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Books

When I was a mere kidlet, the public library was at the end of my block. That was a long ways away, in kid-distance, but it was worth the trek for the reward at the end: a room full of books. I have always loved reading and research, and my tiny apartment is dominated by shelves full of books.

I grew up and went to college before it occurred to me that I could manage those rooms full of books … and be paid for it! Starting in college, I accumulated a decade of academic and corporate library experience before leaving to pursue my interest in Web development. In 2008, I returned to the library world as a paralibrarian at a public library.

I created and maintain the Library Lovers’ LiveJournal, and this website was once featured as a Library Juice Home Page of the Week.

It would take a ridiculously long time to list all of the books I have ever enjoyed; that time can be better spent reading. In 2005, I started cataloguing my books with LibraryThing, and stopped updating the lists on this page.

!NEW! My books up for swap are listed at PaperBackSwap.com.

My favorite books of all time are:

• The Bridge by Iain Banks
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
• Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey
• Brave New World by Aldous Leonard Huxley

Books I read in ’06:

• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• Ambient Findability by Peter Morville
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Identity Crisis by Brad Meltzer
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
• To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• Bad Twin by Gary Troup
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• girls by Nic Kelman
• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
• The Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
• Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
• The Stars’ Tennis Balls by Stephen Fry
• The Dance of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear, and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self by Harriet Lerner
• The Elements of Style Illustrated by Strunk, White, and Kalman
• The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman
• Glass Soup by Jonathan Carroll
• A Feast For Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 4) by George R. R. Martin

Books I read in ’05:

• Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
• Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
• The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
• Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• Breakfast After Noon by Andi Watson
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
• How to Cook a Tart by Nina Killham
• Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
• Looking for Alaska by John Green
• Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
• Writing From the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo
• Mortal Sins by Penelope Williamson
• McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (Issue 13)
• Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel by Lynda Barry
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Books I read in ’04:

• Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore
• Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto
• The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams
• Believing: An Historical Perspective by Wilfred Cantwell Smith
• Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Sharyn November
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
• Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
• The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken
• Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Books I read in ’03:

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• 1984 by George Orwell
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper
• Dead Air by Iain Banks
• The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Overshoot by Mona Clee
• Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
• The Hours by Michael Cunningham
• White Apples by Jonathan Carroll

Books I read in ’02:

• Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
• I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project edited by Paul Auster
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Hotel World by Ali Smith
• The Truth by Terry Pratchett
• A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey
• A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) by George R. R. Martin
• A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2) by George R. R. Martin
• Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

Books I read in ’01:

• Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson
• Toward Amnesia by Sarah Van Arsdale
• Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• Vanilla and Other Stories by Candas Jane Dorsey
• Sea of Silver Light (Otherland, Volume 4) by Tad Williams
• The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee
• Opportunities in Library and Information Science Careers by Kathleen de la Pena McCook
• The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll

Books I own that I want to read/re-read someday:

• The Business by Iain Banks
• A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes
• T.C. Boyle Stories
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronté
• The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
• Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! by Arthur C. Clarke
• Great Books by David Denby
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
• Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco
• The Search for the Giant Squid by Richard Ellis
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Casting Fortune and Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford
• Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality by Neal Gabler
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
• The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough
• The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse
• Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
• Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane
• The Cassini Divison by Ken MacLeod
• He, She and It by Marge Piercy
• The Fifth Elephant and Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
• One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers by Gail Sher
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins
• Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil by Lyall Watson
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Some books I read before this list existed (in alphabetical order of author’s last name):

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Feersum Endjinn, Excession, and The Wasp Factory by Iain (M.) Banks
• Imajica by Clive Barker
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
• Prozac Highway by Persimmon Blackbridge
• The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• The Phoenix Guards by Steven Brust
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary and Tam Lin (The Fairy Tale Series) by Pamela Dean
• Justine by Lawrence Durrell
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
• Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian by Hermann Hesse
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
• Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
• A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1) by George R. R. Martin
• The Accidental Buddhist by Dinty W. Moore
• 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
• Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
• City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, and Mountain of Black Glass (Otherland, Volumes 1-3) by Tad Williams

Books of and about poetry that I recommend are:

• Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins
• Complete Poems 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings
• Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo
• The Tunnel: Selected Poems by Russell Edson
• Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot
• Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller
• The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath
• Complete Poems by Dorothy Parker
• Worshipful Company of Fletchers and Shroud of the Gnome by James Tate
• Odes to Opposites and Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda
• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
• Handbook of Poetic Forms edited by Ron Padgett
• Writing Poetry and Getting Published by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams