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Member: benpass4

Library996 books — see library

ReviewedNone so far

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

TagsCultural anthropology (248), Fiction (144), Ethnography (123), American (78), Europe (75), Belief (73), Gender (66), Modern history (65), Religion (57), Sociology (56) — see all tags

GroupsCzech books

Favorite authorsJaroslav Hasek, Sidney W. Mintz, John Dos Passos, Bruce Sterling (Shared favorites)

About my library This library is, for me, Odysseus’ ship. It has persisted during my voyage through life to this point, but has been reorganized, purged, added to and remade often enough that it can hardly be said to be the same library. It is a deeply ethnographic library today, a result of the PhD’s in anthropology which my wife and I both hold. Parenting has risen rapidly as a subject in the library as it did in our lives with the birth of our first daughter three years ago. It is less science fiction than at any time in my adult life, half the books being lost when we were last in the field. This makes the regularly cursed “friend” who was to have stored the lost books one of the principal creators of the library in its current form. Finally, there is my paternal grandmother, dead these thirty years, whose “Ancient Mariner” and Pennybacker’s “History of Texas” were carried by her to school in the first quarter of the last century. Her books, culled in the losses already mentioned, remain, as does she as a palpable presence in the notes scribbled in margins and letters tucked in the back of volumes. I feel the presence of lost friends, family members and eras of my own life when in the presence of this library. I look forward to the emergence of my daughters as builders of this library.

Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/benpass4 (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/benpass4 (library)

Member sinceFeb 28, 2007