Well, it’s been a while since I shared a bookshelf snapshot. For any newer readers, the idea here is that I’m trying not to keep books unless they’re meaningful to me or are things I’ll likely reread. Every once in a while, the books have a neat story. I’m slowly cataloguing them all, whether they have good stories or not. My shelves are organized roughly by color. Here we are in shelf cubby number 13 (of 20), transitioning from very dark covers to the more neutral tones.

Riding along the top there is a book I got for work and didn’t like very much. The author fancies himself a maverick but seemed to me to mostly just be kind of flakey and annoying.

My kids wore out the copy of The Hobbit we had had for years, so this is a newer copy. I read Bobbie Ann Mason’s Feather Crowns a long time ago in college and found it kind of so-so. Her In Country was much better, if with less of a carnival appeal to it.

Barth I have perpetual mixed feelings about. Giles Goat-Boy is hilarious and smart and never-ending and really uneven, like pretty much all of Barth’s long fiction that I’ve read. I’ll likely dip back into it someday.

I read the Baldwin essays and liked a couple of them but was less interested in the rest. I imagine I’ll give the ones I liked another read someday, so for now I’m hanging onto it. I recently read one of his novels and felt very meh about it.

Lethem is pretty consistently good, or at least aligned with my tastes. The Fortress of Solitude is one of my favorites of his.

The Southern literature anthology was the text of a class I took in college, and it’s chock full of good stuff, and of less good stuff. I revisit things in it from time to time and generally tend to hang onto anthologies. I’ll skip quickly to the next book, A Handbook to Literature, which is an earlier version of the copy that made an appearance in shelf #6. This copy happens to’ve been my mother’s. A professor of mine was the editor of the more recent edition that I used in college.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is magnificent and very much worth keeping to reread later.

I never finished Pierre, though I reckon I’ll read it one day. I also didn’t read A Whaler’s Dictionary all the way through. It’s more of a commonplace book than a thing you sit and read. It’s got some neat entries in it. I picked it up a few years ago when doing an in-depth read of Moby-Dick. It’s a nice book to own, and one that I’d be surprised to find in my local library.

I keep Pynchon, so V remains on the shelf. I haven’t read that one in many years and didn’t love it when I did read it. I can see myself trying it out again, though I’d be more interested, as I think about it just now, rereading one of his others.

I never finished The Savage Detectives. I’ve read Bolaño’s 2666 a couple of times and had been told that this one was also a really good book, but I lost interest maybe 2/3 of the way through and never got back into it. One day maybe I’ll try again. It’s that sort of negligent optimism that keeps me hanging onto this one.