Recent Book Activity

Dream and responsibility. — You are willing to assume responsibility for everything! Except, that is, for your dreams! What miserable weakness, what lack of consistent courage! Nothing is more your own than your dreams! Nothing more your own work! Content, form, duration, performer, spectator — in these comedies you are all of this yourself! And it is precisely here that you rebuff and are ashamed of yourselves, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, derived consolation from the thought that we cannot help what we dream! From this I conclude that the great majority of mankind must be conscious of having abominable dreams. If it were otherwise, how greatly this nocturnal poetizing would have been exploited for the enhancement of human arrogance! — Do I have to add that the wise Oedipus was right, that we really are not responsible for our dreams — but just as little for our waking life, and that the doctrine of freedom of will has human pride and feeling of power for its father and mother? Perhaps I say this too often: but at least that does not make it an error.
                                             — Nietzsche, Daybreak, 1881

An eclectic reader and long-time book accumulator. I like books about philosophy, science (especially biology, and human biology) and history, also autobiographies; for fiction, I prefer books that pay attention to language, that are imaginative, often a bit challenging; I read some science fiction and fantasy and am catching up on "classics".

Note on my wishlist: Most of the items I'm looking for are fairly uncommon! So if you want to send me a gift or swap, and can't find anything on my list, I don't mind. That's why I made a list of suggested donations to the 1001 Library. If you have any of these books, you don't need to mail them to me, just donate them to the library with my thanks!

Some things read in 2012:

Nonfiction

• Peter Del Tredici – Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast
  
• Jade Snow Wong – Fifth Chinese Daughter
  
• Elizabeth Warnock Fernea – Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
  
• Orhan Pamuk – The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
  
• Kenji Yoshino – A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us about Justice
  
• Mark Ridley (ed.) – The Darwin Reader
  
• Zora Neale Hurston – Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
  
• Norm Cohen – Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong
  
• Beryl Markham – West with the Night
  
• Takayoshi Kano – The Last Ape: Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology
  
• Ciaran Carson – Last Night's Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music

• Cecilia Tan (ed.) – The New Worlds of Women
  
• Selçuk Altun – Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
  
• Marion Zimmer Bradley (ed.) – Sword and Sorceress XX
  
• Ayşe Kulin – Last Train to Istanbul
  
• Anonymous (trans. Donald Keene) – The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
  
• Milorad Pavić – Dictionary of the Khazars
  
• Elif Şafak – The Flea Palace
  
• Vladimir Bartol – Alamut
  
• Ha Jin – War Trash
  
• Stefan Themerson – The Mystery of the Sardine
  
• Stefan Themerson – Hobson's Island
  
• Chester Himes – La reine des pommes
  
• Daniel Picouly – Tête de nègre
  
• Boris Vian – L'écume des jours
  
• Henri Barbusse – Le feu
  
• André Gide – L’immoraliste
  
• Franz Kafka – Der Proceß
  
• Bohumil Hrabal – Closely Watched Trains
  
• Dalene Matthee – Fiela's Child
  

• Edward Arlington Robinson – "Llewellyn and the Tree"