I stopped by a Half Price Books this weekend (my favorite place in the world) and grabbed two more for the bookshelves: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and a single-volume set of all four Rabbit novels by John Updike. Both were pretty cheap, and both were on my list.
Yes, I have a list of books to buy.
Not a list of books to read. For now, at least, I’m pretty open to whatever I feel like jumping to next. But I need a book-buying list, for three reasons.
First, books are my crack cocaine. Given unlimited money and unlimited storage space, I would walk into a Half Price Books and make a list of everything I didn’t want. I need focus.
Second, I find more and more that I don’t enjoy books I buy impulsively (i.e. intrigued by the cover, intrigued by the description). I guess I am getting sort of snooty?
And third, I spend a lot of time on the interblogs, and I keep finding these books that sound amazing. You write down the titles of enough amazing books, and, you know, pretty soon you’ve got yourself a list.
Now, I’m flexible. I’ll still buy books that aren’t on the list if they look cool enough, and sometimes I’ll even decide not to buy a book from the list if it’s too expensive or it doesn’t seem as cool as I thought (which happened this weekend with Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook). But more and more, I find myself sticking to the list.
So here’s what I’ve got:
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Arabian Nights (and The Arabian Nights II), Husain Haddawy
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Of Human Bondage, William Somerset Maugham
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
Gormenghast, Marvin Peake
Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson
Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon
Hm – that’s shorter than I remembered. I guess I’ve actually crossed off quite a few lately. Making progress!
So, what’s up, Reader? Care to share any books on your own To-Buy list? Or, if you’ve read any of the books on mine, have any thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
Brian D. Buckley 
haha I actually have a notebook that I have started to keep.. I call it my “Book of Books”. It’s gotten to the point that I have to keep track of the books I want to buy, the books I have and the books I’ve read. I don’t tell many people that 😉
I highly recommend the Tao of Pooh. That book is such a simple book, you’d finish it in one sitting, but it completely changed my life.
Yep…your recommendation is why it’s on my list in the first place. 😉
My “list” consists of all the books i have and havent read, plus all the saved links out to Amazon of books I’m seriously considering. It’ll be awhile before I’m done with what i’ve got…
Absolutely. I could spend a year just reading what’s on my bookshelves already, and never have to buy anything new. And yet, I keep doing it…
Yeah… I suppose if I were to actually focus on just my reading list I could get through it pretty quick, but the chances of that happening are slim 😦
You and me both on books being crack cocaine 🙂 Love that! I had to stop buying books because I ran out of shelves! And even though I moved and have divided my available living space in half, you better believe that I brought every one of them along. 🙂
I noticed Atlas Shrugged isn’t on the list…. Anthem is the worst book she wrote! I promise!
Lastly, Ender’s Game was amazing. It was one of those books I couldn’t put down, and when I did, I thought about it constantly until I picked it up again. Thanks for the suggestion!
I started a blog 🙂
I actually would like to read Atlas Shrugged someday, there are just other books I want to read first. Have you seen the movie yet?
Glad you liked Ender’s Game so much. 😀
If you started a blog, how ’bout you drop me a link so I can go check it out??