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Member: Garp83

Library937 books — see library

Reviews1 review — see reviews

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

TagsAncient History (1) — see all tags

GroupsAncient History, Homer, the Trojan war, and pre-classical Greece, What Are You Reading Now?

Favorite authorsAndre Brink, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Irving, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Styron (Shared favorites)

About me I have always loved to read, but only in the past several years have I returned to reading on an almost daily basis. I often read five books at a time, bouncing from one to the other as my interest rises and falls in the work at hand.

I read a lot of nonfiction, especially history and biography. Traditionally, my interest has been primarily in American history, colonial period through the Civil War, plus Presidential biographies from all the various eras. Over the past few years, however, I became seduced by ancient Greece and the classical education I never had, so I read The Iliad & the Odyssey, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, and some great treatments of the various periods by current historians.

I used to read a lot of fiction. My favorite authors are William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Andre Brink, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Irving. Of late, I began reading contemporary literary fiction fairly regularly, including great recent stuff by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Powers, Junot Diaz, Khaled Hosseini, Dennis Lehane, and Andrea Barrett. I joined a first edition book club at a local independent bookseller that has been feeding me a steady diet in this vein. At the same time, I have attempted to re-visit classic fiction such as Dickens, Crane, Stowe and Melville.

I also belong to a local books-and-beer reading club, and we pick out an unusual book each month that strays beyond usual interests.

It is not unusual for me to have four or five books in progress at the same time, often a mix of fiction, non-fiction and classical. That way I never get bored!

I am very meticulous about handling and caring for my books. I loan anything to friends except books, because that is the one item few value on the same level as I do.

About my library I have about 1500 books in my collection, primarily hardcover, which I catalogued using the awesome Book Collector software from collectorz.com. I batch uploaded my collection from Book Collector to LibraryThing when I joined recently, but only 937 actually uploaded, so eventually I will have to sort thru and figure out what didn't stick.

Here's what I've read over the last several years:
1. The Eternal Frontier – Flannery
2. Facing East From Indian Country – Richter
3. Benjamin Franklin – Isaacson
4. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Stowe
5. The Dahlgren Affair – Schultz
6. Lincoln’s Last Night – Axelrod (5/16/05)
7. His Excellency: George Washington – Fleming
8. American Colonies – Taylor
9. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies – Las Casas
10. Moby Dick – Melville
11. Memories of my Melancholy Whores – Garcia Marquez

READ 2006
12. The Iliad – Homer (2-2-06)
13. 1491 – Mann (2-3-06)
14. Troy – McCarty (2-9-06)
15. President Nixon – Reeves (2-21-06)
16. The Last Voyage of Columbus – Dugard (4-2-06)
17. The Red Badge of Courage – Crane (4-10-06)
18. The Odyssey – Homer (4-20-06)
19. Empires at War – Fowler (5-31-06 ?)
20. Troy and Homer – Joachim Latacz (6-12-06)
21. Agamemnon – Aeschylus (7-7-06)
22. 1776 – McCullough (7-9-06)
23. The War at Troy – Quintus of Smyrna (7-16-06)
24. Guns, Germs, and Steel – Diamond (8-20-06)
25. Gulliver’s Travels – Swift (8-29-06)
26. The King Must Die – Renault (10-13-06)
27. State of Denial – Woodward (10-29-06)
28. Before the Dawn – Wade (11-23-06)
29. Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman – Shostak (12-9-06)
30. The Trojan War: A New History – Strauss (12-17-06)

READ 2007

31. The Kill Bill Diary – David Carradine (1-11-07)
32. Freethinkers – Susan Jacoby (2-19-07)
33. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (3-23-07)
34. Persian Fire – Tom Holland (3-25-07)
35. Histories – Herodotus (6-2-07)
36. The Classical World: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian – Robin Lane Fox (6-5-07)
37. Thomas Paine – Craig Nelson (6-14-07)
38. The Other Side of Silence – Andre Brink (8-6-07)
39. Cities of the Plain – Cormac McCarthy (8-9-07)
40. A Dangerous Friend – Ward Just (8-12-07)
41. Mayflower – Nathaniel Philbrick (8-12-07)
42. The Peloponnesian War –Donald Kagan (8-23-07)
43. The Kite Runner -- Khaled Hosseini (9-8-07)
44. The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai (9-22-07)
45. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz (9-25-07)
46. The Echo Maker – Richard Powers (10-14-07)
47. The History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides (10-25-07)
48. Bridge of Sighs – Richard Russo (11-17-07)
49. Theogony – Hesiod (11-29-07)
50. Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America – David Stick (12-1-07)
51. Coronado – Dennis Lehane (12-6-07)
52. The Air We Breathe – Andrea Barrett (12-13-07)
53. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (12-23-07)

READ 2008

54. The Case of Abraham Lincoln – Julie M. Fenster (1-2-08)
55. The Pirate’s Daughter – Margaret Cezair-Thompson (1-31-08)
56. American Shaolin – Matthew Polly (2-8-08)
57. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (2-11-08)
58. Frogs – Aristophanes (2-12-08)
59. Hellenica: Books 1-4 -- Xenophon (2-16-08)
60. Charlatan – Pope Brock (3-3-08)
61. A Golden Age – Tahmima Anam (3-16-08)
62. Arslan – Engh (3-25-08)
63. The Commoner -- John Burnham Schwartz (4-2-08)
64. Anabasis – Xenophon (4-6-08)
65. Scapegoats of the Empire – George Witton (4-13-08)
66. Killing Custer – James Welch, Paul Stekler (4-20-08)
67. The Persians – Aeschylus (4-24-08)
68. The Choephori(The Libation Bearers)- Aeschylus(4-27-08)
69. The Eumenides - Aeschylus (4-30-08)
70. Ajax – Sophocles (4-30-08)
71. Philoctetes – Sophocles (4-30-08)
72. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles (5-3-08)

Real nameStan

LocationWestern Massachusetts

Emailgarp83verizon.net

Account typepublic, paid

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/Garp83 (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Garp83 (library)

Member sinceDec 2, 2007