I have an elaborately bound, multi-volume set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that I have yet to excavate from its shrink wrap. Plus four or five books on the Second Punic War and the history of Carthage, which I will have to read before I can even begin work on my long-planned historical novel.
A friend has loaned me two books on the defense of Corregidor in WWII, in which her father played an important role. I’m also on the lookout for a copy of Blind Man’s Bluff, which I’ve been told is an amazing read.
On the lighter side, I’m halfway through Master and Commander right now, and have little doubt that I’ll be plowing through the rest of the series presently. I also have The Subtle Knife, but I’ll probably have to re-read The Golden Compass before moving on to it. And I’ve got a whole box full of popcorn novels on my bedroom desk to serve as fillers.
I want to get * Eats, Shoots and Leaves*. That one looks great. I also need to pick up the new Janet Evanovich, Ten Big Ones. I think my To-Be-Bought list would be even bigger than my To-Be-Read pile!
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bryson, Bill
Postmodern Pooh - Crews, Frederick
Sir Apropos of Nothing - David, Peter
Unteleported Man (aka Lies, Inc.), The - Dick, Philip K.
Angry Candy - Ellison, Harlan
Difference Engine, The - Gibson, William
Replay - Grimwood, Ken
Players At The Games Of People - John Brunner
Best of Fritz Leiber - Leiber, Fritz
This Is the Way the World Ends - Morrow, James
Invisible Monsters - Palahniuk, Chuck
Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney, The - Schickel, Richard
I Capture the Castle - Smith, Dodie * on loan to my mom*
Snow Crash - Stephenson, Neal
Bogumbo Snuff Box - Kurt Vonnegut (bought 6/26/04)
I also have an extensive To Get from the Library list - broken down into fiction & non-fiction sections. Dung Beetle, N. Sane & SmackFu - bump the Truss book up to the top of the pile - entertaining and educational!
N. Sane - I read Salt last summer - an intriguing way to look at history; I quite enjoyed it.
unclviny - Teatime is perhaps my favourite Adams book and his bio is a good read as well.
From the library: The Road to Ruin–a new Dortmunder book from Donald Westlake
From the bookstore: The Poet–a Michael Connelly book which is the prequel to his most current novel (which will go in the to-read pile when I get it from the library) Cookoff Fever (or something like that)–by a local author
Borrowed from friends: A Prayer for Owen Meany–everyone says I must read this; just haven’t gotten to it yet Lake House–somebody Patterson
Kid books to keep up with my fifth graders: Midnight for Charlie Bone and Charlie Bone and the Time Twister Caught by the Sea–Gary Paulsen
What a question. Everything I haven’t read is in my to-be-read pile. For the sake of brevity (ha!) I’ll only list those I have next to my bed.
In no particular order, because they get re-jigged every time they fall over:
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Sensitivity of the Spirit, RT Kendall
Operation Shylock, Philip Roth
Works of Malory
Web, John Wyndham
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Essential Spike Milligan
The Autobiography of Henry VIII, Margaret George
Allegory of Love, CS Lewis
Its Colours They Are Fine, Alan Spence
The Old Men at the Zoo, Angus Wilson
Bleak House, Charles Dickens (I WILL finish this one day!)
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
The Gun Seller, Hugh Laurie
some kind of collected Orwell essay book I can’t remember the name of
Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes
The Assurance of Things Hoped For, Avery Dulles
plus assorted Dilbert and Cahrlie Brown books, and a bunch of magazines and old newspaper articles and daily devotionals and all that stuff
Another vote for Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, which is now in my “just-read” pile. Very entertaining.
Let’s see - in the thread that inspired this one, I listed the Christopher Moore titles I’ve just picked up (and I’ve just finished Fluke, which was very good), so I won’t list them all again here. What else?
Bible Stories for Adults, James Morrow The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan (started a while ago, inexplicably never finished) Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale (recommended by a writer friend) The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (and other classic stories) by Philip K. Dick Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson Speaks the Nightbird, Robert McCammon
Also on hand for spare-time browsing:
They Have a Word For It, Howard Rheingold The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce
Unfortunately, I have nothing new at the moment. I do have over 1500 books in my apartment, though, so I re-read everything. I’m rereading most of my Rosamunde Pilcher books at the moment.
Although, my fiance does have a Bennett Cerf autobiography that he’s been trying to get me to read. Maybe I’ll hit him up for that.
I can’t even begin to name all the books in my To-Read cabinet. These are the books I have checked out from the library to read:
How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill (recommended to me by Aitara in this thread) The Fixer by Bernard Malamud Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte On the Road by Jack Kerouac The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket
Other books I want to read this summer:
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Fall and by Albert Camus The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes (recommended by calm kiwi, sunfish, RealityChuck and mhendo in the previously mentioned thread) The Golden Globe by John Varley (I don’t read much sci fi, but I was given this for my birthday and it looks pretty interesting, if lengthy) 1984 by George Orwell
all the books so far in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unortunate Events
if I still have time, Myra Breckenridge by Gore Vidal and The Plague by Albert Camus