however I've ordered quite a few technical and art books like pscates. Some notable highlights, Looking at my Amazon order history,

Web books...
Designing for Web Standards— CSS+HTML book Jeffrey Zeldman. Great book, easy to read through.

PHP and MySQL Development— Big book, but also pretty easy to read, read about 450 pages into it, which is all the explanatory stuff. The rest are example projects.

Practical Unix & Internet Security— Have yet to read through this one, but from the preface/introductionary chapter, the writing seems inviting enough. Content-wise it has a lot of things I've been interested in or lacked knowledge on.

The Complete Manual of Typography— Complete worthless. Ugh.. I tried to read through it (little past half way through), really, but there was so much info being thrown out in technical language that it was rather hard to follow. I got it against another book recommendation and I'm regretting that decision.

Real World Color Management— about 3/4 through this one. some areas take some rereading, but overall I think I understood most of it. I'll finish it up one of these days.

Art/Drawing books

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain— If you're the stick figures and "can't even draw a straight line" people, this is the book to get. If anyone wants to learn to draw, I can expand upon this a bit. The method used was virtually identical to what I was taught in Art (my teacher even took pictures from the book) so about 80% through I found the book was pointless for me. Still a great book for its purpose though.

The Natural Way to Draw : A Working Plan for Art Study— Quite an intense book. Written by a college professor who intended to give the experience of a university level art class. It consists of 3 hour assigments a day for a year. I've yet to start it because once I do I don't want to take any major breaks or start at a bad time. It is somewhat of a goal for me to get through the entire study.

Drawing the Head & Figure— Written by Jack Hamm... this is an amazing book. He manages to throw out tons of facts about the human body, bone structure etc... in an accessible fashion. Once you get through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, this is a fantastic book to jump into. Again, I can expand on this if anyone's interested.

I have also have a few other art books but I figured I should cut this short as the above are most of the notable ones/ones I've read through or mostly through. Just checking my stack right now, the others are How to Draw Lifelike Portraits from Photographs (technique creates some highly realistic facial features), Drawing Wrinkles and Drapery, Drawing Nature, and Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green (enlightening book that explains why the whole blue and red make violet idea is utterly wrong).

OK sorry for that, these are just things I've been reading and working with last 2 years or so, so I have a lot to say. I've been meaning to let loose lots of this (drawing mostly) because I think I've learned or at least been exposed to some very cool things. Again, if anyone else is interested in drawing or whatever, feel free to PM or IM me or something

[synotic]

curiousblurb, you might want to check out this wikipedia article It might not bother you but maybe the URLs you are posting include your shopping history, credit card number and home phone number I suppose it doesn't matter, but I like having nice clean URLs, it makes it easier to copy down Amazon URLs anyways.

As a sidenote, if you don't have a readily supply of books or disposable income, then wikipedia is a great place to learn something new.

[iLikeMyiMacG4]

currently reading Tom Clancy - Without Remorse
books on shelf:
Michael Shaara - Killer Angels
Frank O'Conner - Collected Stories
Mario Puzo - Godfather
Orwell - 1984 (the movie version of the book came today via Netflix)
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
Athol Fugard - Master Harold and the Boys
(author unknown) - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

[Wrao]

I don't even own A book, let alone many books that would necessitate an entire shelf

Well, of course I have a bunch of books around the house, but currently I'm not living there and I don't have any books here. Same in Boston, I have 1 book in boston, Everything you need to know about the Music Business, despite the corny title, it's actually an amazing book.

[curiousuburb]

Originally Posted by synotic curiousblurb, you might want to check out this wikipedia article It might not bother you but maybe the URLs you are posting include your shopping history, credit card number and home phone number I suppose it doesn't matter, but I like having nice clean URLs, it makes it easier to copy down Amazon URLs anyways. As a sidenote, if you don't have a readily supply of books or disposable income, then wikipedia is a great place to learn something new.

