Uploading My Library

In setting up my new study, I did something with my books I've never done before in the twenty-odd years that I've been building this library: I alphabetized them. Not all of them, actually. That would take a week. I've brought down to the study what I'm unofficially calling the canon: roughly two hundred books that have been influential in some way over the past two decades, even if in some cases I haven't actually, you know, read them. The rest remain scattered randomly through the bookshelves in the rest of the house.

This smaller collection makes for a nice little bookshelf, as you can see here. (Click on the thumbnail for a high-res version for those of you who want to zoom in to read all the spines.) It's not a comprehensive list -- there are a number of key books that I'm using right now that aren't on the shelves, and for some arbitrary reason I decided not to put any fiction in the canon, maybe because novels look nice in the living room, and because I'm a little less likely to draw on a novel for research purposes. It's also erratically organized within each letter -- once I got all the B's together, I had a hard time finding the energy to put the Br's after the Bo's.

But alphabetizing has a cool little side effect that had never occurred me. It lets you see very clearly which authors dominate your collection. As I was putting the books up on the shelves, I came up with a couple of interesting taxonomies that genuinely surprised me.

Author with the most books in the collection: Raymond Williams, followed closely by Freud, Stephen Jay Gould, Michel Foucault. (I suspect that Foucault and Derrida would have won this hands down -- given my recovering Semiotics major status -- but a bunch of their books didn't make the canon, and are still sitting around upstairs somewhere.)

Authors with the most books calculating re-readings of books as part of the total (i.e., if I've read Interpretation of Dreams three times, it counts as three books): Richard Dawkins, Freud, E. O. Wilson, followed by Foucault, Jane Jacobs, and Frederic Jameson. (And Jameson is only on there because I read two of his books -- Postmodernism and The Political Unconscious -- about ten times each in my early twenties.)

Author with the highest percentage of books that I really only skimmed: Fernand Braudel. I know, I know. I really should have read them start-to-finish.

Authors with only one or two books who nonetheless had a huge impact on me: Kevin Kelly (Out Of Control), Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire), Robert Wright (Non-Zero), Manuel De Landa (A Thousand Years Of Non-Linear History.)

The thing that's funny about this list is that looking at it you'd assume that Freud was central to my thinking about the world. But in fact, he's really not -- I rarely use Freud in my writings, and rarely think about him in passing. He just happens to overlap with three of the four major phases of my intellectual life (college, grad school, FEED, and book-writing.) We read him quite a bit in the Semiotics program at Brown (as an entree to Lacan, god help us), and I took a class on Freud with Steven Marcus at Columbia. And then Mind Wide Open had a whole closing chapter about updating the Freudian model in the light of modern neuroscience. So as Freud himself would say, his presence in my private canon was over-determined.

Can we start some kind of blogging/flickr sharing of personal library photos? I kind of like the idea...

Comments

[Chris M.]

Man, how you read that postmodern stuff that much without wanting to throw it out, beats me!

[Dan]

It needs to be much higher res if we're to read the spines.

[John]

How about spelling Jameson's first name right? ("Fredric")

Also, you really should blog a list of all those books . . . Bibliography-style with your observations on 'em . . .

[McChris]

Here's a shot of my "bookcase":
http://flickr.com/photos/infobong/22620354/

[Rob]

Nice to see Raymond Williams still getting his due. Every once in a while, I pick one of his books off the shelf, and I'm astonished at how sharp his readings are. I don't see "Culture and Society" on your bookshelf, but reading "The Country and the City" always feels like sitting in on one of the best lecture classes ever held.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but do you have a copy of "Why Orwell Matters" -- but no Orwell? (If you haven't read it already, or even if you have, Orwell's essay on Dickens is a great way to pass a pleasant afternoon.)

Terrific job on the office. A guy could get some writing done in a space like that...

[Stijn F.]

Maybe you should take look at: http://community.livejournal.com/show_your_books/ (pictures of people their bookshelves) and http://www.librarything.com/ (Catalog and share your books online). Especially librarything is really nice. It has some really nice features.

[Pablo]

Ha! - was just about to direct you to: http://www.librarything.com/. I have not used, but looks promising.

[Steven Johnson]

So many comments already. Quick responses:

1. You think there's a lot of postmodern stuff on the shelf here, you should see what it looks like upstairs.

2. The Country And The City is one of my top five favorite books of all time. I have a very short unpublished rumination on Williams that I might post later today...

3. I do have some Orwell somewhere upstairs, and it should be on the canon shelf, but somehow it got lost... That Dickens essay is incredible; I've been re-reading Our Mutual Friend recently, and it has come to mind many times...

4. I'm going to check out librarything now... thanks!

[Mark Dery]

I'm curious to know: in what way, exactly, has THE BELL CURVE been "influential"?

[Steven Johnson]

Re: The Bell Curve. I feel strangely vulnerable having all these books on display...

I didn't necessarily mean "influential" in exclusively a positive sense; the shelf is supposed to be made up of the books I'm likely to reference in my work, books that I'm wrestling with (or have wrestled) in the past. The Bell Curve is there because I've been dealing with IQ a lot in the past few years, and it's the most influential book about IQ -- though completely wrongheaded on almost every front -- published in the last few decades, maybe ever. It also, interestingly, has an unlikely endorsement of the Flynn Effect, which was central to the second half of Everything Bad....

Don't worry, Mark, I do have a copy of Mismeasure of Man that's in the canon -- I'm just using it right now for something else. Normally it'd be sitting right up there next to Murray and Hernstein, keeping them honest...

[Mark Dery]

>>The Bell Curve is there because I've been dealing with IQ a lot in the past few years, and it's the most influential book about IQ -- though completely wrongheaded on almost every front -- published in the last few decades, maybe ever.)

[Mark Dery]

Whups. Post got snarfed.

Retry:

You said: "_The Bell Curve_ is there because I've been dealing with IQ a lot in the past few years, and it's the most influential book about IQ -- though completely wrongheaded on almost every front -- published in the last few decades, maybe ever."

I'm surprised to hear it, since in the (admittedly closed) circles I travel in, it's viewed as a strain of intellectual leprosy, trapped between two covers. Who has it influenced, I wonder? Are there that many unreconstructed social Darwinists out there? None of them could have read Gould, who pretty much handed Murray and Hernstein their heads, happily, and he did it with the vorpal sword of science, too, exposing their bogus scientism for the rotting heap of falsehoods it is. As for IQ, have you ever written about the classic tests? They bring us full circle: Lewis Terman, Carl Brighan, and other developers of the Stanford-Binet were enthusiastic eugenicists, as you doubtless know.

So what do you play on the Jaguar? In every lit nerd beats the heart of a rocker manque. (I know, having just bought an Ibanez Artcore. )

[Michael]

I recognize a lot of those even without being able to read the spines - De Landa's book sticks out on the second shelf down on the left - but the one that I saw that made me smile was the largely-ignored but still very interesting City of Bits from a good 10 years ago or more. Wonderful little book that was.

[Dan Ancona]

Robert Wright's _Nonzero_! Right on. I was hugely impacted by this scale and hopefulness of this book but hardly ever see references to it.

[Greg Bolton]

Yeah! Raymond Williams!

For a moment I thought perhaps you'd broken into my home to take this shot -- we have very similar libraries.

Then I realized that my books aren't alphabetized.

Great post/idea.