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What's in your book stack?

thujone

thujone

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Aug 31, 2006
Messages
12,011
I don't think eBooks will ever have the same appeal to me as solid, tangible books with artistic cover designs and eye-catching spines. And so, this thread is for those of you who feel the same way and have a small stack of tangible books/films that you're working your way through (i.e. not an excuse to post your whole bookshelf/case). It's a spin-off of the "what are you reading" thread, if you will, but with photos.

If you contribute please be considerate and crop your photos, nobody wants to be confronted with a gigantic 2MB image of something that could be better presented as a 100-200kB image that actually fits the typical screen.

NSFW:
woyb0.jpg
 
I wish I had a camera, on my back wall I have about ~300 novels piled into a huge pyramid that I've collected over the past couple of years.

I will just give a taste of what I see first: Peter Carey, William Golding, Salman Rushdie, J. G. Ballard, Louis de Bernieres, Henry Miller, Kazuo Ishiguro, D. H. Lawrence, Ralph Ellison, Shakespeare, Umberto Eco, Iain Banks, Mario Vargas Llosa, Martin Amis, Truman Capote, Zadie Smith, E. L Doctorow, Augusten Burroughs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jean Genet, Edgar Allan Poe, Boris Pasternak, David Malouf, Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Oliver Sacks, Tom Wolfe, V. S. Naipul, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Richard Yates, Don Dellilo, Marm Twain, Carlos Castaneda, William S. Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Arthur C. Clarke, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jules Verne, Thomas de Quincey, Michael Ondaatje, H. G. Wells, A. S. Byatt, Henrik Ibsen, Hubert Selby Jr., Albert Camus, Julian Barnes, James Kelman, Patrick White, Jean Paul Satre, Mikhail Bulgakov, Seneca, Alan Ginsburg, Virginia Woolf (probably my favourite writer at the moment), Ivan Turgenev, Hanif Kureishi, Peter Hoeg, Paul Auster, Sophocles, Rudyard Kipling, etc, etc, etc.

FUck e-books, tangible literature ftw.
 
I'm all in on the fuck e-books movement. Paper books smell nice.

Anyways, don't have a camera, and too lazy to go all the way to the shelf and type out the 25 or so books on my to-read list, so I'll just name a very small few from memory:

Infinite Jest (I never feel like I have enough time to get into this one), Midnight's Children, a few of Nabakov's early Russian works, Notes from the Underground, a couple from Iain Banks, a couple of Palahniuks for when I need easy reading, Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy, and shit, I'm drawing a blank at this point. But a whole fucking lot.
 
i don't know how people can have a bunch of books staring at them on their bedsides all the time. five is my limit, usually, and there are always a couple books in my office that i flip through when i need a distraction from working. out of my stack, the two on top (stories of the modern south & end of alice child molester book) are re-reads just from when i need something comforting to read. i've got an anthology of "modern takes" on sherlock holmes on my ipad that i've been saving for a long trip.
 
sorry, quick lesson on posting pics? nice little spin-off thread :)
 
i love it, very telling, judging another by a book cover.

NSFW:

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Quit of the things of sense,
let th' Almsman-mindfully,
with heart now freed-betimes
the Doctrine search till clouds
have left his fixed mind.

 
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A small sample of my bibliothèque, fwiw. I have much more, but my webcam doesnt allow me to show my other book stack. I'll maybe show some books later on. I have some original editions of some very fine 20th century classics.

120914015237482057.jpg
 
^^ Haha yeah the amount I spent on the books was the camera money.

(One of my favourite Tennyson poems, on pg.17, selected by W. E. Williams)

THE KRAKEN

'Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
THE KRAKEN sleepeth: the faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall* rise and on the surface die.

*Poor grammar, only first person single/plural uses shall.
 
I'm glad this thread found some wings :) I see some interesting titles to add to a future stack!

Kenickie said:
i don't know how people can have a bunch of books staring at them on their bedsides all the time. five is my limit, usually
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I mix books that seem like a slower read in with more exciting titles to tempt me to pick from the former more often. I do most reading away from home so if I grab a slow title on the way out then I get left with no other option than to give it a chance.
 
3 said:
I'm all in on the fuck e-books movement.
Click to expand...

I sense a false dichotomy with regards to literature formats. What's wrong with the enjoyment of both?

Think of it as vinyl vs mp3 (or FLAC for you audiophiles). The special packaging and warm sound of old vinyl records, the 'feel' and look of having a collection at hand is something their digital counterparts can never reproduce. However, when I'm gearing up for a long trip and need to put together a quick two hour mix of my favorite jams I'm not going to be reaching for a turntable. Not to mention the transfer and availability of some old & rare releases make mp3s the only solution.

There are many benefits to having an e-reader, not the least of which is convenience of portability. I like the smell of old books as much as the next guy but to dismiss either format completely is only doing a disservice to yourself.
 
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