Reflections with sand in the keyboard:
Pick 100 books you can’t live without. Tough call. Probably impossible for me.
But imagine that you saw the perfect trailer, an ideal new home, and the only problem was it was just a little shorter than where you currently live. The bathroom was big enough for a real shower, the bed was a decent sized full bed, and kitchenette was gas-powered, plus it folded out and slept two, so the whole thing could, in a friendly state, sleep six. Three couples, more or less.
The single problem is with space. There’s not enough. Or there is, but not quite. So I figure the little cupboard over the front “couch” could hold about 6 or maybe 8 feet of books. Pick carefully,. Reduce my library by 80% or even 90%. Which books would I take with me?
Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang (and Hayduke Lives)
Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker Trilogy
Rudolfo Anaya’s Albquerque’s series.
Ray Bradbury’s works, most of them, anyway.
The Kinky Friedman canon (mostly in hardback)
William Gibson’s canon (mostly in hardback)
RAH collection
Joe R. Lansdale’s collection
Cormac McCarthy’s canon, at least the Pretty Horse Trilogy and the fabulous Blood Meridian
Geoff Nicholson’s Bleeding London
Marge Piercy’s poetry and He, She and It
Robert Rankin collection, just about all of his books (about half are good British hardback)
Rutherford’s London
Shakespeare: complete works
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
Alan Steele’s “near space” series
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Cryptinomicon, Baroque Cycle I,II,III
Bruce Sterling’s works, at least the last half dozen novels he’s put out, as they can’t be left behind
Walter Jon William, two or three of his, including Hardwired and The Rift
Lit Crit is a tough one, Handbook to Literature, both versions V & VI, New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
Bloom’s Shakespeare
Various other lit crit books, as need be, too
Astrology books? There are very few that I’d bother with besides an Ephemeris and Hand’s Planets in Transit.
The more I look thought, the more I realized it’s damn near impossible to make so with fewer books in my library.
[I]Unrelated:[/I]
([url=http://townlaketrail.org/]I’ve got to work this into a PSA.[/url])