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:
- Man Without a Country by Vonnegut
- Evil and World Order by William Irwin Thompson (WIT)
- Why Kerouac Matters
- On The Road (my how this rewired my 16-year-old brain)
- All the Rage This Year
- Pattern Recognition (my favorite William Gibson novel)
- Absolutely Brilliant in Chrome (I've got two stories in this one)
- Ambient Findability
- Rule the Web (very handy book by Mark Frauenfelder -- recommended)
- The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (this is the one to read)
- Lunatic Wind (novelization of Hurricane Hugo in Charleston)
- Chaos
- The Future of Life (by E.O. Wilson)
- Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony
- Clear Intent
- Dreamland Chronicles
- Dreamland
- The Big Wedding
- These Honored Dead (absolutely FASCINATING history of the monuments at Gettysburg)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Mountains and Rivers Without End by Gary Snyder
- Rent Girl (excellent graphic memoir of a prostitute)
- City Lights anthology
- The Time Traveler's Wife (recommended to me by Michelle List)
- The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. It's just beautiful.
- September Rampage
- Alice Waters and Chez Panisse (Not sure what drew me to this one, but it's fascinating)
- Howl at 50 (A great way to revisit a brilliant old friend)
- Storm World
- Cradle of Splendor (my least favorite by Patricia Anthony -- I don't have my favorite by her anymore)
- Brother Termite (a must-read)
- The Happy Policeman
- Cold Allies
- Passages About Earth (WIT)
- The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (WIT)
- Imagination of an Insurrection (WIT)
- The Singularity is Near (very important book)
- The American Replacement of Nature (WIT)
- Coming into Being
- The Third Twin
- Empire of Dreams and Miracles (My first published story)
- Helm
- God's Fires by Patricia Anthony
- Iduru by William Gibson
- My Father the Spy
- Born Fighting
- 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.
- Seven Touches of Magic
- Death by Journalism
- Into the Buzzsaw (Everyone should read this)
- Booty
- Who Will Tell the People? (William Greider's ignored firebell in the night)
- The Zenith Angle
- Wild Ducks Flying Backwards
- The Wimp Factor
- Lolita
- Ghost Ship
- Raising the Hunley (I get a nice credit in this one)
- Man Eaters Motel
- The Constant Gardener (by John Le Carre... caused me to break down emotionally)
- Germs by that liar Judith Miller
- The Republican War on Science
- State of War
- Armed Madhouse
- Fiasco (the book that revealed just how fucked-up our Iraq War "planning" was)
- What's the Matter with Kansas?
- The Republican Noise Machine
- Don't Think of an Elephant
- Everything Bad is Good For You (a great recommendation by John Sloop)
- The Cluetrain Manifesto (Must Read)
- A Golden Haze of Memory (This is THE book if you want to understand Charleston's strange relationship to the past)
- The Great Divide
- Cured by Fire
- My Other Life (a creepy book by Paul Theroux)
- The Fabric of the Cosmos
- The X President
- Hafez: The Gift (I love these)
- Drawing Down the Moon (introduced me to pagan thought)
- Against All Enemies
- The DaVinci Code
- The Truth (with jokes)
- Freakonomics
- Second Lives
- Desolation Angels
- Whiteout
- Slaughterhouse Five (God love Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)
- The Thurber Carnival (He wrote things and drew things and was near-sighted, too)
- The One Percent Doctrine
- The Bauhaus Ideal
- Jarhead
- 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)
- Tuva or Bust (Not well known, but HIGHLY recommended)
- Halfmoon Street
- Smokeout
- Essential Reiki
- Hooking Up
- Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot
- Prague (a novel about expatriots in... Budapest)
- Ann Charter's Kerouac
- The Hobbit
- The Fellowship of the Ring
- The Two Towers
- The Return of the King
- The Nine Billion Names of God
- Earth Abides
- The Shining
- The Red Pony
- The Man in the High Castle
- The Last Man Alive
- War for the Oaks
- Many Lives, Many Masters
- The Stranger
- Traveling Mercies
- Treasure Island
- Xenocide
- Red Prophet
- The Silent War
- The Human Factor
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Fighting for the Future
- Black Elk Speaks
- Fatherland
- Messages from Michael
- Gilgamesh
- Ribofunk
- The Catcher in the Rye
- Walking Across Egypt
- The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love
- Sexual State of the Union (Suzie Bright is a hero)
- The 10th Man
- The Monkey Wrench Gang
- Lancelot (my favorite Walker Percy novel)
- The Honoraby Counsel
- The Power and the Glory
- Travels with my Aunt
- The Force of Character
- The Emperor of Scent
- The Eaters of the Dead
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Very significant to me at the time I read it)
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Play of Consciousness
- Raney (signed by Clyde Edgerton)
- The Great Gatsby
- Chain of Command
- Jpod (An LOL kind of novel. Douglas Coupland on a tear)
- Will (the author wrote to me when I wrote an up-and-down review of this. Very nice woman)
- The Lost Boys
- The Great Derangement
- Arts, Inc.
- Conversations with God (Books 1-3)
- Friendship with God
- The Captain's War
- The Four Agreements
- Rollback
- Here Comes Everybody
- Up and at 'Em (Harold Hartney for the win!)
