1,000 Books

LibraryThing is an online database (for books) that launched in August 2005. I started using it a month later and in the ensuing 19 years have cataloged 1,000 books. I always have a book close at hand but I am not a fast reader. I love to read and do so for a couple of hours every day. Perhaps my favorite pastime. And I can’t think of anything that would tell you more about who I am and what I’m interested in than the books I have read.

Fiction gets most of my reading time (692 titles) but in recent years I have developed a taste for nonfiction (245 titles). Together, the work of 351 authors. Most popular:

Robert B. Parker (51), John Sandford (46), Michael Connelly (36), Lawrence Block (32), Elmore Leonard (28), Sue Grafton (23), John D. Macdonald (23), Ross Thomas (21), Robert Crais (19), Mick Herron (17), Bill Granger (15), John Grisham (15), William Gibson (14), Carl Hiaasen (14), Neal Stephenson (13), elson DeMille (12)

I give each entry in the database one or more tags and that probably provides the clearest picture of my interests. (Note: tagging is more art than science)

I purchase most of the books I read because I love highlighting passages which was one of the main reasons I started a blog in 2002. When I finish a book I transcribe the highlighted passages into a Google Drive document as well as creating a blog post. Think of these as really short Cliffs Notes. Lots of examples here.

I only keep a book if I think there is chance I’ll read it again (I’ve read each of the John Sanford Prey novels half a dozen times). All others are donated to the local library for their annual book sale.

I couldn’t guess how much I’ve spent on books in the last fifty years. I’m sure Amazon has that number for the last 30 years, but I don’t regret a penny. Fiction is my virtual reality and non-fiction the better part of my education. With a book close at hand I am never bored.

Lots of my acquaintances prefer audio books and I’ll confess to some bias on this topic. Having someone read a book to me is not the same as reading the book. Might be a better experience for some but it’s not the same as hearing my mental voice tell the story. I love the smell of a book…the feel of the turning pages…the physical experience of reading.

Small American Towns

“The country had changed since the last time he d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings: GO COUGARS! GO HAWKS! GO REBELS! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.”

— The Return by Michael Gruber

Books read in 2023

Following from a Washington Post story (behind paywall so won’t bother to link).

Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.

Reading five books put you in the top 33 percent, while reading 10 books put you in the top 21 percent. Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.

I read 36 books last year (some I’d read previously). Prompted a nice chat with ChatGPT.

Your decisions don’t matter

After 20 years of reading about free will, I have to agree with those who insist it doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion, but probably necessary. Robert Sapolsky has written a book titled “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” this excerpt describes an experience I’m having with increasing frequency.

“You may have had the uncanny experience of talking about an upcoming camping trip with a friend, only to find yourself served with ads for tents on social media later. Your phone didn’t record your conversation, even if that’s what it feels like. It’s just that the collective record of your likes, clicks, searches and shares paints such a detailed picture of your preferences and decision-making patterns that algorithms can predict — often with unsettling accuracy — what you are going to do.”

Sapolsky references a short story by Ted Chiang (What’s Expected of Us) in which the narrator describes a new technology that convinces users their choices are predetermined, a discovery that saps them of their will to live.

“It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter,” the narrator warns, “even though you know that they don’t.”

From a review in the Los Angeles Times. (Apple News) Below are some of my favorite bits.


“Most Americans have negative perceptions of atheists, and antiatheist prejudice is more prevalent than antipathy toward Muslims (which comes in second place), African Americans, LGBQT individuals, Jews, or Mormons.”

“We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to this moment.”

“While change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed by the world around us.”

“Much has been made of the hospitality, conservatism (as in strictly conserving cultural norms), and violence of the traditional culture of honor of the American South. The pattern of violence tells a ton: murders in the South, which typically has the highest rates in the country, are not about stickups gone wrong in a city; they’re about murdering someone who has seriously tarnished your honor (by conspicuously bad-mouthing you, failing to repay a debt, coming on to your significant other…), particularly if living in a rural area.”

