What's on your bookshelf?

Looking at other people's bookshelves is fascinating!

Do share a favourite book, or a book you would like to read one day. 

Parents
  • I'm living vicariously at the moment - due to always moving around, I don't have many books of my own (the boxes with books in are always the ones that are hardest to move!)  However, I've been sharing a house for a year or so now with a landlady who is a total bibliophile. There are several entire walls of books from  floor to ceiling here, and everything from classic fiction through to deeply technical books about psychology and sociology (the fact that I seem to have cracked the spines of many of them does rather make me wonder how many my landlady has actually got around to reading herself!)

    My own bookshelf is almost completely reference books; aside from a couple of favourites that I like to re-read, I generally don't hang onto fiction, and mostly borrow it rather than buy my own. My reading has always been dominated by factual books rather than fiction; as a kid, I'd often read an encyclopedia from cover to cover as if it were a novel. Fiction only really works for me when the characterisation is fairly simple; if there are too many characters, or too much story is based on their relationships, I get just as confused about the social goings-on as I do in real life! I have a definite preference for short-stories rather than novel-length fiction. I can happily read for hours and hours at a time, but novels seem to need too much storage in my brain for character biographies and sequences of events, so I "lose the plot" very easily.

    The reference books show my special interests quite accurately. There's a lot of art and art history, natural history and biology, history and archaeology, programming language guides, geology (especially relating to caving), and books about language. Having said that, I rely on those less and less as I get more adept at finding what I want online - if Wikipedia were a book, it would be very dog-eared and have pages falling out by now!

    Reading is a must, though. I was hyperlexic as a child, and my brain has a very strong compulsion to read any and every word that I see - including terms and conditions on bus tickets, the ingredients of my shampoo when sitting on the loo, the beer mats on the wall of pub behind the person I'm trying to listen to, etc. It barely matter what the words are, or whether I already know them by heart; my brain just likes to play with words as if they are toys.

    As for a favourite; if I had to pick only one (OK; some), I would choose The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of five books!) I still read it again every other year or so, and have never got the slightest bit bored with it.

  • I just came across this list of 78 feel good books - is there anything here that appeals to you? ideas.ted.com/.../

  • Czeslaw Milosz was a very fine poet.  I have a collection of his works.  Well worth reading.

  • Seamus Heaney weather out there tonight: 

    Winter-evening cold.
    Our backs might never warm up but our faces
    Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys. . .
    As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes
    And whatever rampaged out there couldn’t reach us,
    Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.

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  • Seamus Heaney weather out there tonight: 

    Winter-evening cold.
    Our backs might never warm up but our faces
    Burned from the hearth-blaze and the hot whiskeys. . .
    As green sticks hissed and spat into the ashes
    And whatever rampaged out there couldn’t reach us,
    Firelit, shuttered, slated and stone-walled.

Children
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