Your BOOKS posts circle around a few durable preoccupations: consciousness and self, technology’s impact on humans, books as memory/meaning, and the shift from owning to accessing (including your own library).

1. Big clusters of interest

• Consciousness, self, and awareness. –   You return again and again to books about how mind and reality work: Eagleman’s *Incognito* and *Sum*, Metzinger, Hood, Baggini, Kahneman, Graziano, Carroll, etc., plus long excerpt posts.  These posts stress constructed reality, limits of introspection, and the idea that “awareness” is primary.
• Buddhism / Tao / non‑dual themes. – You’ve built full reading lists around Zen, Tao, and Buddhist writers (Watts, Hagen, Batchelor, Uchiyama, Nisargadatta, Ramana, etc.), and you excerpt heavily from *Buddhism Plain and Simple* and related titles.  The recurring thread is direct seeing over belief, “no separate self,” and letting go of control.
• Tech, networks, and “the Mesh.” –  Posts on Kevin Kelly (*The Inevitable*, “moving from ownership to access”), Steven Levy’s *In the Plex*, Sean Carroll’s *The Big Picture*, and Seth Godin’s “future library” all treat the net as a newly-awakened global system.  You seem drawn to the moment when everything becomes connected and searchable, and to the loss of older certainties that comes with it.
• Speculative / SF as philosophy lab. – Ira Levin’s *This Perfect Day*, Neal Stephenson (*Snow Crash*, *Cryptonomicon*, *The Baroque Cycle*, *Polostan*), William Gibson (*The Peripheral*), Powers’ *Galatea 2.2*, Tevis’s *Mockingbird*, *Fahrenheit 451*, *Book of Eli*, *Canticle for Leibowitz*—you use them to think about control, surveillance, post-literate worlds, and what happens when books disappear or become sacred relics.

2. Books as externalized memory and identity

• You explicitly frame books as “humanity’s externalized memory,” and note how SF repeatedly plays with hoarding, burning, or forgetting books as a shorthand for tampering with what it means to be human.
• You highlight examples where books are:  preservers of memory (*Book of Eli*, *Fahrenheit 451*, *Mockingbird*, *Canticle for Leibowitz*),  
•   stand‑ins for training data and consciousness (*Galatea 2.2*, Borgesian libraries),  
•   forbidden or elite objects (*Handmaid’s Tale*, relic books in Dune‑like worlds).[1]
• You also confess a “mild superiority” over people who don’t read and note how depressing it is that many adults never touch a book after school.  That mix—books as sacred memory plus awareness that most people aren’t reading—gives your BOOKS category a faintly elegiac tone.

3. Ownership → access (and your own library)

• You track your collection with LibraryThing since 2005 and then with BookBuddy Pro, calling reading “the best use” of your time and using cataloging tools to extend the pleasure.
• At the same time you quote Kevin Kelly on the shift from owning to accessing (“consumers may eventually not own anything at all”) and connect this to Netflix, streaming, and personal data.
• A recent paperback post, with Gemini’s commentary, frames the collapse of mass‑market paperbacks as part of a broader split: physical books become premium objects for collectors while cheap/ubiquitous reading moves to screens.  You recognize that your own paper library sits right in that “premium hobby” zone.

4. Reading as a filter on the world

• Politically/culturally, you often reach for book/author touchstones rather than punditry: Albert Brooks’ *2030* for debt and generational resentment, Buckley’s *Boomsday* for policy satire, Orwell on voluntary censorship, the New Yorker piece on Trump’s ghostwriter.
• Posts like “People who don’t read books” and “The chief danger to freedom of thought” link literacy to intellectual courage and resistance to herd opinion.
• You often quote a book, then pivot to a short personal reaction—“this seemed entirely plausible,” “I found this depressing but inspiring,” “this matches my philosophy”—so the BOOKS category reads as an externalized thinking journal more than “reviews.”

5. Recurring connections and self‑portrait

Pulling it together, a few through-lines that show up when you zoom out:

• Books as tools for deconditioning. –   You favor titles that question default settings: self as illusion, media as noise, ownership as optional, institutions as contingent.
• Bridging science, tech, and spirituality. – Your shelves link neuroscience and cosmology (Eagleman, Carroll, quantum-consciousness books) directly with Zen/Tao writers and non-dual teachers, and you sometimes use SF metaphors (Gibson’s peripherals) to express Eastern ideas about awareness using avatars.
• A gentle apocalypse-of-reading vibe. –   From mass‑market’s death to future libraries as co‑working hubs to characters who can’t or don’t read, there’s a consistent “something is ending, but something new is coalescing” mood.
• Books plus systems. – You’re drawn not just to stories but to infrastructures around them: libraries, distribution, cataloging apps, Kindle/Amazon tracking what you read, and the idea of a planetary “Library” that blends LOC, CIA, and the web.