What's on your bookshelf?

Love it! 

Eeeeuw! Well I suppose why not. There are enough other mites and other nasties that live on us. The bane of my life. 

That sounds like a very interesting read - off to check it out now! 

The fact that errors can be reported to Project Gutenberg gives me great joy - I rarely read a book without spotting at least one! I also like the fact you can download different versions of the text (with/without illustrations). 

This is how I look at it! 

Not to mention booklice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psocoptera

It's quite a while now since I have seen any, I sold most of my oldest books to pay for my wedding! 

Books don't last forever anyway! Pages go yellow, the spine unglues, pages fall out at a touch. 

I used to try and keep all my books perfect.  I'm still keen on that for fiction but I no longer obsess about it - I've come to think that, at the end of the day, you get the best out of them by using them.  So now I don't mind if they get a bit bag bashed or whatever anymore.  But I do really understand why you want to try and keep them perfect, because there's something very nice about a perfect looking book.

I don't remember where, but some years ago I read something about the importance of textbooks versus your notes you make when learning subjects.  I had to throw away all my school and University notes because they just took up too much space and I rarely, if ever, looked back at them.  But the thing I read pointed out that if you keep your textbooks, and annotate them with your observations (I use pencil so I can update them as my observations improve), and highlight the most important bits, then you always have those to refer back to and you have useful notes right in the book as well.  The highlights also lead you straight to the "crunch" so you don't have to bother wading through all the "fluff" if you don't need to.  Plus, because you used the textbooks to learn the subject, you're already familiar with them and should have an idea where you need to look for particular information.  Also, you hope that the textbooks are reasonably definitive sources of information!

I'm looking at a lot of maths books at the moment, and they often do things like prove one part of a theorem and then leave the rest as exercises.  I try not to do a Fermat and say "I have a wonderful proof for this but it's too large to fit in the margin."  If necessary I stick extra pieces of paper in using Scotch magic (matte transparent) tape with the details.    I also do this this for the exercises if it's feasible.  I feel the scotch magic tape is better than normal sellotape because:

1. You can still write on it and highlight on it because of the matte surface,

2. If it's put on cleanly you can often photocopy things and the tape doesn't show up.

3. It looks better because it's much more transparent and it doesn't give things that slightly "tea stained" yellow look that normal sellotape does.

If I don't have any Scotch magic tape on me, I'll use normal Sellotape, but I usually have Scotch tape in my bag so I don't often need to use Sellotape.

My favourite maths books now are ones like Michael Spivak's Calculus 4th edition where he leaves plenty of real-estate for notes on the pages!  I don't mind the weightiness - I just think "with the way things are these days, you never know when you might need an improvised weapon!" :-).

How different people have different views. I would say a tatty book is an unloved book and a loved book is a pristine book. We are both right!

I probably go to extremes to try to protect my books. If a book needs to be placed in a bag then I will wrap it in its own bag (sometimes two bags) and place it inside a jiffy bag. I never bend the spine of a book. I know when I have done everything well when I have read the book and it looks unread.

A tatty book is a loved book. 
My favourites have been stuffed into overloaded backpacks and taken on holiday with me, read while eating, read in the garden/on the beach, read in the bath.
Their appearance reflects that. XD

I read a lot online. Some reports are really interesting and relevant - like this one:

Kindness, emotions and human relationships: The blind spot in public policy 

You can download it free here: https://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/project/kinder-communities/?download=view

Sustenance.

Interestingly I've never got into other fantasy other than Harry Potter (which are similar to yours in the tattiness of the covers). I tried Tolkein and Dark Materials but just couldn't get into them at all. But Harry Potter is my ultimate obsession.

Sanctuaries.

Greetings. I have not read this entire Thread, but I Post to mention somethings which may be popular yet not mentioned...

Does anyone else have certain books - from old, or paperback - and then have what is said to be "The same book" Digitally, but upon reading it there are certain changes? Not spelling/scanning mistakes, but differences such as chapters split or combined, or whole sentences added which were not in the original. (Often the added content makes no sense to the rest of the Book!)

Also, some books, paperback or otherwise, are different/edited, and it is impossible to get the original wording. 

...The two books I have in mind are Bambi, and Black Beauty. Try as I might, I cannot locate the original worded version of "Black Beauty". I could list a few examples of the changes, but was just wondering if anyone else has this, um, annoyance/problem with any other books they know of...?

Also, I understand that they edit some Books because the language is so 'archaic', but the edits made sometimes go against the Plot... Does anyone else know what I mean, Thanks...     !

Oh all sorts! 

