What's in your home library or what should be in everyone else's?

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Oct 31, 2021
I've spent my life collecting ebooks and sometimes reading them, but the older I get the more I want the real thing so I've started to build my library from scratch. Not too many book stores within immediate driving distance so I'm picking things up slowly. A few books on the Civil War, a few art books with lots of pictures. I'm thinking I should pick up some cookbooks as motivation to actually gain cooking skills. I'd like to see if my main shop would order some controversial books for me but the vibe I get is definitely not right-of-center so I may have to drive to a rural store.

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What are some choice offerings from your own library? Post pictures of your shelves, post summaries, talk about your experiences in bookstores, tell us how you love the smell of old paper and young boys. Do you own anything 'rare' or 'antique'? Do you own old dictionaries or encyclopedias?
 
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Ooh, personal library sperging. I hoard books like an autistic dragon -- last time I moved, my library filled about 15 boxes, and that was after culling aggressively (and not counting journal papers I have only electronically, because to hell with paying Elsevier's extortionate prices). Probably the two most interesting areas of focus it covers are Mesoamerican anthropology and classical literature from the 1500s through the 1800s. The latter set might not sound super interesting if you're not into that stuff, except that it's mostly actual antiques, with the exception of William Blake's works, because originals of those are unobtanium (they were all handmade). I also have a shitload of East Asian folklore (some antiques again), and a small collection of books focusing on propaganda and what was going on at the ordinary person level in the Axis countries during WW2.

Dunno if any of those subject areas interest you, but if they do, feel free to ask questions if there's something in particular you're curious about or want a recommendation.
 
a small collection of books focusing on propaganda and what was going on at the ordinary person level in the Axis countries during WW2.
Sure, this is the sort of thing I'm interested in. The only book I've read like this was Lothrop Stoddard's Into The Darkness which was decent but didn't go into much depth as he was an outsider. I do intend to order the full Lothrop Stoddard catalog along with Madison Grant's works and other eugenicists and racialists of their day. It's amazing the kind of stuff that's simply not available online. These books really need to be preserved for future generations.
 
I have a shitton of math, science and engineering books at all levels ranging from the classics like Euclid's The Elements to old college math textbooks from my pure math days to tidbits of the history, anthropology, philosophy and religious connections of math and science. I feel that math and science are subjects so poorly taught in schools that kids come out the other end hating them. The only reason I don't is because my dad had taught me a good deal of math and physics when I was really young so that I became mature in the subject matters ar hand. I plan on doing the same with my kids when I have them, this is the first logical step with that. I unironically want to see how to turn my house into a library after I die . I think this knowledge should be preserved for future generations at all costs.

On the other hand, I have some more personal mangas that I either read when when I was younger or would have read like Yotsubato, Sakura Taisen and Azumanga Daioh. This is just me being a bit nostalgic and reading comfy manga in my downtime. On the other other hand, I have 6 books (and counting) of gravure photoshoots involving classic Japanese swimsuit models, a famous Japanese-Dutch actress and a famous Japanese-Mexican female wrestler. That shit is either going to remain a lifelong secret or going to be passed down to my son(s) in secret. There is no way I'm telling anyone about that.
 
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First Editions of every original Tom Clancy novel.
Wilbur Smith's work up to Warlock.
Every Flashman novel.

My favourite book ever is Cocktail, by Heywood Gould. Absolutely fascinating. The film version was a piece of shit and only (barely) covered about a third of the the novel. I wrote to the author about it and he replied that he'd spent a week in bed, traumatised, when he saw what Hollywood had done to his story...BUT it also allowed him to become a full time writer.
 
I read all these during COVID and got a lot of enjoyment and/or enlightenment out of them:

"Death of the West" by Pat Buchanan, autographed
"Working Wood: the Artisan Course" by Paul Sellers
"How to Make Friends With Strangers and Stay Friends Until You Die: A Really Inspirational Guide to Friendship" by Chris (Simpsons artist)
"Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America" by Jared Taylor
"The Story of Life" by Chris (Simpsons artist)
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
"More Guns, Less Crime" by John Lott
"Good Eats" by Alton Brown
Atlas of Clinical Gross Anatomy
We3
"Ilium" and "Olympos" by Dan Simmons
Hero of the Empire
"Free-Range Kids" by Lenore Skenazy
"Saturn V Flight Manual" by NASA
"Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell
Persepolis
"Industrial Society and Its Future" by Ted Kaczynski
The Myth of the Noble Savage
Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia
"Free to Choose: A Personal Statement" by Milton Friedman
"Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman
The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future
Weapons of Mass Instruction
How the Scots Invented the Modern World
"Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer" by Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer
"The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
 
Robinson Crusoe: The first novel written in English. It's also a very well written and captivating story. Dafoe does seem like he kinda' didn't know where to end it though, as near the end he just sort of goes on and on past the point where the story should be over, but I give him a pass because he was trailblazing.

