Bookcases: Fiction

Like most book addicts, my collection is never "complete" because I'm always finding more to buy. Thus, even as I post these pictures of my bookshelves, they're already out of date as I've acquired a handful of books since taking these photos. However, my shelves were in pretty good order last week, so I figured it was as good a time as any to document them. Plus, it's been seven years since the last time I cataloged them. So here we go!

Bookcase no. 9

This shelf contains the tail end of my nonfiction books (to be shown in a subsequent post), which dovetail nicely into my anthologies. First up, the English major's handbook, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Note that I began with the fifth edition my freshman year, and switched to the sixth edition my sophomore year (1993). The four anthologies to the right of the Nortons were also used in various college courses.

Notable here are the books by Atwood and Babel. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the funniest book I'd ever read when I was in middle school. I worry, sometimes, that I would find it not nearly as funny now that I'm an adult. But occasionally I still get the itch to reread it. Maybe one day.

This is a good shelf! The stories of J. G. Ballard, Donald Barthelme, and Jorge Luis Borges are some of my favorites. Burgess's Enderby novels are hilarious. And I'm anxiously awaiting the large amount of time I'll need to devote to reading Bolaño's two novels on this shelf.

Willa Cather's My Ántonia was the first "adult" novel I read that inspired me to start reading something other than science fiction for fun, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White is one of the best novels I've ever read by a man with a voluminous beard (sorry, Tolstoy), and Raymond Carver's short stories are perfection.

Bookcase no. 10

Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick, side by side. Their works don't really have anything in common--or do they?

That "leather"-bound edition of Dickens's Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, and A Tale of Two Cities is one of the first non-sci-fi books I bought for myself. The gilt edges have mostly rubbed off, leaving the edges a nice, dull brown (along with the paper itself). All in all, it was a pretty cheaply made book--but I still love it. Also notable on this shelf are the heavy-duty Annotated Sherlock Holmes volumes. I've read one Sherlock Holmes story ("The Speckled Band") in my life--as part of a college course covering literature in Victorian England--and I hated it. But with Sherlock-mania sweeping the globe (and my own appreciation for the Cumberbatch/Freeman version, particularly), I decided to pick these up. Still haven't read any of them, though.

It still bugs me that I gave up on George Eliot's Middlemarch. I'll have to try it again, now that I know what I'm in for. Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is a wonderful novel, as is Tibor Fischer's The Thought Gang. Unfortunately, the only other person I've met who also enjoyed Fischer's book is a disconcerting weirdo. Alas.

This shelf contains a number of dying-to-reads (Fraser, Genet, Haldeman, Heller, Highsmith), some pretty-greats (Gissing, Groff, Hemingway, Hesse), and some ho-hums (Harbach, Hearn).

My favorites on this shelf: Joyce's Dubliners, Kafka's The Trial, and Kerouac's On the Road. No, I haven't read Ulysses (or at least not all the way through; tried, and failed, twice). What has kept me from reading Lem's Solaris is a near-universal proclamation that the English translation (from the Polish translation, not the Russian original) is abysmal. Why, I wonder, can't a new translation be done? (I'm sure there's a legitimate reason, or else it would've happened already.)

My favorites on this shelf: Matthew Lewis's The Monk, McCarthy's The Road, Melville's Moby-Dick, Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, and Christopher Moore's Lamb.

Bookcase no. 11

Nabokov rules this shelf, as is his right.

Orwell and Poe: two other important shapers of my young mind. The "leather"-bound Poe was purchased around the same time as my Dickens collection. And no, I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow either (like Ulysses, I've tried [once] but gave up). Someday....

Philip Roth is another favorite of mine. The Illuminatus! Trilogy was important to me in my early twenties, though I wonder how it would hold up if I read it again in my early forties. David Schickler is one of those authors who dazzled me with his first book (Kissing in Manhattan) and then bummed me out with his lackluster follow-up (Sweet and Vicious). I hear he's written a memoir, to be published later this year; I might have to give it a try.