Plenty of non-fiction (mostly human biology leftover from university/wildlife/epidemiology; one of my most visually appealing books is a great big hardback about the black death embellished in gold and red, with skeletons and rats and ships on the cover). 
I also have a decent variety of cook books (though most of my cooking/baking is done from memory, so used only occasionally).
Then I have pet care books for almost very species I've ever kept and a few other animal-y non-fiction books (I really enjoyed A Street Cat Named Bob). 

Fiction-wise, some standouts on the wall-O-books are, by genre;

Sci-Fi/Sci-Fi comedy; The Martian, all the Red Dwarf novels, Colony (another from RD writer Rob Grant).

Fantasy; SO MUCH TOLKIEN. The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings, The Silmarillion, Beren and Luthien, etc. etc. I also have the History of Middle Earth set about the inspiration and story behind the books, put together by his son. (It's a hefty 3-book set of doorstoppers printed on tracing-paper-thickness pages; terrifies me to read it because I'm always worried I'll damage the thing!)
His Dark Materials; the trilogy, La Belle Sauvage and a great big lexicon.
I'm also another Harry Potter fan; the books I had since my childhood are so dog-eared that The Goblet of Fire is missing its entire cover. It looks like a just-barely-bound-together manuscript! Lost count of the number of times I've re-read them. 
A Song of Ice and Fire; all of it, plus the world of ice and fire backstory-book (you've probably figured that I'm very into lore/information-gathering when I get into a series)
Good Omens, by Pratchett and Gaiman, is one of my all-time favourites. 

Animal fiction; Still got a few of the classics that have transferred from my childhood bookshelves. White Fang was always my favourite of the genre and so is a proud member of my "falling apart" collection.

Mythology; The Mabinogion, my version's in both English and Welsh because I was trying to teach myself a bit of the latter when I got it. It's a neat mythos. :)

Crime; Not generally a fan, but I have ALL the Holmes. 



I'd feel weird if I wasn't surrounded by books. We had so many growing up (literally several corridors lined with bulging bookshelves and more in the bedrooms) that other children used to joke that I lived in a library.

I'm absolute pants at reading I'm really slow, this is exasperated with fiction as I struggle to visualise the story. My wife can read a novel in a day the same book takes me weeks. I'm alright at factual stuff like law, it must be the ND in me but it makes perfect sense, when learning most around me really struggled to grasp concepts. Anyway of tangent, I'm 37 but my favourite book is still a kids book, "The Woff" by Jeremy Strong. I remember it being read in infants school when I was 5 as group reading at the end of every day, I absolutely loved it, my mum had to special order it, still have it now. 

Yes I started with Blyton. My favourites were the Adventure series with Kiki the parrot, the Five Find-Outers and Dog, the school series with Mallory Towers and so on. 

From Blyton. I went on to Christie after reading Cat Among the Pigeons. All those school mistresses being murdered! Needless to say murder didn't figure much in Mallory Towers. I also started getting interested in science fiction, reading Asimov's, then Silverberg, but the one novel that spoke to me most powerfully was John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. 

A degree in literature meant reading became more of a chore than a pleasure, but Dino Buzzati brought on delightfully spooky shivers with two short stories, one about where a train travellers sees everyone is fleeing towards the South but the narrator never finds out why, and Settle Piani (Seven Floors), a hospital story with a difference. 

The TV series made me interested in the Frost in May quartet about a young woman's struggle with her Catholic faith and the abuse she experienced through it and it is still a regret I missed the last televised edition of that. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance intrigued me too, 'spoke' to me, as that was about one man's search for understanding. 

The Next big Thing became vampires, after discovering Barbara Hambly's Those who Hunt the Night. She has since the early 90's written several more with James Asher the spy, his doctor wife and their problematic relationship with vampire Don Simon Ysidro. I enjoyed Anne Rice, but later on do think she lost the plot a little.

I have gothics both older and modern, mentioned Patrick MC Graph's Asylum elsewhere I think. Nowadays I get to review quite a lot, as I get plenty of free stuff read - there are tantalising opportunities to get paid occasionally too, but so far early bird and all that. 

I'm interested in mythology, psychology and how these impact the larger body politic, so I have most of Campbell's books, Frazer, something by an Anne Baring on the deleopment of the Divine Feminine, Riane Eisler. I have books on Jung and the Gnostics. I used to dabble in astrology and still have some books on that, but I grew to dislike intensely the theosophical underpinnings it was based on, or has been, and the way it is used to diminish and categorise others.

A few art books I have. 

And a whole bookcase of the tools of the trade, that language, English. My own linguistic skills pushed into the background, but it has put food on the table for over 20 years now.