The other day I went through one of my periodic bouts of OCD, wherein I grab all the books off my shelves that I’ve not yet read. Turns out there are 100 books on that list; they’re below. It occurred to me that I went through the same exercise back in the day; I looked and found that indeed, I made such a list in 2006. There were 27 books on the list at that time. Of those, I’ve read five. I’ve decided that I’ll never read nine of them. That means I’ve added … uh … 87 books to the list. Yikes. This is not working out well. Here’s what the new, shameful pile looks like:
The list of books in those piles is below the fold.
Then there’s the to-read list, which contains 540 books at the moment and which overlaps quite a bit with the list below. Oh, and I have a shelf full of math books that I will, in truth, probably never read (e.g., Munkres’s [book: Topology]). Not a hopeful scene at all.
I also have three books checked out of the library at the moment:
* [book: Probability with Martingales], on the recommendation of a Twitter follower
* [book: Google’s PageRank and Beyond], just to refresh my memory
* Joshua Ferris’s novel [book: The Unnamed], on Adam Kessel‘s recommendation.
Finally, I’m in queue for four books at the library:
* [book: Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?], by Tom Geoghegan (author of the heartbreaking and awe-inspiring [book: Which Side Are You On?: Trying To Be For Labor When It’s Flat On Its Back], and lamentably defeated candidate to replace Rahm Emanuel as the Congressman from Illinois’ fifth district)
* Rosecrans Baldwin’s novel [book: You Lost Me There]
* [book: Diary of a Very Bad Year], by the possibly-fake hedge-fund manager profiled on [mag: n+1] (favorably reviewed by Ezra Klein)
* Karl Polanyi’s [book: The Great Transformation] (which I could have sworn that Cosma Shalizi reviewed somewhere, but apparently not)
Objectively speaking, this collection of books bespeaks almost pathological packratitude. So now I have my unread-but-owned book stack out in the open, sitting guiltily on the floor in front of my bookshelves. I’d like to say that I won’t buy another book until I’ve polished all of those off. A boy can dream about the end of his own pathologies.
* Richard Posner, [book: A Failure of Capitalism]
* Posner, [book: Antitrust Law]
* Peter Drucker, [book: The Effective Executive]
* Drucker, [book: The Age of Discontinuity]
* Augustine of hippo, [book: The City of God]
* Robert Fisk, [book: Pity The Nation]
* Tolstoy, [book: War and Peace]
* Joshua Angrist, [book: Mostly Harmless Econometrics]
* Henry Adams, [book: The Education of Henry Adams]
* Goethe, [book: Faust]
* Faulkner, [book: Absalom, Absalom!]
* Faulker, [book: The Sound and the Fury]
* Jerzy Kosiński, [book: The Painted Bird]
* Camus, [book: The Stranger]
* Henry James, [book: The Ambassadors]
* Henry James, [book: The American]
* Sheldon Axler, [book: Linear Algebra Done Right]
* Steve McConnell, [book: Professional Software Development]
* Richard Swinburne, [book: Bayes’s Theorem]
* William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, Michael McPherson, [book: Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities]
* Jon Bentley, [book: Programming Pearls]
* Cervantes, [book: Don Quixote]
* Daniel Dennett, [book: Brainchildren]
* Michael Szenberg, Lalla Ramrattan, and Aron Gottesman (editors), [book: Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century]
* James Wallace and Jim Erickson, [book: Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire]
* H.M. Schey, [book: Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus]
* Robert X. Cringely, [book: Accidental Empires]
* Joseph Schumpeter, [book: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy]
* Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, [book: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications]
* Marshall G.S. Hodgson, [book: The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam]
* Brendan Sheehan, [book: Understanding Keynes’ General Theory]
* Sudhir Venkatesh, [book: Gang Leader for a Day]
* Feynman, [book: The Character of Physical Law]
* Susan Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, [book: Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity]
* Gérard Debreu, [book: The Theory of Value: An axiomatic analysis of economic equilibrium] (available in its entirety online; I took it to Kinko’s and had it bound nicely)]
* Eric Hobsbawm, [book: The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991] (part of his study of the impacts of the French and Industrial Revolutions on world history)]
* Virginia Woolf, [book: To The Lighthouse]
* James Joyce, [book: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]
* Tolstoy, [book: Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy]
* Sinclair Lewis, [book: Main Street]
* Lawrence, [book: Lady Chatterley’s Lover]
* Melville, [book: Great Short Works of Herman Melville]
* Atwood, [book: The Handmaid’s Tale]
* Kafka, [book: Amerika]
* Pushkin, [book: Yevgeny Onegin]
* Carl Boyer, [book: The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development]
* Feynman, [book: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter]
* Thucydides, [book: The History of the Peloponnesian War]
* José Zalabardo, [book: Introduction to the Theory of Logic]
* David Frum, [book: Dead Right]
* Frum, [book: Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again]
* James Hoopes, [book: False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today]
* Toni Morrison, [book: The Bluest Eye]
* Søren Kierkegaard, [book: Fear and Trembling/Repetition]
* Emma Goldman, [book: Living My Life]
* George Scialabba, [book: What Are Intellectuals Good For?]
