books survey

[cellio]

Someone asked me to answer this books survey that's been going around, so here goes.

1. Total number of books I own:

The author of this survey clearly does not have the same ideas about magnitude that I and most of my friends do. I will answer in shelf-feet, because I don't have a database and counting would be silly.

Ok, let's see...

• Jewish: about 15 feet
• Music: about 12 feet
• Cooking/food: about 6 feet
• Art, graphic novels, comic collections: about 8 feet
• Everything else except SF&F: probably about 20 feet
• SF&F: this is tricky because Dani owned vastly more than I did, there was a lot of overlap, and we've merged. I'm going to guess that about 10% of the holdings are "mine" in some sense. Now, to compute... I get 330 feet of paperbacks and, um, about 36 feet of hardbacks, roughly. Some of the occupants of the hardback shelves might be overflow from misc; I'd have to go look.

2. Last book I bought:

Singular?

Dog Food, another in the Play With Your Food series (scored for a dollar), and Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (by Tim McGee). I also bought some other books at the same time, but they were gifts so I'm not including them.

3. Last book I read:

I'm currently reading A Bintel Brief, a compilation of letters to the advice column in the Forward from the first two-thirds of the last century. Most of the authors of the early letters are Jewish immigrants; later letters are presumably more likely to be from children of immigrants. (I'm only up to 1909.)

I've also been paging through Dog Food and Miriam's Kitchen, and reading essays from Eyes Remade for Wonder (Rabbi Lawrence Kushner). Also looking things up in the D&D Player's Handbook, but that's different. :-)

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

"Mean a lot" is a tall order, so I'll reinterpret as "are significant". I'm not saying these are the "most" or "best"; they're just a few of the many books that are noteworthy in some way. If you ask again in a month (please don't) I'm likely to name five other books. I think I answered another "books I like" question recently, so I'll try to avoid duplication while not actually going and finding that post. :-)

• Common Lisp: the Language. I helped write it, a teeny bit. I had no idea at the time that I would end up specializing in writing documentation for programmers.
• Parsha Parables by Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky. I first encountered his weekly torah commentary on the net, and now there are four collections in dead-tree edition. He doesn't assume you know a lot already; neither does he talk down to you. He tells stories, and connects them to the parsha.
• Medieval Instrumental Dances by Tim McGee. This book introduced me to a repertoire that I really like. And hey, transcriptions. :-)
• The Phantom Tollbooth. The first fantasy novel I remember reading (though it wasn't billed as such), and I love the word play, number play, and "logic play". Time to reread, methinks.
• Two Jews Can Still Be a Mixed Marriage. Um, yeah.
• Bonus book: Joy and Jealousy. Even though it's vanity press, I'm pretty proud of the work we did.

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

>> The author of this survey clearly does not have the same ideas about magnitude that I and most of my friends do.

Yes. I understand perfectly. My quick-and-dirty estimate is that we own approximately 90 feet of books. I don't think that's enough; you can never get too many books. :)

[cellio]

I suppose you'd have too many books if the accumulated weight threatened the structural integrity of your house. But on the other hand, you could just move at that point. :-)

(Mind, I say this within earshot of someone who had to rearrange part of his collection specifically because he didn't think the attic would hold. But most of the time that's not a serious concern.)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

>> But on the other hand, you could just move at that point. :-)

Either that, or shore up the house. ;)

I love books. And I don't like getting rid of them because if I like them (and even if they're just OK), I will end up reading them more than once.

[jducoeur]

I suppose you'd have too many books if the accumulated weight threatened the structural integrity of your house.

Been there, done that -- that's why the comics are now in a nice cement-floored storage unit until I can get around to weeding them.

I don't think our books threaten our floors, but that's mainly because they're spread throughout the house; if they were all in one place, I'd worry. I have no idea at all how many books we have -- they're so scattered (across bookshelves and boxes everywhere) that it's hard to even come up with an estimate...

[cellio]

Been there, done that

You are, in fact, the person I had in mind. :-) And yes, a regular distribution of books shouldn't pose the same challenges as stacked boxes.