OK, here’s another fun blog game from Mixolydian Mode via normblog; take the list of books, and look in your shelf for the authors.
If you’ve got them on the shelf, leave them. If you don’t, insert an author you do have and bold it.Sadly, I seem to have very little overlap with Norm; he’s a professor and British, while I’m a random guy and a Californian…sigh.
For the new books, I decided to pick from the lefthand stack of shelves in the dining room, just to limit the amount of walking around and looking I’d have to do.
1. Evelyn Waugh
2. Vladimir Nabokov
3. Robert Stone
4. Joyce Carol Oates
5. Richard Yates
6. Tim Powers
7. Flannery O’Connor
8. Larry Brown
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. William Shakespeare
> Same game, new list. This one’s non-fiction:
1. Atul Gawande
2. Max Horkheimer
3. I.F. Stone
4. Kevin Phillips
5. Primo Levi
6. Lewis Minkin
7. Julian Jaynes
8. Ferdinand Hayek
9. Thomas Merton
10. H.L.A. Hart
OK. I’ll throw in a small smattering of mine. Start with fiction…
1. George Orwell
2. Ray Bradbury
3. Herman Hesse
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Anne Rice
6. Neal Stephenson
7. Mark Twain
8. Gordon Korman
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10. William Shakespeare
> Same game, new list. This one’s non-fiction:
1. Carl Sagan
2. Kevin Kelly
3. Tom Peters
4. Bernard Lewis
5. Angelo Codevilla
6. Stewart Brand
7. Idries Shah
8. Ferdinand Hayek
9. Miyamaoto Musashi
10. H.L.A. Hart
I’ll go from Joe’s! 🙂
1. George Orwell
2. Ray Bradbury
3. Herman Hesse
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Anne Rice
6. Neal Stephenson
7. Mark Twain
8. *Larry Niven*
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10.William Shakespeare
> Same game, new list. This one’s non-fiction:
1. *William Hamilton*
2. *Keinosuke Fukayama*
3. *Michael Sells*
4. *John Maynard Smith*
5. *Robert Trivers*
6. *Matt Ridley*
7. *Richard Dawkins*
8. *Pascal Boyer*
9. *Stephen Hawking*
10.*James George Frazer*
Hmm, very nearly isomorphic on fiction, but it looks like orthogonal on non-fiction.
BTW, Joe, have you read Cryptonomicon yet?
No, no Cryptonomicon yet. Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and of course In The Beginning there Was the Command Line.
I love Snow Crash.
That’s all I wanted to say…
C’mon JC, do your books, puhleeze? We have to have some common ground if we both loved Snow Crash! 🙂
Oh, and on my non-fiction list, that’s *Sir James Frazer* (the golden bough?)
Okay, sure.
Fiction
1. *Stephen King*
2. Ray Bradbury
3. Herman Hesse
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. *William Gibson*
6. Neal Stephenson
7. *John Kennedy Toole*
8. *Alexander Pushkin*
9. Fyodor Dostoevsky
10.*George R.R. Martin*
Non-fiction
1. *Michael Murphy*
2. *Douglas Hofstadter*
3. *Frederick Coplestone*
4. *Adam Smith*
5. *Thomas Kuhn*
6. *Maurice Merleau-Ponty*
7. *Ken Wilber*
9. Stephen Hawking
10.James George Frazer
I’m not sure where poetry fits, but –
*Ranier Maria Rilke*
*Theodore Roethke*
Jinnderella, I have the feeling we share a LOT of fiction tastes, but our non-fiction tastes differ.
That’s an interesting one, isn’t it? We prefer different realities, but prefer the same fantasies?
Ah, another Ken Wilber fan… and I contend that Stephen King has never surpassed his book of short stories, “Night Shift”.
Robert Heinlein
Harry Turtledove
Studs Turkel
William Manchester
Martin Gilbert
Margaret Atwood
Toni Morrison
Mark Twain
Stephen Hawking
JRR Tolkein
CS Lewis
Herman Hesse
JC, I have King and Gibson too!
And I’m thrilled that we are as similiar as we are. I think non-fiction represents work and school type books. Still, what are the odds of two as different as we are having _A Brief History of Time_ and _The Golden Bough_ on one shelf?
That was fun. 🙂
Hmmm, I wonder what David Blue has on his shelf?
