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]

Is this Steele's book, or another one? Now you've got me really curious.

This is Steele's book. See my answer to metahacker for the story.

There were three books that seriously influenced my thinking when I was young, and this is one of them.

Now I'm curious -- what were the other two?

[jducoeur]

This is Steele's book.

Very neat. That was one of my principal reference books for one of my jobs, about ten years ago. I wrote what would now be called an IDE for the initial prototype of Ada '95, while the language was still being designed. The back end was Allegro Common Lisp, using Garnet -- a really magnificent rule-based GUI system, also designed at CMU -- for the graphics, with Emacs and ELisp as the editor. Garnet remains by far the best GUI system I've ever worked with; the commercial state of the art still hasn't caught up with it. And now that I surf around, I find the Amulet project, which is basically the same thing in C++ -- I'll have to check that out.

Anyway, it was a fun, productive environment to work in; the thing didn't run very fast, but I managed to get a pretty full-blown IDE up and running in about four months flat, including fancy call graphs and all. One of my more bizarre career moments was showing the thing off at a military trade show, and explaining this thing I'd basically whipped up quickly to generals wandering past...

what were the other two?

Though there were obviously many books that influenced me, the three that really stick in my mind as mattering most to me when I was around 10 were The Phantom Tollbooth, The 21 Balloons, and Roald Dahl's Charlie books, which I think of as one double-novel. (And very slightly later, now that I think of it, A Wind in the Door.)

After that, I got into more hardcore science fiction, and that consumed me for most of my adolescence. But I don't think any single SF book was as important to me as those above...

[cellio]

I wrote what would now be called an IDE for the initial prototype of Ada '95, while the language was still being designed.

Nifty!

You'll get a giggle out of this: I briefly worked on the Garnet project too. :-) (It was a summer job.) I made the first fledgling steps to port it from X11 to the Macintosh. Since I didn't have significant knowledge of either X11 or the Macintosh (I was just a Lisp weenie), and I suspected that there might be other ports in the future (I see I was wrong) and maintaining branched/ported code is a PITA, my approach was to build a glue layer to implement the relevant parts of the X11 API on the Mac. I have no idea what the final implementation ended up looking like.

One of my more bizarre career moments was showing the thing off at a military trade show, and explaining this thing I'd basically whipped up quickly to generals wandering past...

:-)

My early reading influences included Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, The Little Prince, and (in a different vein) the Encyclopedia Brown books (not necessarily in that order).

[jducoeur]

I briefly worked on the Garnet project too.

Neat -- given the timing, I was wondering if you might have. Having used the end result, I was very impressed: to date, I've still never found a GUI toolkit that was so efficient. (The pinnacle was the day that I decided I needed to invent a sort of 2D image-based "scrollbar" for my big bubble diagrams. IIRC, it took 11 lines of code. I was blown away.)

My early reading influences

The Little Prince wasn't a big one for me, but the others all were. Haven't thought about Encyclopedia Brown in years...

[cellio]

Neat -- given the timing, I was wondering if you might have.

I actually had a non-academic job in between. I was really just grunt labor for Garnet; I'd been working on a project whose funding ended in May, had hopes of joining a different project in the fall, and needed something to fill the gap. (Then didn't get onto another project and left for industry at the end of the summer.) So I can't take any credit for Garnetty goodness, but I agree with your assessment that it was pretty spiffy.