Little House on the Prarie: This is also an excellent story that isn't really like the sanitized TV adaptation. It's a true story that I won't ruin but what really happened and why is so interesting if you take the time to research it a little:

basically the Ingalls family inadvertently settled in the wrong place and nearly got murdered by native Americans for trespassing on their territory. Hijinks ensued.

Gone to Texas: The novel that the movie The Outlaw Josie Wales is based on. It's really good.
 
Nietzsche. Biographies and autobiographies and Generals Grant and Sherman. A complete collection of the BDSM Erotica of Anne Rice. The collected works of the Bronte sisters. A shitton of books about rock bands most of you kids have never even heard of. Various translations of Beowulf, the Prose Edda and The Sagas. A shitton of books about mythology and the supernatural - ironic because I don't believe in anything (see Nietzsche, above).

The two most important books I own are The Emperor's Handbook by Marcus Aurelius and Villette by Charlotte Bronte. Do you need to learn to live self-sufficiently and how to shoulder the burden of loss? These are the only books you need.
 
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I have about every flavor of early childhood education book as well as books on raising healthy children. Montessori, Waldorf (lol), Gardner, Charlotte Mason, Teaching Mathematics, Last Child in the Woods, How to Raise A Boy, Grit, Teaching Reading, Creating Inspiring Spaces for Children, Raising Gifted Toddlers.

I also love history. So I have a lot of large art history books with pictures for my kids to look at & get inspiration from for projects at home. I have books on Mesoamerica (my favorite), paleontology/dinosaurs, and others that cover pretty much every region.

Religious books of all major religions. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. Some are actual religious texts some are analyses of texts.

I have a whole section dedicated to sociology and politics. And books on ethics and philosophy.

I have some psychology books about PTSD, Bipolar, Schizophrenia, etc

I am really, really lacking in fiction. But I plan on buying all the classic literature for my kids once they, you know, can actually read a picture book.

The one book I recommend everyone read is “The Gift of Fear.” I know it’s hyped up, but it’s fascinating and applicable to life.

On a side note, my family doesn’t have a Netflix/Hulu subscription but we do pay for Wondrium and the Great Courses. It’s really hard to find room to read when you have a toddler ripping paper out of your hands and audiobooks suck imo. So this is the best alternative.

Typically when I’m at home a Great Courses is running in the background. Their communism in power courses are great, mesoamerica is awesome. We’re currently working our way through military blunders through history which is also really good. And of course the Black Plague course is a classic. Wondrium was probably the best purchase I ever made lol
 
In Arabic I recently finished Al-Shawkani's Critique of Blind Following and quite liked it, which is what prompted me to also get Al-Shawkani's Guiding Stallions. I also recently got Ibn Hazm's Rulings on the Epistemology of Rulings, I'm gonna need to improve my Arabic though before I can make my way through them. These are basically all related to textualist Islamic jurisprudential epistemology because it seems to me like a pretty good way of deriving understanding from the Islamic sources of law and it's kind of been neglected over the centuries, there's a small community around the interwebz of nerds who've started to rediscover these works and I'm finding it quite interesting. Plus they're not Ibn Taymiyyah's works so it's also not borderline impossible to get (I still wanna get Refutation of Al-Bakri but it's literally always sold out), I somehow managed to track down Ibn Taymiyyah's Refutation of Logicians though which I've heard is a great work on metaphysics.

In English I'm currently reading a compilation of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, from what I've read so far I've enjoyed The Black Cat the most. I'm also about half way through Edwin Abbot's Flatland which is very interesting as a work of fiction because it's basically aiming to teach a kind of mathematical thinking. In the vein of mathematics, Lockhart's Lament was phenomenal and really changed the way I think about math and even reading it as an autopedagogical guide is helpful, even though it doesn't seem like that was the intended use case. Aside from that, I've got Kant's Critique of Pure Reason that I'm eager to get into and a compilation of some of Focault's work. Some guys in an analytical theology group told me about Modal Logic as Metaphysics so I've got that on the shelf, I've flicked through it and it seems at the very least like a good way to get into modal logic. I'm waiting on a copy of Thomas Judson's Abstract Algebra, which I've been wanting to get ever since I got into the nitty gritty of encryption algorithms a while back. As far as fiction I'd like to read I've got the Neuromancer series and Wuthering Heights I'd also like to get round to at some point, but I think I should finish whats on my plate first.

I could honestly type all day about this stuff but I'd rather not block out the whole thread lol, so I'll cut the blogpost here.
 
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Just put what you love. I have a Bible, some philosophy and theology books, including some other religious texts like the Tao Te Ching, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I have some art books, books on coding and general computer maintenance types of shit. I have a lot of music books, mostly sheet music collections but a couple on theory and examining standards. Some books on painting, sketching, etc. A few old comics that I loved and have kept throughout the years. Some random fiction and nonfiction I've collected here and there, could be anything from Shakespeare to Lord of the Rings. I also have a couple books not in English, and books for the languages I've studied.

