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

[cellio]

I was an undergrad at CMU at the time, and largely through dumb luck I ended up working as a tech writer on the Spice Lisp project. (Spice Lisp was the implementation for the Perq.) I was working as a tech writer, not a programmer, and I ended up helping not just with the local implementation but also the emerging standard. I was given some sections of what would become the book to edit and a few to write first drafts of. (That is, there had already been a consensus about content on the mailing list, with signatures, but someone needed to write English and flesh it out.) I honestly don't know how many of my words made it into the book (I definitely had a hand in the discussion of error-handling), but I did do non-trivial work on it and even got into discussions about the content (defining the interface). I didn't realize until years later just how valuable that experience was.

I'm particularly glad that I didn't grok at the time how few of the other people in those discussions were random undergrads like me, because I would have been afraid to say anything if I'd known. (Mailing lists rather than physical meetings are useful that way -- on the internet no one knows you're a dog and all that.)

So I actually have a contributor's copy of the first edition, autographed by Guy Steele. :-)