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Member: jglassow

CollectionsYour library (554), Currently reading (1), Favorites (18), Not read (12), All collections (554)

Reviews6 reviews

TagsFiction (155), Christian (74), George MacDonald (59), Inklings (28), Chinese (26), Current Events (21), Science Fiction (20), Linguistics (17), Native American (16), Plays (16) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

GroupsLanguage, Pynchon Pandæmonium, What Are You Reading Now?

Favorite authorsPaul Bowles, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Jacques Ellul, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Jack Kerouac, George MacDonald, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Ezra Pound, Thomas Pynchon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Paul Virilio, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Williams (Shared favorites)

Favorite bookstoresAkateeminen kirjakauppa - Helsinki, Atticus Book Store, Baldwin's Book Barn, Barnes & Noble Booksellers - Downtown Rochester, Barnes & Noble Booksellers - Pasadena, Blackwell Charing Cross Road, Blackwell Oxford, Bodhi Tree Bookstore, Boekhandel Sint-Hubertus, Book Passage, BookPeople, Books & Books - Coral Gables, Books of Wonder, BookStation, Borderlands Books, Borders - Century City, Borders - Glasgow, Borders - Manhattan - Columbus Circle, Borders - Sunnyvale, Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore, Brattle Book Shop, Bulhosa books & living - Entrecampos, Caves Books [敦煌書店 ], Christopher's House, City Books, City Lights Bookstore, Dark Carnival, Daunt Books, Dom Knigi (House of Books/ Дом Книги at 62 Nevsky), Duvall Books, El Ateneo - Grand Splendid, El Péndulo, Elliott Bay Bookstore, Eslite [誠品], Explore Booksellers and Bistro, Follett's Intellectual Property, Forbidden Planet - London, Foyles, Foyles at Southbank Centre, Galignani, Harvard Book Store, Hatchards, Hay-on-Wye Booksellers, Idlewild Books, Iliad Bookshop, J. Paul Getty Museum Bookstore, Kensington Row Bookshop, Left Bank Books, Livraria Lello, London Review Bookshop, Maple Street Book Shop, Massolit Books, Moby Dickens Bookshop, Moravian Book Shop, Nucleus Gallery, Page One, Paragraphe Bookstore, Politics and Prose, Powell's City of Books, Prairie Lights Books, Psychic Eye Book Shop - Nellis, Raven Used Books, Red Bus Bookstore, Red Emma's BookStore Coffeehouse, Robinson Crusoe, Scarthin Books, Secret Headquarters ®, Selexyz Dominicanen, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Serendipity Books, Shakespeare & Company, Skylight Books, Strand Bookstore, Tattered Cover Book Store - Colfax Avenue, Tattered Cover Book Store - Historic LoDo, That Bookstore In Blytheville, The American Book Center, The Archives Bookshop, The Book Barn, The Book Barn Downtown, The Book Shop, The Haunted Bookshop, The Haunted Bookshop (Sarah Key Books), The Reading Room - Mandalay Bay, Time Tested Books, Trident Booksellers & Cafe, Tronsmo, Vroman's Bookstore, Wild Rumpus Books for Young Readers

Favorite librariesAlhambra Civic Center Library, Back Valley Public Library, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana - Vatican Library, Biblioteca Municipal de El Escorial, Biblioteca Sala Borsa, Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Bibliothèque Nationale de France - Site François-Mitterrand, Bibliotheek Vlissingen, Boston Public Library (Central Library, Copley Square), Bristol Central Library - Reference Library, British Library, Columbia Public Library (Daniel Boone Regional Library System), David Sassoon Library & Reading Room, Deadwood Public Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, Harrison Memorial Library, Inyo County Free Library - Furnace Creek Library, Jefferson Library, Library of Congress, Los Angeles Public Library - Central Library, National Taiwan University Library, New York Public Library - Humanities and Social Sciences Library, New York Public Library - Jefferson Market Branch, Peckham Library, Philologische Bibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin, Provisions Library, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, Salinas Public Library - John Steinbeck Library, South Pasadena Public Library, Taipei Public Library Beitou Branch, The Beijing Bookworm [北京书虫] -- Lending Library, The Boston Athenaeum, The Huntington Library, The Royal Library (The Black Diamond) Det Kongelige Bibliotek, The Seattle Public Library, Central Library, University of Washington - Suzzallo Library, Vancouver Public Library - Central Branch, Wolfson College Library, Oxford University

