Most of this is from the shelves at home, as I like to think the reason I have carted a thousand books around from move to move is that I think they’re worth re-reading …
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein … to the boys as a chapter book at bedtime. Yes, it’s a re-read. Second? Third? Fourth?
One Mountain, Thousand Summits, Freddie Wilkinson … standard mountain death and survival story. Meh. An Into Thin Air wannabe, complete with dramatic retelling and totting-up of personal valor for the living and the dead.
The Once and Future King, TH White’s classic Arthurian story. The first book, Sword and the Stone, is one of my favorite tales. The second and third books, imaginings of Arthur’s flawed knights, are beautiful. The fourth book is too political and too foretold for my taste. Third read?
Hero with 1,000 Faces, Joseph Campbell. I finally got around to reading the whole thing … got it in grad school.
Steampunk: An anthology, eds. Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. Disappointing. Borrowed from Rutland Free Library. A couple of good stories, but this is not the best of the genre … or maybe I’m just spoiled because I cut my steampunk teeth on Gibson and Sterling, which really is the best …
Speaking of, Mona Lisa Overdrive by Gibson is one of those novels I can read and re-read. Easily my favorite of the Sprawl Trilogy, and I’m a big fan of Neuromancer …
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. I would link to Wikipedia like the others except it’s only a stub … a stub? A WikiFail. It’s making me rethink the Venn diagram in my head of the intersection of baseball fans and utter geeks … I have read this pretty much cover-to-cover every year since its publication in 2001.
Hidden Empire, Kevin J. Anderson. A library borrow. The best thing I can say about this book is that after the end of civilization as we know it, in paperback, it will provide about 300 sheets of asswipe. So no, I won’t be borrowing the next six books of the Saga of the Seven Suns. Is there any good sci-fi coming out these days?
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco. The Da Vinci Code for grownups … the single best literary whodunit. I have read this three or four times. Taking my time this time around.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Yup, all four novels and 56 short stories. A guilty pleasure (one of several as I re-read this list … lol). I have an old hardcover with original illustrations. Very nice. Multiple reads.
“The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” a paperback collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s pre-Cthulhu work. If you don’t know, you probably shouldn’t bother asking.
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