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Member: EnriqueFBird

CollectionsYour library (3,550)

Reviews4 reviews

Tagsmystery (373), chess (225), short story (113), Perry Mason (88), game collection (79), Nero Wolfe (51), history (29), Gregor Demarkian (25), biography (18), tournament (17) — see all tags

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Favorite authorsIsaac Asimov, David Bronstein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Agatha Christie, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Dvoretsky, Erle Stanley Gardner, C. S. Lewis (Shared favorites)

About meBorn in Chicago in 1950 of Puerto Rican parents; have lived and resided in San Juan or Carolina, Puerto Rico all my life from 3 weeks old; majored in college in Humanities and English lit.; work as a senior system programmer(!); married with 3 adult sons; love the baseball St. Louis Cardinals, the local baseball Criollos de Caguas, the local volleyball "Changos de Naranjito" - my son Chiqui plays for them, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca (the movie), "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" and Johann Strauss,"Silencio" and Rafael Hernández, "Caminito" (the tango), "My Native Land" (poem by Sir Walter Scott),Pablo Neruda and Rubén Darío, and "How Great Thou Art"; first and top major reading interest: mysteries, with a preference for classical, Golden Age type ; second is chess ; went to 5 World Chess Olympics, first as player, next 3 as captain of Puerto Rico team, and last as captain of Puerto Rico women's team [no, I did not have a change-of-sex operation!]; elected and inducted to the Puerto Rican Chess Hall of Fame in December 2007; also like books on: Christianity - particularly theology primarily calvinist, sports primarily baseball then boxing; history primarily classical WW2 Napoleon local US Civil War and U.S. politics,current affairs especially Arab-Israeli conflict, the classics of my youth (Dumas, Verne, Salgari, Edgar R. Burroughs, Sabatini), light mathematics, light economics, business, light philosophy, logic, computers, very light scienc fiction and sword and sorcery, espionage, and many other s. Favorite writers in no particular order and certainly missing many: Agatha Christie (the Top One, no competition here!) , Verne, Dumas, Ellery Queen, Edward D. Hoch , G.K, Chesterton and his Father Brown, Jack Ritchie, Rex Stout, Dietrich Boebhoeffer (as a subject) , C.S. Lewis, R.C. Sproul, Jeffery Deaver (beginning with his first Lincoln Rhyme), Mary Higgins Clark, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Helen McCloy, Phoebe Atwood Taylor (not Alice Tilton!), Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason , Thomas Cook , Jennifer Rowe, Sax Rohmer, Henry Cecil, and others. For whatever it is worth, my favorite sets of currently published book editions include the Crippen and Landru short story collections and the Rue Morgue editions.

About my libraryMy first, still living book was given and inscribed to me by UPR chancellor Jaime Benítez in 1959 or 1961; another personally priced item is one which my father gave me in the mid 1960s as a 3 Kings Day (Epiphany - January 6th) present. I have thousands of paperback mysteries from the 1960s and 1970s, a few from the 1940s (Pocket Books, Dells), and countless others from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s). Began acquiring more hardcovers regularly in the mid to late 1970s, and 1980s, and in larger amounts in the 1990s amd 2000s as Bookstacks Unlimited and Amazon were discovered. Amazon has made simple data entry of many recent acquisitions but it is now harder and harder to enter my disorganized library. I thought in the early 1990s that I must have aroud 15000 - 20000 books; now, I cannot guess. WHen I last moved to our current home (1993), most of my library went into boxes and knots and filled up a room - my personal life project is organizing them in the next few years. By the way, I love books!

Real nameEnrique F. Bird Picó

LocationSan Juan, Puerto Rico

Emailenfbirdponelinkpr.net

Account typepublic, lifetime

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URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/EnriqueFBird (profile)
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Common KnowledgeSeries (414), Awards (200), Characters (5111), Places (746)

Member sinceJan 31, 2007