20 June 2024

Professor Batty's bookcase

"This is my personal shelf, my wife has her own. The top row are all Icelandic books, with many of the sagas and all of the translated work of Halldór Laxness. This is an active reference for my Laxness in Translation site. There is a fair amount of modern Icelandic fiction on the second row as well; the Arnaldur Indriason mysteries, Sjón's strange novels, along with the late Minnesota author Bill Holm's evocative essay collections. The rest of the case holds music-related books (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Björk), mythology (Robert Graves, Joesph Campbell), folktales, some modern fiction (Douglas Coupland, Jeffery Eugenides, Charles Portis), a variety of art books and some miscellany. Some of the more interesting titles:
Songs of a Sourdough, by Robert W. Service (1907)
The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire, by Charles Morris
The Art Journal Volume XVIII, (1879)
After 1903—What?, by Robert Benchley (1938)
California and the West, by Edward Weston (1940)
Growing Pains, by Wanda Gág (1939) 
Most of these books I look at or read fairly often, I don't keep books I won't read again."

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