Cull your book collection down to a dozen volumes

For whatever reason, you must reduce the total numbers of books you own to twelve. If you own Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King in separate volumes, then keeping them leaves only nine open spots, even though they’re really just one book. Contrariwise, if you have all the Sherlock Holmes novels & stories in a single codex, you still have 11 spots left after choosing that one. Also, you may not run out & buy a Kindle & download tons of books that way, nor may you buy a single-volume copy of LOTR+Hobbit+Silmarillion if you don’t already have it.

I’ll start:
[ol]
[li]Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings[/li][li]Tolkien’s The Silmarillion[/li][li]Lewis’s Till We Have Faces[/li][li]Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr[/li][li]Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To[/li][li]Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying[/li][li]Pat Conroy’s Beach Music[/li][li]The aforementioned compleat Sherlock Holmes[/li][li]Adams’ first four Hitchhiker’s novels (sadly I do not own the five-volume version)[/li][li]Heinlein’s Expanded Universe[/li][li]The Concise Oxford Dictionary[/li][li]Bulfinch’s Mythology[/li][/ol]

I hesitated about the last. I like Hamilton’s Mythology better for the writing, but Bulfinch gives us more stories.

Anybody else?

Whoa, I’m going to wait until this evening to answer this one, to give me time to think! I do know that To Kill a Mockingbird and The Oxford Study Edition of The Bible(NSRV, with Apocrypha) will be included.

Over my dead body.

Based on which ones I either reread or read in repeatedly:

  1. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  2. Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (both of these would be my Oxford Press editions)
  3. Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire
  4. Dashiell Hammett’s Complete Novels (50 cent yard-sale acquisition)
  5. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird
  6. Shakespeare’s Plays (hard to read due to small print and thin paper, but they’re all in there)
  7. William Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay
  8. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
  9. C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters
  10. David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System
  11. The John McPhee Reader
  12. The Bible (NIV with an inscription by the man who gave it to me)

Seconded!

Skald the Rhymer: Your books or your life!

Le Ministre de l’au-delà: (Strapped to the table saw, the whirring blade rapidly approaching his testicles) Take my life, you heartless bastard - I’m saving my books for my old age!

I didn’t say the other books were going to be destroyed. Feel free to assume they’re going into storage for, oh, a year.

ETA: Besides, even when I was doing the Evil Overlord bit, I’d never have done the “your books or your life” thing. I’d have sent the flying monkeys to steal the books, confiscate the ones I liked, and force you to watch while the flung poo on the rest. But you’ve have gotten them back later.

The Collected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury

Blood Sport: A Journey Up the Hassayampa by Robert F. Jones

Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife by Mick Farren

Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad

1984 by George Orwell

Boys Life by Robert McCammon

Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Last Call by Tim Powers

The Art of Thomas Hart Benton by Henry Adams

The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones

River Teeth by David James Duncan

I’m thinking of any books I’ve always enjoyed re-reading. I would definitly have to have the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plus Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander Series, and Marion Zimmer Bradford’s Mists of Avalon. (I can watch Harry Potter as movies still, right?)

I don’t see why not. Hell, I didn’t even say you couldn’t go to the library; just that you, yourself, would be only allowed to only twelve codexes.

You might not be aware, because I try to keep my grousing about it down to every third post, but as of mid-October of last year, my bloody collection IS in storage, along with my scores, CDs, Vinyl recordings, backup copies of purchased software… I started packing up with the stuff I didn’t think I’d need right away in June of 2008.

I’ve lost track of the number of things that I’ve bought a second copy of because I couldn’t find the box with the one I already own in it, but the list starts with The Magic Flute, which I bought for a production I did in Hamilton in October, packed sometime just before we moved out of the old house, and needed for another production in London, ON in late May. Couldn’t find it… I now have two copies of La Traviata, Chopin’s Nocturnes, the Grade 9 RCM piano repertoire book, Langenscheidt’s English-German dictionary, the list goes on. [hijack] If one more person tells me that ‘If you’ve done without it for a year, you don’t really need it’, I will ensure that person is done without for a year… [/hijack]

Anyway, enough rant, here I go in the spirit of the OP -

Herodotus - The Histories
J. M. Roberts - The Penquin History of the World
The Mahabharata - mine’s in three volumes. trans. B. van Buitenen
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
e e cummings - Collected Poems
Michael Ondaatje - In the Skin of a Lion
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Tolstoy - War and Peace - mine’s in two volumes, so that’s me out.

Over. My. Dead. Body.

:wink:

Seriously though, I think I’d try to pick twelve I hadn’t read yet. Not sure how I’d go about it, but I’d rather go with something new. . .

ETA: I really have to start reading the threads before responding to the OP.

The Bible
The Early Upanishads - Patric Olivelle’s ed. + transl.
The Rg Veda - McDonnell’s ed. (it’s the one I have)
The Mahābhārata - Van Buitenen’s ed. + transl. (3 volumes and incomplete - but I love 'em)
The Illiad
The Odyssey
The Histories - Herodotus
The Collected Works of William Shakespeare
Critique of Pure Reason - Kant
Walden - Thoreau

On preview: Nice list, Ministre - half of it anyway :wink:

twitch This is like asking a parent which one of their children they would put in storage for a year. But, kinda sorta in order:

  1. Complete works of Shakespeare.
  2. Complete works of Plato.
  3. Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe.
  4. The Iliad
  5. The Odyssey
  6. The Bible (KJV)
  7. The Complete Stories - Franz Kafka
  8. Basic Writings of Nietzsche
  9. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (has all the books in it)
  10. London: The Biography - Peter Ackroyd
  11. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
  12. Bradbury Stories: 100 of his most celebrated tales

(I was going to put Herodotus, but then I realized I really wouldn’t feel right having Herodotus and not Thucydides, and since I don’t personally own either of the absolutely fantastic Landmark Thucydides or Landmark Herodotus, I’d rather have my Homer [Lattimore]).

Good Lord - are you me, or am I you?

:: slaps Le Minstre etc with trout ::

Quiet, ere you send the mods on a sock hunt!

Please don’t slap my (apparently) long lost twin. No socks here, though admittedly a bit of trolling goes with my username. (I didn’t include Gargantua & Pantagruel as my copy is in 6 volumes - rather a waste of precious space).

::smacks lips:: Mmm, trout!

Talk about an impossibly difficult choice. I think I’d just go to zero and get new books that I haven’t read and then keep cycling them out like that.

[ol]
[li]Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway[/li][li]The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway[/li][li]Lord of the Rings - Tolkein[/li][li]The Hobbit - Tolkien[/li][li]Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass - Carroll[/li][li]Hamlet - Shakespeare[/li][li]Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut[/li][/ol]
At this point I’d go out and buy a few books. I do own over 12 books but I wouldn’t want to waste the rest of the spots on those particular books.

I own something like 3000+ books. You want me to cut it down to TWELVE?

IMPOSSIBLE!

Though definitely on my list would be the family heirloom copy of The Builders, 1856 edition. Not a long read, but absolutely lush printing. My only regret is that my mother had to die before it passed into my possession (and NO! I had nothing to do with her passing! Would still much rather have mom, since she let me look at it whenever I wanted anyway)

I actually AM trying to whittle down my collection, but I’m only planning to pare it down by half. At which point I’ll probably start collecting more books again.