What to say about this shelf? Tolkien, I guess. Though The Lord of the Rings has nothing in common with Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow (besides being, y'know, a novel), it shares the distinction of being another of those few books I've started reading and never finished. I've had that fancy leather-bound version since high school (it was a gift from my parents), and I just recently bought the hardcover British editions overseas from amazon.co.uk because the jackets are sooo pretty; perhaps they'll inspire me to try it again. (That's my hope, anyway.)

Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace are probably the two most unavoidable influences on my writing life, hence it's appropriate that they would sit together here (albeit for an unrelated, alphabetical reason).

Oscar Wilde was another important early shaper of my young mind. His effect on me is immeasurable. Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is one of the best books I've read in recent years. If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so now!

Bookcase no. 12

These shelves contain my mass market paperbacks, which also happen to be some of the books I've had with me the longest (naturally). Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale remains one of my favorite novels of all time; this particular copy, which I used in a college class on gender, is annotated and underlined to within an inch of its life. One of these days I need to buy myself a clean copy. Alexandre Dumas was an early favorite of mine; that copy of The Man in the Iron Mask originally belonged to my dad. He had it with him when he was a captain in the Air Force (as evidenced by his name and rank written on the inside of the front cover).

That old copy of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four also belonged to my dad. It's a particularly important book to me--both the physical copy as well as the book itself. I read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead strictly to learn what all the fuss was about; what I learned is that Rand had no sense of humor whatsoever (as borne out by Tobias Wolff's Old School). An acquaintance gave me that copy of Atlas Shrugged. It's not likely that I'll ever read it. Hey, that copy of Ivanhoe was my dad's as well. (Jeez, I've swiped a lot of books from my dad!) My excuse for this one is that it's another book I started reading but never finished. Shearing's So Evil My Love is important to me for reasons I can't divulge here. That first, gray copy of Frankenstein is another book that, like The Handmaid's Tale, was exhaustively annotated in college, thus the additional copy next to it, which is clean.

More Tolkien. If you didn't know better, you'd think I love The Lord of the Rings. And some Vonnegut, whom I actually do love. This shelf ends with some biographies, some of which are more embarrassing (Madonna! by Mark Bego) than others (Little Girl Lost by Drew Barrymore). Oh, who am I kidding? They're both pretty embarrassing. Should I reiterate that many of these mass market books have been with me for thirty years or more?

Speaking of which, here's an entire shelf of Isaac Asimov novels, the author I read the most when I was a kid.

And some more sci-fi; including some older (Cherryh, Hogan, Delany) and some newer (Reynolds).

Bookcase no. 13

More mass markets. Notable is my copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? billed as Blade Runner, which should clue you in to when it was that I developed an interest in Philip K. Dick. Also important was Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, which scared the everloving crap out of me as a kid. (It didn't help that the Cold War was still going strong when I was growing up in the '80s.)

Bookcase no. 14

Various anthologies, none of which are really worth discussing.

My collection of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, beginning with issue 11.

Fifteen years' worth of Pushcart Prize collections, and twelve years' worth of Dozois's The Year's Best Science Ficiton.

Bookcase no. 15

The "kid's books" bookcase, obviously. That book on the lower right, called Love and the Facts of Life was given to me by my mom when I was in seventh grade (I think). It was her way of avoiding giving me "the talk." I should mention that the book was already thirty years old when she gave it to me. Needless to say, I learned everything I needed to know on the playground. Thanks anyway, Mom!

The most important comic books of my childhood: Archie. Oh, how I wanted to live in that world of oddly kaleidoscopic skies. Betty or Veronica? That's a rather personal question, don't you think?

My childhood reading list (nearly) condensed into one shelf.

A strange conglomeration of books that almost confuse things by their very presence in this post. The Better Little Books belonged to my dad; the Big Little Books to my mom. The eight books stacked with their spines not visible are the complete Great Brain series by John Fitzgerald.

More oddball materials. The Dungeons & Dragons boxes are most important, followed closely by the Star Trek Enterprise-D blueprints. Yes, I'm that kind of nerd. Finally, the Cliff Notes were given to me by a high school friend who didn't need them anymore. I should rush to point out that I did not actually use them myself; I simply can't stand to see any kind of printed material thrown away (you should ask my wife about all the New Yorkers I have stashed in the basement).