Thanks for your concern, but I didn't buy them online... just used amazon to point others to easy access.
I'm a longstanding advocate of privacy online. No autofill settings, Pithhelmet blocking and cookie rules set, ruthlessly regular reader of privacy policies, and a skeptical attitude to any requests for information that I might prefer not to share.

Better to edit the urls of sessionid strings, though. You are correct.

As for online libraries:

Archive.org has 25,000+ texts online, including Project Gutenberg
Banned Books Online from UPenn's Digital Library
Perseus.tufts.edu ~ searchable classical greek/roman archive, papyri, and more

[dviant]

How about what's on top of my toilet instead?

• some Print Design Annual (latest one I think)
• "MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer" by Hillman Curtis
• "Ogilvy on Advertising" by David Ogilvy

I really can't wait to say that I read Ogilvy on Advertising entirely while taking dumps. I'm only about 1/3 the way though however. I really need less roughage I think.

[PhenixReborn]

Oh yeah, I have computer books too!! I was wondering where all my money went...

I mostly use O'Reilly books and I have:
Practical C++ Programming
Programming C#
Java in a Nutshell
JavaServer Pages
HTML and XHTML
XML and .NET
Learning Perl

I also have (non-O'Reilly):
Complete MySQL Reference (McGraw-Hill)
XML Bible
C# Programming Cookbook
C for Java Programmers
Extreme Programming Adventures in C#

Which brings two questions to mind:

1) Does anyone have an opinion of the online bookshelf at OReilly.com?

2) Is anyone in here a practitioner of Xtreme Programming aka Agile Programming aka Test-driven Programming? I've tried it, but found it to be a bit difficult to develop tests for anything other than a simle function. Just looking for other opinions or suggestions about it.

Concerning Terry Goodkind:

IMHO, he is second only to Tolkein for story-telling. While I don't always make his books my first choice (since they can be brutal to the senses), he is definitely a good writer. I think Tolkein is better only because of the imagery, which Goodkind seems to avoid using most of the time in order to focus on the story and characters.

Books are my escape hatch from this world, so the imagery is important to me.

[Windswept]

I have a few stacks of books by my bedside at present, but they're not necessarily representative of what I normally read. Haven't started any of these yet. Or, rather, I've read one page and then have fallen sound asleep. Spending too much time online, I guess.

American Sphinx: the Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik ("the finest book on France in recent years" - NYT Bk. Review)

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz

The Grown-ups Guide to Running Away from Home by Rosanne Knorr

The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama

Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir

Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns

The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24's Over Germany by Stephen Ambrose

Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch

A History of the British Secret Service by Richard Deacon

The German Generals Talk: Startling Revelations from Hitler's High Command by B.H. Liddell Hart

Rommel - The Desert Fox: The classic biography of the legendary leader of Germany's Afrika Korps by Desmond Young

The SAS Survival Handbook by John Wiseman

Tactics of Modern Warfare by Mark Lloyd

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Waugh/Bellonci


I have a couple thousand books. Have no idea how many. Divided into sections like:

English Literature
American Literature
European and World Lit.
Literary Criticism
American History
World History
Ancient History
Military History
Military Non-Fiction/ Fiction
Science/Nature
Art
Culinary Arts

Have *tons* of Vietnam war books. Also WWII stuff like The Brotherhood of War series, The Corps, etc. Used to read all that stuff voraciously.

In the past I have read *lots* of British mystery series, so many that I can't keep them straight in my mind...which is fortunate, because then I can read them all again someday. heh. Mysteries, I don't buy - just check them out from the library, twenty at a time.

I have read the O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin entire series (20 vols.?) twice and own all those books. (British navy during the Napoleonic Wars)

Have all the Hornblower books, and have read those twice also. I LOVE British navy seafaring books. (Napoleonic Wars again)

Have read/own all the Sharpe's Rifles series. Loved those too. (Napoleonic Wars, but with an 'advance' rifle unit - sharpshooters - British Army)

I would *really* love to do a comprehensive study of military history, strategy and tactics, ancient to modern. But I don't want to start doing this until I can dedicate many uninterrupted months to the project; because after reading, I'll want to do some writing, and it's all going to take a long time.