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".

1001 Library Members: Please borrow books! A long list of what I have available is HERE. (To join the library, look at their shelf or contact me.)

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 2013:

Nonfiction

• Lorene Cary – Black Ice
  
• Matsuo Bashō – The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
  
• Lili Loofbourow – "Gollum's Mother: On Marie Corelli." Los Angeles Review of Books, February 13, 2013.

• Orhan Pamuk – Snow
  
• Josh Lanyon – Come Unto These Yellow Sands
  
• Laura Baumbach & Josh Lanyon – Mexican Heat
  
• Vicki Essex – Back to the Good Fortune Diner
  
• Leo Perutz – St. Petri-Schnee
  
• Gail Tsukiyama – The Samurai's Garden
  
• Gloria Naylor – The Women of Brewster Place
  
• Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go
  
• Elif Shafak – The Bastard of Istanbul
  
• Irmgard Keun – Das kunstseidene Mädchen
  
• Courtney Milan – The Governess Affair & The Duchess War
  
• Margaret Atwood – Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories
  
• Stefan Zweig – Amok. Novellen einer Leidenschaft.
  
• Astrid Amara – "No Life But This"
  
• Ginn Hale – "Things Unseen and Deadly"
  
• Colette Moody – Parties in Congress
  
• Abigail Roux – According to Hoyle
  
• Heidi Cullinan & Marie Sexton – Second Hand
  
• Aleksandr Voinov – Skybound
  
• Emma Donoghue – Slammerkin
  
• Ursula K. Le Guin – Lavinia
  
• Allegra Goodman – Intuition
  
• Heidi Cullinan & Marie Sexton – Family Man
  
• Tamara Allen – "If It Ain't Love"
  
• Tamara Allen – The Only Gold
  
• Christa Wolf – Kindheitsmuster
  
• Leena Lehtolainen – My First Murder
• Sawako Ariyoshi – The River Ki
  
• Nicola Griffith – Slow River