OK.. hmmm… from JC’s link in the chain:
Fiction
1. William Shakespeare
2. Harlan Ellison
3. Herman Hesse
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. William Gibson
6. Neal Stephenson
7. Mark Helprin
8. Michael Moorcock
9. Neil Gaiman
10.Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Non-fiction
1. Steven Runciman
2. Douglas Hofstadter
3. Barbara Tuchman
4. Bernard Lewis
5. David Berlinski
6. Clifford Pickover
7. William Manchester
9. Paul Johnson
10. Robert Kaplan
Hi, jinnderella! 🙂
Fiction
1. William Shakespeare
2. *Albert Camus*
3. *Gustave Flaubert*
4. J.R.R. Tolkien
5. *Ross Leckie*
6. *Pauline Gedge*
7. *Charles Dickens*
8. Michael Moorcock
9. *Roger Zelazny*
10. *Tim O’Brien*
Non-fiction
1. Steven Runciman
2. *Norman Housley*
3. Barbara Tuchman
4. Bernard Lewis
5. *Niccolo Machiavelli*
6. *W.M. Flinders Petrie*
7. *Joyce Tyldesley*
9. *Ian Shaw*
10. *Joan of Arc* (testimony and letters)
I’m not sure where poetry fits either, but –
*Virgil*
*Rudyard Kipling*
And a bookshelf of chess.
Hi David Blue, that was good! 🙂
I’ll add two poetry, like you and JC.
T.S.Eliot
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Is everyone not listing the Bible because it’s assumed (correctly I hope) that we all have at least one? Or because we’re listing by author, and people can’t find a comfortable and neutral way to name the author in this case? 😉
The lists seem to have been Bible-free before we thought of splitting them into fiction and non-fiction, so that shouldn’t be the problem. 😉
I assume we all have a Koran too, nowadays? Good collections of Hadith though, that’s something else. “Possibly” _Prophet of doom_ would no be considered a neutral and academically respectable source. 😛
Umm, I don’t think I own a bible. I do have a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh, 3 Qu’rans, and the Upanishads and Vedas. Some from school. 🙂
David,
I had the author problem, as most do with the Hebrew Bible.
Mind you, if you think listing an author for the Torah is tough, try figuring it out for the “Talmud”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud some time….
Following on from David Blue:
Fiction
1. William Shakespeare
2. *Mervyn Peake*
3. *Frank Herbert*
4. J.R.R. Tolkien (hmm, anyone noticing a common factor here?)
5. *Cordwainer Smith*
6. *Terry Pratchett*
7. *Iain M. Banks*
8. Michael Moorcock
9. Roger Zelazny
10. *Mary Gentle*
Non-fiction
1. Steven Runciman
2. *Richard Dawkins*
3. Barbara Tuchman
4. Bernard Lewis
5. Niccolo Machiavelli
6. *John Lewis Gaddis*
7. *Steven Pinker*
9. *Tom Holland*
10. *Bertrand Russell*
Poetry
*Dylan Thomas*
*Milton*
*Baudelaire*
I’ll see your Bible and Koran, and raise you an I Ching/Tao Te Ching.
Jinderella may trump with _Hadith_, but I counter with a _Summa Theologicae_. 😉
Jinderella:
Three Q’urans ?
Got my lousy hand beat. 🙂
jinnderella: “Umm, I don’t think I own a bible. I do have a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh, 3 Qu’rans, and the Upanishads and Vedas. Some from school. :)”
Bravo!
Still, I think a Bible is a good thing. It helps me understand where people whose thoughts and expressions are Bible-based are coming from, or where people I admire (like Joan) were coming from, or even where things I think and say come from.
Christendom is “my gang.” I have an interest in the central document of “my gang”.
William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill too, but hey these are short lists.
John Farren”
“4. J.R.R. Tolkien (hmm, anyone noticing a common factor here?)”
Ah, yeah! Partly it’s got to be timing – the movies, the DVDs and so on. But they (the extended versions for sure, on the full screen) are now established masterpieces too. So the tree of Tolkien’s work has brought forth ample good fruit, and this is now one of the sources of our shared culture. That’s a good thing! 🙂
I feel sorry for Homer though. I guess _Troy_ didn’t do the same job. (Or deserve to on its merits. That was one sad, lame movie.)
Joe Katzman: “Mind you, if you think listing an author for the Torah is tough, try figuring it out for the Talmud some time….”
(laughing) I concede that one.
The authors of ancient religious texts were often anonymous, but you can at least say – here are the Pyramid Texts, here is the evidence, here is what the Egyptologists say. (Or equivalent for the religion of interest to you.) The Jewish web of commentary is “something else”.
Ho, I’ll trump you all! I have a Necronomicon! 🙂