Books I own (that I've actually read)

On vacation last week I went looking for a book and never found it. As I rummaged through the various eddies where books tend to collect in this house, I started wondering what percentage of the books in his building I've actually read -- either cover-to-cover, or in the case of some reference books, at least substantially engaged.

This doesn't include most of our coffee table or picture books, nor does it include the multiple "For Dummies" books we've collected over the years.  It includes some collections (The Portable Curmudgeon, for example) but not others (Idiots in Charge or Things A Man Should Never Do Past 30). And this list reveals that I've lost track of an alarming number of quality, first-edition books over the years.

If I'm right in assuming that I've read about 15 to 20 percent of the books that we own then... well, it's pretty clear why we're running out of house...

The list:

1. Man Without a Country by Vonnegut
2. Evil and World Order by William Irwin Thompson (WIT)
3. Why Kerouac Matters
4. On The Road (my how this rewired my 16-year-old brain)
   
5. All the Rage This Year
6. Pattern Recognition (my favorite William Gibson novel)
   
7. Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome (I've got two stories in this one)
8. Ambient Findability
9. Rule the Web (very handy book by Mark Frauenfelder -- recommended)
10. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (this is the one to read)
11. Lunatic Wind (novelization of Hurricane Hugo in Charleston)
12. Chaos
13. The Future of Life (by E.O. Wilson)
14. Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony
15. Clear Intent
16. Dreamland Chronicles
17. Dreamland
18. The Big Wedding
19. These Honored Dead (absolutely FASCINATING history of the monuments at Gettysburg)
20. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
21. Mountains and Rivers Without End by Gary Snyder
22. Rent Girl (excellent graphic memoir of a prostitute)
23. City Lights anthology
24. The Time Traveler's Wife (recommended to me by Michelle List)
25. The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. It's just beautiful.
26. September Rampage
27. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (Not sure what drew me to this one, but it's fascinating)
28. Howl at 50 (A great way to revisit a brilliant old friend)
29. Storm World
30. Cradle of Splendor (my least favorite by Patricia Anthony -- I don't have my favorite by her anymore)
31. Brother Termite (a must-read)
32. The Happy Policeman
33. Cold Allies
34. Passages About Earth (WIT)
35. The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (WIT)
36. Imagination of an Insurrection (WIT)
37. The Singularity is Near (very important book)
38. The American Replacement of Nature (WIT)
39. Coming into Being
40. The Third Twin
41. Empire of Dreams and Miracles (My first published story)
42. Helm
43. God's Fires by Patricia Anthony
44. Iduru by William Gibson
45. My Father the Spy
46. Born Fighting
47. The Summer Isles. This was published by Aio Press and it's not only a beautiful physical object, it's a brilliant novel. Hard to find.
48. Seven Touches of Magic
49. Death by Journalism
50. Into the Buzzsaw (Everyone should read this)
51. Booty
52. Who Will Tell the People? (William Greider's ignored firebell in the night)
53. The Zenith Angle
54. Wild Ducks Flying Backwards
55. The Wimp Factor
56. Lolita
57. Ghost Ship
58. Raising the Hunley (I get a nice credit in this one)
59. Man Eaters Motel
60. The Constant Gardener (by John Le Carre... caused me to break down emotionally)
61. Germs by that liar Judith Miller
62. The Republican War on Science
63. State of War
64. Armed Madhouse
65. Fiasco (the book that revealed just how fucked-up our Iraq War "planning" was)
66. What's the Matter with Kansas?
67. The Republican Noise Machine
68. Don't Think of an Elephant
69. Everything Bad is Good For You (a great recommendation by John Sloop)
70. The Cluetrain Manifesto (Must Read)
71. A Golden Haze of Memory (This is THE book if you want to understand Charleston's strange relationship to the past)
72. The Great Divide
73. Cured by Fire
74. My Other Life (a creepy book by Paul Theroux)
75. The Fabric of the Cosmos
76. The X President
77. Hafez: The Gift (I love these)
78. Drawing Down the Moon (introduced me to pagan thought)
79. Against All Enemies
80. The DaVinci Code
81. The Truth (with jokes)
82. Freakonomics
83. Second Lives
84. Desolation Angels
85. Whiteout
86. Slaughterhouse Five (God love Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)
87. The Thurber Carnival (He wrote things and drew things and was near-sighted, too)
88. The One Percent Doctrine
89. The Bauhaus Ideal
90. Jarhead
91. Company C (I actually became friends with John Sack, the author, after reading this book. A brilliant, decent man who would have been appalled by what Bush did in Iraq)
92. Tuva or Bust (Not well known, but HIGHLY recommended)
93. Halfmoon Street
94. Smokeout
95. Essential Reiki
96. Hooking Up
97. Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot
98. Prague (a novel about expatriots in... Budapest)
99. Ann Charter's Kerouac
100. The Hobbit
101. The Fellowship of the Ring
102. The Two Towers
103. The Return of the King
104. The Nine Billion Names of God
105. Earth Abides
106. The Shining
107. The Red Pony
108. The Man in the High Castle
109. The Last Man Alive
110. War for the Oaks
111. Many Lives, Many Masters
112. The Stranger
113. Traveling Mercies
114. Treasure Island
115. Xenocide
116. Red Prophet
117. The Silent War
118. The Human Factor
119. The Grapes of Wrath
120. Fighting for the Future
121. Black Elk Speaks
122. Fatherland
123. Messages from Michael
124. Gilgamesh
125. Ribofunk
126. The Catcher in the Rye
127. Walking Across Egypt
128. The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love
129. Sexual State of the Union (Suzie Bright is a hero)
130. The 10th Man
131. The Monkey Wrench Gang
132. Lancelot (my favorite Walker Percy novel)
133. The Honoraby Counsel
134. The Power and the Glory
135. Travels with my Aunt
136. The Force of Character
137. The Emperor of Scent
138. The Eaters of the Dead
139. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Very significant to me at the time I read it)
140. Stranger in a Strange Land
141. Play of Consciousness
142. Raney (signed by Clyde Edgerton)
143. The Great Gatsby
144. Chain of Command
145. Jpod (An LOL kind of novel. Douglas Coupland on a tear)
146. Will (the author wrote to me when I wrote an up-and-down review of this. Very nice woman)
147. The Lost Boys
148. The Great Derangement
149. Arts, Inc.
150. Conversations with God (Books 1-3)
151. Friendship with God
152. The Captain's War
153. The Four Agreements
154. Rollback
155. Here Comes Everybody
156. Up and at 'Em (Harold Hartney for the win!)
157. The Mists of Avalon (Wonderful)
158. End Game (The book that convinced me chess was worth another look)
159. Collapse
160. Spook Country
161. Guns, Germs and Steel
162. Armageddon in Retrospect
163. The Gum Thief
164. Omega Sol
165. Outbound
166. The Neanderthal Enigma (great look at archaeology)
167. Darkness and Scattered Light
168. A Sense of the Myserious
169. McSweeney's No. 20
170. Rainbow's End
171. The Inferno
172. Light in August
173. Smoke Signals
174. The Winter of our Discontent
175. The Prince
176. Shadow of the Hegemon
177. Lord of the Flies
178. Breakfast of Champions
179. Redeye
180. The Great Pursuit
181. Catch 22
182. Like a Family
183. This Side of Paradise
184. Here and Hereafter
185. Johnny Tremain
186. The Flaming Ship of Ocrakoke
187. The Mosquito Coast
188. For Whom the Bell Tolls
189. American Blood (Jeez! Awful!)
190. Asylum
191. The End of the Affair
192. After Jihad
193. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I holed up for two days in my dorm room reading this one)
194. Mr. Lincoln's Army
195. A Stillness at Appomatox
196. Memory Babe
197. Lunch at the Piccadilly (Clyde Edgerton hits the wall)
198. Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler is huge in Germany)
199. The Mind of the South (W.J. Cash also was an editor at The Shelby Star)
200. America: What Went Wrong?
201. Strega
202. Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding
203. A Farewell to Arms
204. Fables For Our Times (more Thurber!)
205. Labor's Untold Story (a labor organizer mailed this to me after I gained a modicum of fame at 17 by leading a student bus driver's "strike" that got lots of media coverage in Greensboro, N.C.)
206. The Aquarian Conspiracy
207. The Tao of Jung (just terrible)
