Lots O' Books

It strikes me that I haven't quoted from many books in the past few months, which may give the impression that I haven't been reading much. Au contraire, however; I have been reading quite a bit, and there've been quite a few satisfying books among the lot. My excuse is that I've been catching up in writing about my reading elsewhere, so I thought I'd summarize a bit. As for the quotations: fear not! I've been taking notes.

I don't know that I've mentioned my "book of books" before. This is a bound book in which I write down the titles of books after I've read them. It started in 1982. For a number of years before that I had thought it would be cool if I had such a list but, alas, it seemed too late to start: there were already by then too many books under the bridge, in a manner of speaking. Then I convinced myself by pointing out that if I started then, in 20 years' time I'd have quite a good list. Well, it's now an incredible 24 years later and it is, indeed, quite a list, not to mention a convenient aid-to-memory when I try to recall whether I've read this or that mystery in X's series.

A few years ago, as an exercise but also for my own convenience, I put the entire Book of Books online in a database, which you can look at if you're curious. The point that I was going to make in mentioning all this is merely that I've just added all of my reading for 2006 — and that this is the earliest that I've managed to add a years' reading to the database. I list 102 titles for 2006, lower than in some years because I had other things keeping me busy.

Among those titles are a number of nonfiction books that I enjoyed reading — a whole string of really top-notch writing — and about which I have been writing Book Notes for the Science Besieged project. I managed to catch up this week with finishing notes for some titles that have been hanging around since last fall. Here are some of the titles; I invite you to read my notes about them:

Posted on January 11, 2007 at 20.08 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Books

3 Responses

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  1. Written by Bill Morrison
    on Friday, 12 January 2007 at 12.50
    Permalink

    Thanks for the list, Jeff. It's encouraging that nearly all the copies of these 6 books in the Victoria Public Library system are out being read.

  2. Written by rightsaidfred
    on Tuesday, 16 January 2007 at 17.11
    Permalink

    Where's the Koran?

  3. Written by jns
    on Tuesday, 16 January 2007 at 19.24
    Permalink

    Available in most of your finer bookstores.

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