* Bernard Bailyn, editor, [book: The Debate on the Constitution : Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification] (2 volumes)]
* Mill, [book: The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, the Subjection of Women and Utilitarianism]
* Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, [book: The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography]
* Abelson and Sussman, [book: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs]
* Georges Perec, [book: A Void]
* George Akerlof, [book: Explorations in Pragmatic Economics]
* Aristotle, [book: The Basic Works of Aristotle]
* H.W. Brands, [book: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt]
* E.M. Forster, [book: Howards End]
* John Brunner, [book: Stand on Zanzibar]
* Howard DeLong, [book: A Profile of Mathematical Logic]
* Albert Hourani, [book: Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939]
* Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner, [book: Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead]] (Intrator is the best teacher I’ve ever had)
* Arthur Schlesinger, [book: The Coming of the New Deal: The Age of Roosevelt Volume II, 1933-1935]
* Schlesinger, [book: The Age of Jackson]
* Neil Netanel, [book: Copyright’s Paradox]
* Vergil, [book: The Aeneid]
* John Carlis and Joseph Maguire, [book: Mastering Data Modeling: A User-Driven Approach]
* Don Brown, Chad Michael Davis, and Scott Stanlick, [book: Struts 2 in Action]
* Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson, [book: iPhone SDK Development]
* Alasdair Allan, [book: Learning iPhone Programming]
* Gamma et al., [book: Design Patterns]
* Joseph Hofbauer and Karl Sigmund, [book: Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics] (to reread/read more thoroughly)]
* Mark Green and Michele Jolin, editors, [book: Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President]
* Robert V. Binder, [book: Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools] (described in [book: Test-Driven Development] as *the* canonical book on software testing)]
* A.P. French, [book: Vibrations and Waves]
* Friedrich Nietzsche, [book: Basic Writings of Nietzsche]
* T.W. Körner, [book: Fourier Analysis]
* T.W. Körner, [book: Exercises For Fourier Analysis]
* Peter Seibel, [book: Practical Common Lisp]
* Robert C. Tucker, editor, [book: The Marx-Engels Reader]
* Samuelson, [book: The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson] (5 volumes)]
* Mark-Jason Dominus, [book: Higher-Order Perl] (though I’m really more interested in it as a book about functional programming generally; my Perl days are over)]
* David Griffith, [book: Introduction to Electrodynamics]
* Cover and Thomas, [book: Elements of Information Theory]
* Halmos, [book: Measure Theory]
* David Pollard, [book: A User’s Guide to Measure Theoretic Probability]
* Patrick Billingsley, [book: Probability and Measure] (Grimmett and Stirzaker is a prerequisite, Pollard may be another)
* Grimmett and Stirzaker, [book: Probability and Random Processes]
* David Harville, [book: Matrix Algebra from a Statistician’s Perspective]
* Lewis Mumford, [book: The City In History]
* Alicia Munnell and Steven Sass, [book: Working Longer: The Solution to the Retirement Income Challenge] (started reading it the other night; seriously one of the most depressing book introductions I’ve ever read)
* Thomas Pynchon, [book: Inherent Vice] (I’m in the middle of it now)
* Boccaccio, [book: The Decameron]
Steve Reads 
What about all those academic treatises of mine, Steve? Don’t tell me you haven’t made room on your shelf for those. They each come in three 560pp volumes.
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You could just change the name of your blog to “Steve Owns” and be done with it.
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What about all the dissertations that never become books at all? What — have you somehow bought into our unfair publishing system? There are hundreds of thousands of dissertations out there that will never see the light of day. What about self-published books? What if the Next Great Idea You Really Need is in the grey literature?
I’m so kidding.
One of the great things about being a librarian is that it cured me of my book fetish. I am deeply aware of the value of my personal book collection — its value is zero. Almost every book I own is still in print and if not , can be easily purchased on the secondary market or even printed on demand.
I don’t need to keep a copy “just in case”. I’m over 40 and married — I don’t need to keep books in order to document my intellectual development , to remind myself of my former self or to impress someone with my book collection.
So, I encourage you to keep the list and ditch the books, especially if they’re making you feel bad. Sometimes I keep books I want to read around so that they serve as a visual reminder of the task. Kind of like a big post-it note. If that’s what you’re doing — great.
But if the pile stresses you out — get rid of it. Focus on what you’re reading now. Enjoy it fully. The books you have yet to read will still be there when you want to read them years from now.
As a professional libraian, I promise you that you do not have the sole remaining copy.
But if you don’t believe me, there’s always http://www.worldcat.org. You can see exactly how rare your books are.
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