The OF Blog: How to drive certain people crazy

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

How to drive certain people crazy

Consider this to be a "fun" exercise, one that might prove to be an anathema for those people that value order to an O-C level. I have decided to list the contents of a typical shelf of mine (I have a great many bookcases and over two dozen shelves from which to choose) and let's see if these go together:

Neil Gaiman, Humo y espejos (Spanish translation of Smoke and Mirrors)
Lionel Sosa, El sueño americano
Ana Frank, Diario (I've never read/owned the English translation)
T.H. White, Camelot (Spanish translation of The Once and Future King)
Mario Vargas Llosa, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto
Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
David Albahari, Götz and Meyer
Rafael Ábalos, Grimpow: The Invisible Road
Dave Eggers, What is the What
Charles de Lint, Promises to Keep
Charles de Lint, The Ivory and the Horn
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself
Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow
Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto, Asleep
Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss
Catherynne M. Valente, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams
Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tale: In the Night Garden
Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tale: In the Cities of Coin and Spice
John Crowley, The Solitudes (Ægypt: Volume I, revised)
John Crowley, Dæmonomania (original edition)
John Crowley, Endless Things

And yes, I'm awaiting the revised Love and Sleep and Dæmonomania before I read all of the Ægypt cycle in one go (I read Dæmonomania before I realized that there were bits before and after and if Crowley is revising them all, I'll just wait until then to start reading). Also, I know full well that this wasn't in alphabetical order or even by type or even monolingual in arrangement. But it was a left-to-right listing of books on a single shelf.

Care to list your shelf arrangement here or on a blog of yours?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

On the shelf I tend to be pretty anal about categories and alphabetization, so such a listing wouldn't be very interesting in terms of eclecticism. But here's the books that are down off the shelf (I know it's cheating). Some of these go together much more than one might think.

Chopin, Nocturnes and Polonaises
Brahms, Complete Shorter Works for Solo Piano
The Avram Davidson Treasury
Lafferty, Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Valente, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden
Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary
Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories
Graves, The White Goddess
Borges, Collected Fictions and The Book of Imaginary Beings
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Tennyson, Idylls of the King
Kipling, The Jungle Books
Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda
Herodotus, Histories
John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium
David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength
John Crowley, Little, Big

pussreboots said...

Ha ha. You sort books about as well as I do. LOL. Happy reading.

 
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