MembreEumnestes

I suppose I have three libraries. One is a library I share with my wife, about 1000 books--poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction--ranging from antiquity to recent, mixing classics with modern genre fiction. Limited space forces us to cull items when we add new volumes.

The second is a private library of about 500 books, heavy in "great books" and academic studies of literature, history, and philosophy. This library includes 45 Loebs, the Variorum edition of Edmund Spenser, Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_, Auerbach's _Mimesis_, and Davidson's _Actions and Events_.

The third library is the one I have posted on Library Thing. I started compiling it about four years ago. It comprises what I call "fine books," mainly from Imprint Society, Easton Press, Limited Editions Club, Franklin Library, Heritage Press, and Folio Society. The books in my collection are generally illustrated and and leather bound, but not so expensively that they're out of my price range on eBay or Abe books. About two dozen are letterpress. I have collected about 200 of these volumes so far, and bookshelf space will not allow me to go much further.

Former academic, interested especially in ancient literature, European Renaissance culture, and philosophy. But I admire and enjoy good writing from any period or culture.

READING LIST

**********2023 (so far)**************

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (tr. N. Denny)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, parts I and II (tr. D. Luke)
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (tr. P. Gabriel)
Georgette Heyer, Frederica
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (tr. A. Hannay)
Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire
Homer, Odyssey (tr. E.V. Rieu)
Julio Ramon Ribeyro, The Word of the Speechless (tr. K. Silver)
Robert Herrick, One Hundred Eleven Poems
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (tr. D. McClintock)
Saki, Stories
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (tr. H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop)
Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.
Plato, Symposium (tr. W. Hamilton)
Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
K’ung Shang-Jen, The Peach Blossom Fan (tr. C. Shih-Hsiang & H. Acton)
Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony (tr. W. and E. Muir)
Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems
Vladimir Sorokin, Day of the Oprichnik (tr. J. Gambrell)
Dan Simmons, The Terror (ab)
Jean Racine, Six Tragedies (tr. J. Cairncross)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Jane Austen, Northanger Abby
Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories
Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
Zadie Smith, Swing Time
William Shakespeare, Sonnets
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Science (tr. A. Del Caro)
Molly Keane, Good Behavior
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy
Jeff Vandermeer, Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Confucius, Analects (tr. Robert Eno)
Confucius, Analects (tr. Lionel Giles)
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight

**********2022********************

George Eliot, Middlemarch
Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Fernanda Melchor, Paradais (tr. Sophie Hughes)
Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague (tr. Ekin Oklap)
Hendrik Ibsen, Six Plays (tr. Eva Le Gallienne)
Georgette Heyer, Arabella
Galen, On the Natural Faculties (tr. Arthur John Brock)
Yasushi Inoue, Tun-Huang (tr. J.O. Moi)
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
Silvina Ocampo, Thus Were Their Faces: Stories (tr. D. Balderston)
William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the English Kings (tr. R.A.B. Mynors)
Ben Jonson, Volpone
Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre (tr. A.L. Heinrich)
René Descartes, Selected Writings (tr. D.M.Clarke)
Miron Białoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising (tr. M.G. Levine)
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (tr. Lysander Kemp)
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (tr. J. Strachey)
Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby
Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Benito Pérez Galdós, Tristana (tr. M.J. Costa)
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration from the North (tr. D. Johnson-Davies)
Susan Sontag, Essays from the 1960s & 70s
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
Patrick Modiano, In the Café of Lost Youth (tr. C. Clarke)
Jane Austen, Persuasion
G.W.F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. A.V. Miller)
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (tr. R. Simms)
Virgil, Eclogues (tr. J. Michie)
William James, Pragmatism
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City (tr. K.S. Kingsbury)
Georgette Heyer, Venetia
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species
Epicurus, Extant Works (tr. C. Bailey)
Robert Pinsky, At the Foundling Hospital

**********2021*****************************
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (tr. D. McDuff)
Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
William Shakespeare, The Comedies
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Ann Petry, The Street
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (tr. V.E. Watts)
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (tr. W. Weaver)
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici
Georgette Heyer, The Foundling
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution
Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
Catullus, Poems (tr. J. Michie)
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (tr. A. Kerrigan et al.)
Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (tr. J. Cohen)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost
Guy de Maupassant, Tales (tr. R. Colet)
Leo Tolstoy, Short Stories (tr. R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky)
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God
John Stuart Mill, Political Writings
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars (tr. J. Warrington)
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
Robert Heinlein, Tunnel in the Sky
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (tr. R. Kirkpatrick)
Kelly Link, Get in Trouble
Livy, Early History of Rome (tr. A. Selincourt)

**********2020*****************************
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
William Blake, Poetry
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Essays (tr. D.G.H. Cole)
Renata Alder, Speedboat
Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa, Travels of Marco Polo (tr. R. Latham)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires (tr. R.W. Flint)
Voltaire, Candide (tr. R. Aldington)
Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy?
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Molière, Plays (tr. D.M. Frame)
Robert Burton, On Being Certain
John Donne, Poetry
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Francis Bacon, Essays
Isabel Allende, House of Spirits (tr. M. Bogin)
Euripides, Plays (tr. P. Vellacott)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
Sophocles, Plays (tr. D. Grene & R. Lattimore)
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Aeschylus, Oresteia Trilogy (tr. R. Fagles)
Mary Louise Alcott, Little Women
Deborah Eisenberg, Collected Stories
Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude (tr. G. Rabassa)
Robert Penn Warren, Collected Poems
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Susan Stewart, Columbarium

**********2019*****************************
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (ab)
Mark Haddon, The Pier Falls
Paulette Giles, News of the World
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (ab)
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (ab)
British romantic poetry
David Malouf, Ransom
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (ab)
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (ab)
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
Willa Cather, Death Comes to the Archbishop (ab)
Henry James, Washington Square (ab)
Amy Hempel, Collected Stories
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Isaac Asimov, Caves of Steel (ab)
H.P. Lovecraft, Mountains of Madness (ab)
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
Ovid, Metamorphoses (tr. D. Raeburn)
Colson Whitehead, Underground Railroad
George Saunders, Tenth of December
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
Jennifer Egan, Welcome to the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach

**********2018 (Jun-Dec)*****************
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (tr. A. Briggs)
Colson Whitehead, Zone One
Don Delillo, Cosmopolis
Sarah Lindsay, Twigs and Knucklebones
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales