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Reply With QuoteMy bookshelves are organised by spine colour, and size.
Mostly what they say about me is 'not big on dusting'.
Interesting thread...
Well, looking at the bookshelf in my study area, which only has a few books in, I've got:
- Top shelf: a couple of dozen technical books, mainly ones I wrote
- Second Shelf: Sci-Fi / Fantast mish-mash: couple by Peter Hamilton, a few by Raymond Feist, plus some miscellaneous stuff (Matt Beaumont
, Pat Barker, Iris Murdoch. And, I've just noticed, a book of Spanish Slang at the end, no idea what that's doing there
- Third shelf: more sci-fi, plus a few comics. Ahem, "graphic novels", sorry - Planetary, Authority, etc. Plus the past 6 years' worth of the Economist's "The World in 200x" yearly publication.
My bookshelves are organised by spine colour, and size.
Mostly what they say about me is 'not big on dusting'.
What my bookshelves say about me at the moment is that lots of areas of my life are intertwined and overlap. I should really have my study bookcase with my academic books, my living room bookcase with the classics and the books that 'look' nice (which I sort of already do) and third one with my novels (yep a lot of sci-fi/fantasy) and misc.
But 'reorganise bookshelves' is way down on the list of things to do at the moment. And I know I'd end up sitting on the floor reading and not actually getting very far.
(I did once do a proper tidy up of bookshelves in a small one room library in Ghana once which was interesting - the a/c unit burning out in a shower of sparks, and my favouritewhen taking some books of the shelves, cockroaches jumping out at me! Ah the memories...*shudder* )
Eclectic? Really?Originally Posted by Beowulf1970
well.. on the OTHER shelf (behind me and to my right I have ....)
The Dilbert Principle, Marguerite Pattens 1000 favourite recipe's , a swathe of Stephen Baxter books, Bruel and Kjaer's "Frequency Analysis", Mathematics for engineers and scientists, the Dune Encyclopedia , entire works of William Shakespeare, The gormenghast trilogy, lots of "so you want to be a writer" style booksa shelf of Iain M Banks books, a pile of Robert Rankin books, even more photography books, books about Linux, Perl, php and security, The K-PAX trilogy and the compendium of Roger Zelazney Chronicles of Amber , Chaos and Non Linear Dynamics, Stability Instability and Chaos ( an introduction to the theory of nonlinear differential equations) , an Introduction to Linear analysis (kreider, Kuller, Ostberg and Perkins).. and a few books on ecological living (The passive solar house, Wind turbine basics etc etc)
an Eclectic mix I would say.. I have a few other book shelves.. but they're all equally random.
Vast majority of my fiction books are Terry Pratchett, with some other humerous SF/fantasy sitting waiting to be read (Robert Rankin/Tom Holt/Craig Shaw Gardner). I would have a lot of chick lit, except I always get rid of my books once I've read them! Probably the only fiction books I will keep are my Pratchetts and my Stargate Fan Fictions.
Vast majority of my non-fiction books are on Elvis or Stargate. Also have a few biographies (Boy George, Ant & Dec, Jon Bon Jovi), some books on Friends and The Simpsons, a few dictionaries/language books (mostly French), games/quiz books, driving books (left over from my days as a driving instructor), reptile care books (from when I had a green water dragon as a pet) and a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1951 (inherited!)
Ya! really
Seems to be - science fiction/fantasy and - erm - books about work...what's eclectic about that?Ya! really
Point taken.. although not completely. Maths is a hobby not a profession per se, I don't build houses that's just an interest , I don't work in self help.. that's just a personal crutch, I'm not an author... that's just a pipe dream and I'm not a professional photographer that's just a hobby.
So.. APART from the books on photography, hard sums, self help , book writing , ecological living and Shakespeare (or are you counting him under your sci fi / fantasy umbrella?) then perhaps.. yes, you might be right
besides, ,my dictionary (on my shelf) defines Eclectic as "selecting from various systems, doctrines, or sources; composed of material gathered from various sources, systems, etc"
Various.. not ALL
Like Quiet_flame, the vast majority of my books are at my parents' house (in Oz)- of the books I have acquired over her (in 5 months) I have: Foucault's Pendulum, On Beauty, by Zadie Smith, Suite Francaise (I. Nemirovski), Birds without wings, Unfinished Journey by Yehudi Menuhin cos he ROCKS, Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin... a couple of selfhelp books, a cookery book... and a few others I can't think of right now. I've read most of these while I've been here. Tend to go for fantasy, historical fiction, and books about other cultures.
I just inherited some of my late grandmother's books- typically I took anything remotely dictionary-like (Fowlers, Brewers, Pears Cyclopedia, a German/Eng dictionary, an Oxford concise) and a few classics like Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland.
At home I have several boxes of books- mostly on medieval history/arthurian lit, English lit, and French books.... also a sizeable collection of dictionaries in various combinations of languages, to wit Eng, French/English, French, German/Eng, Italian/Eng (no latin) and grammar books... A few years ago I had in my possession a Latin/French dictionary, which was very cool... but I left it behind in France :crying:
Last edited by Alice; 20th-August-2006 at 09:52 PM.