Unless you're just trying to do something aesthetic, just put what you love on your shelves, and you'll figure something out. If you did just want something aesthetic, I've seen some used bookstores where you can buy old books that aren't rare for dirt cheap but look absolutely gorgeous.

One thing I'd say though is maybe put your cook books in your kitchen. That way you can just reach out and grab them while you're cooking, versus having to go to your library.
 
Good deal of mostly forgettable sci fi and horror paperbacks, but the more notable...
-More People, Places, and Things (sentimental value, this is the book that taught me to read. Filled with a great variety of stuff from Dick and Jane to Greek Myths to Robin Hood)
-The Essential George Orwell Collection (1984, Animal Farm, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air, Burmese Days)
-The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
-Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy + Restaurant at the End of the Universe
-Chronicles of Prydain boxed set
-A Clockwork Orange
-The Collected Cthulhu Mythos of Robert E Howard
-England's Dreaming
-Catch 22
-Neuromancer
-King James + Catholic Bible
 
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Books about Spanish Colonialism, The Hobbit, and the American civil war.
 
Sure, this is the sort of thing I'm interested in. The only book I've read like this was Lothrop Stoddard's Into The Darkness which was decent but didn't go into much depth as he was an outsider. I do intend to order the full Lothrop Stoddard catalog along with Madison Grant's works and other eugenicists and racialists of their day. It's amazing the kind of stuff that's simply not available online. These books really need to be preserved for future generations.

Awright, here's what I've got in that vein, starting with the behind the scenes stuff in the Third Reich:

Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under The Nazis, by Nicholas Stargardt -- Title speaks for itself. Only study of kids under Axis rule I know of. Grim.
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, by Johnson & Reuband -- A solid overview of life that also tries to figure out just how in the know your average Joe was.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen -- Specifically tracing the origin and development of genocidal views among different strata of German society. Not without criticism (he reaches a little in some places, and doesn't address how similar genocidal attitudes developed that had nothing to do with Jews), but I don't think anything's come out since that's attempted to go as in depth on the subject, and the bibliography and footnotes are a goldmine.
The Nuremberg Interviews, by Leon Goldensohn -- Interviews with many of the Nazis tried at Nuremberg while they were in prison. Covers almost all the big names. Includes funny gossip about them, too (everyone thought Goering was a fat bitch and he and Himmler were lolcows).
Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, by Albert Speer -- Speer's own confessional/diary of the start of his career, up through the end of the war, documenting how he ended up a major player in the Nazi party despite his day job having been an architect. Lots of dirt on day to day interactions with the big names, and how very cow-y they were. (Hitler was an actual sperg who annoyed the shit out of several of the major architects and artists of the era.)
Spandau: The Secret Diaries, by Albert Speer -- The second half of Speer's diaries, written while serving his sentence in Spandau prison.
Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest -- Survey of 20th century totalitarianism. Old, but kind of foundational.
Diaries of Joseph Goebbels -- I don't actually have a copy of this because I've only ever seen a single set and it wasn't for sale (university library had it). English edition is unobtanium (20 years and counting chasing it), but if you can read German, that edition is much easier to find. Frustrating, because it's invaluable as both a primary source on life in Nazi Germany, and as a discussion of propaganda techniques by one of the major developers.

And on the development of modern propaganda:

Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique, by Leonard W. Doob -- You'll need to go vintage for this one, don't think it's had an edition since before WW2, but it's not expensive, only mildly uncommon. Should be able to turn it up on ABEBooks, eBay, or even Amazon.
Propaganda Technique in World War I, by Harold D. Laswell -- One of the few analyses of pre-WW2 modern propaganda use and technique.
Propaganda, by Jacques Ellul -- If you can get only one book studying propaganda, this is the one to get IMO. Focused on WW2 and the early Cold War eras. Concise and still relevant, despite its age. Scans can be found on Archive.org.
most major works by Edward Bernays -- The great grandfather of propaganda and advertising.
most major works by Marshall McLuhan -- If Bernays is the great grandpa, McLuhan is the grandfather.
Triumph of The Will, by Leni Riefenstahl -- A film, not a book, but often considered the first piece of sophisticated motion picture propaganda. The original DVD print by Synapse is excellent -- superb restoration job, and it includes an enjoyable historical commentary track that sometimes gets amusingly sassy. If you get a digital copy, double check that -- some versions have the subtitles and commentary forced on and can't be disabled. Editions prior to Synapse's are crap (all were from damaged film reels). Can't remember if Criterion ever did an edition, but if they did, I'm sure it's very high quality.
 
Do audiobooks count? Hard to read while driving a semi.

- Atlas Shrugged
- 1984
- Animal Farm
- Brave New World
- The Old Man and the Sea
- Technology of the Gods by David Hatcher Childress
- Everything Von Daniken ever wrote
- Red Phoenix series by Larry Bond
- Command and Control, and The Dead Hand, 2 very informative books about the cold War.
- a bunch of technothrillers
 
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