Membredrbubbles

This isn't my personal library; this is what I've read since mid-2004. Books that I began but abandoned are not included, except in cases of edited volumes only a few chapters of which I ever intended to read. (If you care, the years in the "date read" field are correct, but the days/months are only correct in that they indicate the order of completion. I don't bother with actual day/month.)

When I can determine it, I enter the publication date of the original work into the Date field.

Rough scale o' stars:

5: Singularly worthwhile
4: Uncommonly worthwhile
3: More or less worthwhile
2: Disappointing, dull, forgettable, &c., &c.
1: Craptacular

I find that the Harry Potter and Tolkien books I've read swamp my "Fun Statistics" and skew the social connections towards über-popular stuff, which makes said statistics and connections kind of uninteresting. So here is a list of books I share with fewer people than the "mean book obscurity" of this list.

• My light reading wish list is here.
• My serious reading wish list is here.
• My picture-book wish list is here.

My "Favorite libraries" are just those public libraries from which I have ever held a card. Here's a map of them all.

The novel I like best is the late Mr. Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. I was astonished by how well I liked Dr. Gowers' Mathematics: a Very Short Introduction; math is by no means a strong suit of mine.

Ghost stories are my reading-candy. You can see my ghost-story collection here.

Rudyard Kipling is my guilty pleasure, although I do quote his poem "I keep six honest serving-men" to parents of toddlers; and once I made my Intro to Prehistory pupils do an archæological exegesis of his poem "In the Neolithic Age," which is an astonishing endorsement of cross-cultural tolerance: I mean, it's Kipling, for pete's sake — he of "The White Man's Burden."