208. Neuromancer
209. Great Flying Adventures
210. The Sterile Cuckoo
211. The Wilderness World of John Muir (I carried this old book around in a pack with me for years)
212. The Dark Wind
213. Blackbeard's Cup
214. The Big Fix
215. Bloods (Askari Mekanic loaned me this one... Askari, come get it)
216. Vengeance
217. Testaments Betrayed
218. Road Warriors
219. Music in Every Room (I bought this one for it's subtitle: "Around the World in a Bad Mood")
220. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
221. Continental Drift (I dig me some Russel Banks)
222. The Book of Jamaica
223. A Naturalist's Guide to the Southern Blue Ridge
224. A Picture History of the Civil War (Catton)
225. Sacred Hoops
226. Maverick
227. Maggie Cassidy
228. Pastwatch
229. Maps in a Mirror
230. Alvin Journeyman
231. Ender's Game
232. God is Red (Vine Deloria died a couple years ago, dammit)
233. SS-GB
234. The Red Pony
235. The File (interesting book about the Stazi)
236. The Green Hills of Africa
237. Roughing it Easy
238. German Made Simple
239. Conceived in Liberty
240. Touch the Earth
241. America: The Book
242. The Paridiso
243. The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn (a lovesong to Taos by John Nichols)
244. A Walden Two Experiment
245. Nine Stories
246. The Nick Adams Stories (this was the book that was in my pocket on the day I reported to Fort Knox for basic training)
247. Siddhartha
248. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (bio contends Greene murder a woman and wrote about it over and over again in his fiction)
249. Fortress America
250. Shu (my first journalism mentor, who is no doubt thrashing around in his grave as we speak)
251. All the President's Men
252. War Crimes
253. East of Eden
254. Appalachian Tail Hiker II
255. As Far As The Eye Can See
256. A Season on the Appalachian Trail
257. The Wayward Bus
258. St. Joan of the Stockyards
259. St. Joan
260. Rilke's poetry translated
261. The Moon is Down (the first Steinbeck I ever read)
262. Henderson the Rain King
263. Goethe: Faust
264. The Russians
265. The Big Deal
266. Down Home
267. Salvation on Sand Mountain (GREAT little book on faith and roots)
268. The Appalachian Trail
269. The Beat Generation
270. The Unvanquished
271. Seize the Day
272. Heartfire
273. Shadow Puppets
274. Jule Carr
275. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
276. Strip Tease
277. The Little Prince
278. Armored Cav
279. Ten Days that Shook the World
280. A Clockwork Orange
281. Conversation y repaso
282. Death in the Afternoon
283. Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy
284. Desolate Angel
285. Moon and Sixpence
286. The Journey Home
287. Mo' Yo' Mama
288. The Heart of the Matter
289. Practical Flying (first edition, from I believe 1919)
290. The Legend of Nance Dude
291. The Sun Also Rises
292. The Odyssey
293. Sometimes a Great Notion
294. The Serial
295. This Hallowed Ground
296. Nirvana Blues
297. The Sibyl
298. Survival, Escape and Evasion (one of the best books ever published, and it's a U.S. Army training manual)
299. State of Fear (complete, utter, worthless SHIT)
300. Get Thee to a Punnery
301. The Portable Curmudgeon
302. Still Life with Woodpecker
303. Satori in Paris
304. How to Stay Alive in the Woods
305. Angelheaded Hipster (a beautiful book... overwhelms the decent written content)
306. The Unhinged World of Glen Baxter (very funny cartoonist)
307. Watching Baseball Smarter (by Zach Hample, who is cool)
308. Thelwell Country (Thelwell is the master)
309. A Leg at Each Corner
310. The New English Bible
311. Tao Te Ching (bought my Jane English/Gia-Fu Feng translation at 18... I now own at least five translations)
312. Tales of the Grand Tour
313. Into the Green
314. When They Were 22
315. Dirty Little Limericks
316. Seven Arrows
317. Jackdaws
318. Word of Mouse

Comments

[jmsloop]

Your assumption in the third paragraph is a free-form delusion, nothing more.

Also, it's Idoru. Not Iduru. It's been out since 1992; you should get this right.

And you need two dashes (--) after the third use of "books" in the first paragraph.

[Huffman]

God damn it Conover. Now I want to catalog my books, and, having a slight tough of OCD, I probably will. Thankfully I took a bunch to Goodwill a couple of months ago.