- The Mists of Avalon (Wonderful)
- End Game (The book that convinced me chess was worth another look)
- Collapse
- Spook Country
- Guns, Germs and Steel
- Armageddon in Retrospect
- The Gum Thief
- Omega Sol
- Outbound
- The Neanderthal Enigma (great look at archaeology)
- Darkness and Scattered Light
- A Sense of the Myserious
- McSweeney's No. 20
- Rainbow's End
- The Inferno
- Light in August
- Smoke Signals
- The Winter of our Discontent
- The Prince
- Shadow of the Hegemon
- Lord of the Flies
- Breakfast of Champions
- Redeye
- The Great Pursuit
- Catch 22
- Like a Family
- This Side of Paradise
- Here and Hereafter
- Johnny Tremain
- The Flaming Ship of Ocrakoke
- The Mosquito Coast
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
- American Blood (Jeez! Awful!)
- Asylum
- The End of the Affair
- After Jihad
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I holed up for two days in my dorm room reading this one)
- Mr. Lincoln's Army
- A Stillness at Appomatox
- Memory Babe
- Lunch at the Piccadilly (Clyde Edgerton hits the wall)
- Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler is huge in Germany)
- The Mind of the South (W.J. Cash also was an editor at The Shelby Star)
- America: What Went Wrong?
- Strega
- Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding
- A Farewell to Arms
- Fables For Our Times (more Thurber!)
- 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.)
- The Aquarian Conspiracy
- The Tao of Jung (just terrible)
- Neuromancer
- Great Flying Adventures
- The Sterile Cuckoo
- The Wilderness World of John Muir (I carried this old book around in a pack with me for years)
- The Dark Wind
- Blackbeard's Cup
- The Big Fix
- Bloods (Askari Mekanic loaned me this one... Askari, come get it)
- Vengeance
- Testaments Betrayed
- Road Warriors
- Music in Every Room (I bought this one for it's subtitle: "Around the World in a Bad Mood")
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- Continental Drift (I dig me some Russel Banks)
- The Book of Jamaica
- A Naturalist's Guide to the Southern Blue Ridge
- A Picture History of the Civil War (Catton)
- Sacred Hoops
- Maverick
- Maggie Cassidy
- Pastwatch
- Maps in a Mirror
- Alvin Journeyman
- Ender's Game
- God is Red (Vine Deloria died a couple years ago, dammit)
- SS-GB
- The Red Pony
- The File (interesting book about the Stazi)
- The Green Hills of Africa
- Roughing it Easy
- German Made Simple
- Conceived in Liberty
- Touch the Earth
- America: The Book
- The Paridiso
- The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn (a lovesong to Taos by John Nichols)
- A Walden Two Experiment
- Nine Stories
- The Nick Adams Stories (this was the book that was in my pocket on the day I reported to Fort Knox for basic training)
- Siddhartha
- Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (bio contends Greene murder a woman and wrote about it over and over again in his fiction)
- Fortress America
- Shu (my first journalism mentor, who is no doubt thrashing around in his grave as we speak)
- All the President's Men
- War Crimes
- East of Eden
- Appalachian Tail Hiker II
- As Far As The Eye Can See
- A Season on the Appalachian Trail
- The Wayward Bus
- St. Joan of the Stockyards
- St. Joan
- Rilke's poetry translated
- The Moon is Down (the first Steinbeck I ever read)
- Henderson the Rain King
- Goethe: Faust
- The Russians
- The Big Deal
- Down Home
- Salvation on Sand Mountain (GREAT little book on faith and roots)
- The Appalachian Trail
- The Beat Generation
- The Unvanquished
- Seize the Day
- Heartfire
- Shadow Puppets
- Jule Carr
- Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
- Strip Tease
- The Little Prince
- Armored Cav
- Ten Days that Shook the World
- A Clockwork Orange
- Conversation y repaso
- Death in the Afternoon
- Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy
- Desolate Angel
- Moon and Sixpence
- The Journey Home
- Mo' Yo' Mama
- The Heart of the Matter
- Practical Flying (first edition, from I believe 1919)
- The Legend of Nance Dude
- The Sun Also Rises
- The Odyssey
- Sometimes a Great Notion
- The Serial
- This Hallowed Ground
- Nirvana Blues
- The Sibyl
- Survival, Escape and Evasion (one of the best books ever published, and it's a U.S. Army training manual)
- State of Fear (complete, utter, worthless SHIT)
- Get Thee to a Punnery
- The Portable Curmudgeon
- Still Life with Woodpecker
- Satori in Paris
- How to Stay Alive in the Woods
- Angelheaded Hipster (a beautiful book... overwhelms the decent written content)
- The Unhinged World of Glen Baxter (very funny cartoonist)
- Watching Baseball Smarter (by Zach Hample, who is cool)
- Thelwell Country (Thelwell is the master)
- A Leg at Each Corner
- The New English Bible
- Tao Te Ching (bought my Jane English/Gia-Fu Feng translation at 18... I now own at least five translations)
- Tales of the Grand Tour
- Into the Green
- When They Were 22
- Dirty Little Limericks
- Seven Arrows
- Jackdaws
- Word of Mouse
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.
Posted by: jmsloop | Wednesday, August 13, 2008 at 18:18
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.
Posted by: Huffman | Monday, August 18, 2008 at 21:14