CapitalistImperialistPig

I suppose that I've always been a bit of a sucker for the big book. War and Peace , Moby Dick , and The Brothers Karamazov made big impressions in my youth. I let myself be talked into buying The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring before heading to a remote Army post in Arizona - but I wasn't about to lay about big bucks to buy the whole series. I quickly devoured those while in the temporary barracks there when another soldier arrived fresh from Vietnam, where he had only had The Two Towers , so a trade was quickly arranged. I still like the big books, but my tastes have changed a bit. Gravity's Rainbow , Infinite Jest , Ulysses , and Atlas Shrugged dimmed my enthusiasm for modern fiction. I have, however, acquired way too many thick physics and astrophysics books. Gravitation , AKA "The Black Hole", by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler is a familiar heavyweight at 1336 large format pages. Not one to rest on his laurels, Thorne teamed up with Blandford ...

That book you spent some time searching for in the dusty boxes in the garage (on the hottest day of the year) isn't there either. Corollary 1: That book you were thinking of buying - don't - you already own it. Corollary 2: See above. Upside: You know all those ridiculous Greiner-Mueller books you bought but never read? The one on thermo actually has a good explanation of the very point you were mystified about. My apologies Prof's G and M.

I seem to have reached that point in my life when I can afford to buy more books than I have time to read. Strictly speaking, I have always bought more books than I had time to read. Until recently, though, I couldn't actually afford them. Mostly my problem is that I buy hard* books. * hard for me, that is.

I hate to give up on a story before I know the end of it. This causes me some grief, like that I get every time I go to see a new Harry Potter movie - or buy the latest DVD. When Tolkien more or less created the modern epic fantasy, the success of The Lord of the Rings launched a thousand imitators, not all of which are utterly bad - though of course many are. I have indulged in a few of them, and once in, I'm usually caught. Robert Jordan had to write about four lousy books in a row (in the Wheel of Time Series ) before I gave up on him. My latest indulgence is George R R Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series. The first book was pretty good - the guy can write and he created some interesting situations and characters. Book four, A Feast for Crows got quite a lot of hype (from Time , among others), but I'm pretty disappointed. Magic has more or less disappeared from the series, and the cardboard characters are getting a bit old, but the worst feature of the book is the sh...

The number one most popular New York Times article at the moment is It’s Not You, It’s Your Books by Rachel Donadio. Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!” We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into dea...

Lee talked me into cataloging some of my books on Library Thing , and I put their widget on the blog. I'm thinking now that latter step was a mistake. The problem is that whenever I look at one of the little icons I get reminded of how much smarter the books are than I am. It's depressing.

At Lee's suggestion, I added a librarything link to some of my books. Most of the books listed are on physics. You might notice that I have a lot of old junk. This is not coincidence - I pretty much am old junk.

A quick check of my bookshelves suggests that I have something like thirty-leven books on Quantum Field Theory, some, so be sure, of only historical interest. Surely that should be enough for any but the dullest student to learn the subject. So why the heck did I just buy another one ? Well, hope springs eternal, and now that there are approximately as many QFT texts as there are students, somebody has to support the industry.