Other favoritesPour House Cafe, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, National Book Festival, The British Museum, LibraryThing H.Q., The Corporation of Yaddo, Santa Fe Institute, Franz Kafka Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (museum and shop)

About me
Love my wife & son Caleb. Enjoy nature, forests, mountain peaks, rivers, unmarked trails and howling owls. Try to live in an unhurried, easygoing manner in a fast paced society. Live and work in the urban, but try to have an eclectic, community oriented view of life. Accept people as they are. Syncronicity, harmony, peace. Follower of Jesus: peacemaker, nonviolent resister, comforter of the dispossessed. Love all people, animals, plants, mushrooms, rocks, trolls, moss-covered sequoia trees and lichen-covered boulders. Protect living earth's environment. Ride a bike!

To read--acquire new knowledge, explore the imagination, understand new ideas, attain spiritual enlightenment. Knowledge is such a limited word. Existence necessitates a prismatic, kaleidoscopic knowledge, a knowledge that reflects the collective human mind. Reading is a catalyst to acquire a microdot of truth, perception, insight into reality, to perceive how thinkers and sojourners interpret life, truth, beauty and love. Before I die, I want to taste of life, discover meaning and truth. Reading helps me see what I am incapable of seeing. I see through the author's eyes. Like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, authors help me to enter the world of light and bring me closer to grasping elusive truth. Like looking through the Hubble Space Telescope at a sliver of space, like looking through a keyhole, like a frog in a well, I only see a portion of truth-reality. Books open the truth-opening just a little wider for me to see out and wonder.

About my libraryMy LibraryThing catalog contains MOSTLY BOOKS I HAVE READ.


The Astronomy Library of the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands
Photo Credit: (Erik)







First Lines:

1. Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. A screaming comes across the sky. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

4. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

5. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

6. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

7. All this happened, more or less. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

8. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

9. Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

10. 124 was spiteful. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

11. I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)

12. See the child. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985)

13. A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

14. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

15. A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

16. Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick. Stephen King, The Shining (1977)

17. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

18. It was a pleasure to burn. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

19. I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2005)

20. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

21. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Favorite Novels:
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Lilith, George MacDonald
Phantastes, George MacDonald
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick
Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey


Favorite Nonfiction:
The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
The Subversion of Christianity, Jacques Ellul
No Logo, Naomi Klein
When Corporations Rule the World, David C. Korten
Christi-Anarchy, Dave Andrews
The Way It Is: One Water...One Air...One Mother Earth, Corbin Harney
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
Language in Thought and Action, S. I. Hayakawa


Favorite Library:
Taipei Public Library Beitou Branch

The Green building, Taipei city library Beitou branch from Daren on Vimeo.

AMERICA, Allen Ginsberg

America by Allen Ginsberg - Tom Waits/ Allen Ginsberg


a peacful place to read a book...
Rogue River, Oregon, USA Photo by Hamad Darwish from Medford, Oregon, USA



Thomas Pynchon's Private Detective Hits Streets in August 2009

Inherent Vice - Penguin Press, 416 pages, August 4, 2009

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog.





A nice place to read...







Happy Bicycle Day! - April 19








Nanda-yo! Kochi miruna-yo! Dare-ni mukatte mono itten-dayo? Jama shinai-dekure! Ototoi koi! Baka ka!

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Real nameJonathan

LocationLos Angeles

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

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

Common KnowledgeSeries (61), Awards (162), Characters (2030), Places (495)

Member sinceSep 27, 2007

Currently readingSometimes a Great Notion (Penguin Classics) by Ken Kesey