“You can’t successfully believe something different from what you believe.”

“Why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before it.” They why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before that,” forever, isn’t absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. […] In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. […] All that came before, with its varying flavors of uncontrollable luck, is what came to constitute you. This is how you became you.”

“By age three, your average high-socioeconomic status kid has heard about thirty million more words at home than a poor kid.”

“‘Free will’ is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will. […] We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons.”

“We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control — our biology, our environment, their interactions. […]Try as we might, we can’t will ourselves to have more willpower.”

“We don’t change our minds. Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, are *changed* by circumstances around us.”

“What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.”

“Depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.”

Talking books with ChatGPT

I prompted ChatGPT to make a list of the ten best crime fiction writers of the last fifteen years. She (I opted for the female voice called ‘Sky’) left off a few of my favorites and we discussed them. At the 5:38 mark of this 6 minute chat, she makes reference to my interest in classic vehicles, communications and blogging. Topics which came up in earlier conversations. I still have goose bumps.

Hey, Siri. Sound…anxious

The following excerpt is from William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). More than 20 years before Apple came up with Siri.

“Angela,” the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, “I have a call from Hilton Swift…

“Executive override?” She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter.

“No,” it said, confidingly.

“Change your tone,” she said, around a mouthful of

beans. “Something with an edge of anxiety.”

“Mr. Swift is waiting,”  the house said nervously.

“Better,” she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, “but I want something closer to genuine hysteria…”

Will you take the call?” The voice was choked with tension.

“No,” she said, “but keep your voice that way, I like it.”

I’m not a big fan of “voice assistants,” but I might be if they ever work like Gibson’s.

“Change your tone, something like the priest in the marriage scene in Princess Bride.”

Somehow it all went wrong

“But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged. The Berlin Wall and Vietnam; the Rwandan Genocide, the Twin Towers, Camp Delta; suicide bombings and global warming. […]There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.”

— Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Party time in the Führer bunker

“When Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) was finally released from her typing at around 4 a.m. on Sunday 20 April, and the Führer and Frau Hitler retired, she went upstairs to find some food for the Goebbels children. The scenes which she encountered, not far from where the wounded lay in the Reich Chancellery’s underground field hospital, shocked her deeply. ‘An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody.”

“Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.’ SS officers
who had been out searching cellars and streets for deserters to hang had also been tempting hungry and impressionable young women back to the Reich Chancellery with promises of parties and inexhaustible supplies of food and champagne. It was the apocalypse of totalitarian corruption, with the concrete submarine of the Reich Chancellery underworld providing an Existentialist theatre set for hell.”

The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Antony Beevor)

Hitler’s final memo

One more from Antony Beevor’s great history, The Fall of Berlin 1945:

“Hitler took Traudl Junge (one of his secretaries) away to another room (in the bunker), where he dictated his political and personal testaments. She sat there in nervous excitement, expecting to hear at last a profound explanation of the great sacrifice’s true purpose. But instead a stream of political clichés, delusions and recriminations poured forth. He had never wanted war. It had been forced on him by international Jewish interests. The war, ‘in spite of all setbacks,’ he claimed, will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of a people’s will to live’” (emphasis mine)

The Fall of Berlin 1945

I so thoroughly enjoyed Antony Beevor’s history of the siege of Stalingrad I ordered The Fall of Berlin 1945. I’m about halfway through the 430 page book and, like Stalingrad, it’s a page-turner. No work of fiction –movie, novel, TV documentary series– could ever capture the scope and horror of these events.

As with all (most?) non-fiction books, I’m reading with a marker in hand, highlighting the passages I want to save. Some of them are below, some in a Google Document. But not all because there are just too many. And I haven’t saved them in order because –like the events themselves– too chaotic.

Like so much of the history I’ve read, I’m finding eerie parallels to current events. Nazism and Trumpism; Hitler and Trump the most obvious example. Continue reading