Yaah, dat wot my dictionary say too.Point taken.. although not completely. Maths is a hobby not a profession per se, I don't build houses that's just an interest , I don't work in self help.. that's just a personal crutch, I'm not an author... that's just a pipe dream and I'm not a professional photographer that's just a hobby.
So.. APART from the books on photography, hard sums, self help , book writing , ecological living and Shakespeare (or are you counting him under your sci fi / fantasy umbrella?) then perhaps.. yes, you might be right
besides, ,my dictionary (on my shelf) defines Eclectic as "selecting from various systems, doctrines, or sources; composed of material gathered from various sources, systems, etc"
but the usual use of "eclectic" would be to describe something from unusually wide variety of sources. Most people have books on self help, and on cookery, and anybody who can read ought to have Shakespear. (And Dickens.) (And Austen.) (And Wordsworth.) (And...)
Having said that, my - um - quibble was based on your second post, and I see that the other bits and pieces came in your earlier post.
Enjoyed your use of the phrase 'hard sums'. That's certainly something most people don't read books on!
There's never one around when you need it, is there?
Quite
Actually I think I did come across an opportunity to use it once at uni (ie after it had passed from my possession)...
-> wrestles with trying to make a joke out of "mot juste" and "verbus correctus" but gives up <-Quite
Actually I think I did come across an opportunity to use it once at uni (ie after it had passed from my possession)...
uurgh.. languages are not my thing .. a Latin/English dictionary is bad enough.. and English/ French dictionary is worse.. but a Latin/French dictionary ? my brain hurts just thinking about it!
Anyway, words are fuzzy.. they lack precision, one word can have two or more meanings, one meaning can have many words, some words sound alike but are spelt differently, others spelt the same put pronounced differently. No no no.. give me the safe warm precision of numbers any day
Mine say....untidy person lives here who
except for the many books I have related to work - they all have their own place on the shelf for easy reference and are grouped in relation to their content, but still show a person.
My "library" (room at bottom of stairs) :
Travel/Language/Translation books
History (from ancient to modern e.g The Roman War machine, Henry Kissingers Diplomacy book)
Fantasy: Gemmel,Feist,Robert E Howard, George RR Martin,Tolkein, Weis and Hickman, etc..etc..
Sci-Fi: William Gibson, Arthur C Clarke, etc....
TV/Film fantasy: Angel, Buffy, Aliens (very light reading
Thrillers/Crime/General: Conan Doyle, Patricia Cornwell, Ian Banks, Tom Clancy
(even his latest utter **** one, i didnt know)...etc..
Graphic Novels: V for vendetta, Watchmen, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men etc..
Non-Fiction: Books on the mind, religion, artificial intelligence, every New Scientist Magazine for the last 5 years or so (why? er..dunno)
Computer related: Everything from Oracle DBA books and Hacking Wireless Networks to Programming in PHP, PL/SQL, Java etc.. (a lot of those are in my computer room though)
Humour: Nearly all Pratchetts, Douglas Adams, Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes (2 in German)
A new childrens books shelf - Dr.Seuss...etc.. Peek A Boo Baby is my personal favourite
Michael Moorcock, Gemmel, China Mievillle, Neil Gaiman, R. E. Howard, Gygax, Steven Pressfield, Willian Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neil Stephenson, Ian M. Banks, E. R. Burroughs, R Chandler, J Ballard...
History: mainly about Africa like the diaries of General Gordon and Stanley, but also French and Indian Wars, Ancient Rome, Punic Wars, Vikings and American Indians.
Work/Computers related: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Typography, Print Buying, CopyEditing, OSX, HTML, CSS.
Graphic Novels: Sin City, Death Dealer, Elfquest, The Sandman.
Others: the first two books of Conversations with God, a couple about Buddhism, a few self help books, books about writing and a few RPG and Wargames manuals.
Wow? Which God? Proof at last for skeptics everywhere!
Obviously the one Neal Donald Walsh converses with....
I read them a while ago and they certainly gave me some stuff to think about.
Re: What your bookshelves say about you...
Books done A-Z , Apart from my Uni books - which are almost too heavy to lift....
My fiction swings from Margery Allingham to P.G. Wodehouse, via Douglas Adams, Austen, Agatha Christie, Dickens, Jasper Fforde, Giles, Michael Innes, C. S. Lewis, Pratchett, Ellery Queen, Tolstoy, Thelwell books etc etc
Non fiction includes a sore shoulder worth of Immunology and Microbiology texts, a couple of HTML and other computer texts, Library Categorising books, Wild Thesauri, Dictionaries and general reference texts, a couple of French/ English and Latin/English Dictionaries(mainly still to be used), Card game books, Christian Theology.
Lots more classics, chick lit, and crime fiction, and slowly building a library of sci fi.
Cheers
Whitetiger
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