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Member: makifat

Library5,753 books — see library

Reviews141 reviews — see reviews

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Tagsliterature (2,079), history (757), english (589), american (483), penguin (354), religion (330), french (325), medieval (277), philosophy (235), poetry (223) — see all tags

GroupsAncient China, Ancient History, Bloggers, Byzantinistik, Favorite Bookstores, Happy Heathens, Pro and Con, Rock 'n' Roll, Records and Record Collections, The Chapel of the Abyss

About me A well-organized packrat and trickster. Dedicated, in theory at least, to the principle of non-attachment. In the dubious parlance of astrology, a Gemini (which makes perfect sense). Agnostic Einsteinian mystic.

My wife is smart and beautiful and my sons (3 and 7) are handsome and brilliant. I get to stay home with my sons. I am a lucky man.

See below: My "data entry adventure" (as Mr. Waugh puts it) being mostly at an end, I don't expect to be part of the LT discussions too much in the future, a revelation which may cause a certain whoop of joy in Chicago. Not to say that one shouldn't expect the unexpected.

About my library I still recall the singularly delightful smell of pre-regulated toxins in a small clean civic library on the High Plains, where in the mid-60's I read the prerequisite number of books each summer in order to receive a colored certificate with a picture of the library, with the date in bold relief. I have always been a reader.

My personal library has been accumulating for over 30 years. I started at a tender age with the absurd von Daniken oeuvre (long since abandoned) and copies of FATE magazine from the 1950's, which even now lie hidden in a box somewhere. A chance finding of the Penguin edition of the Bhagavad Gita at a library book sale in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1976 opened up the world of books in earnest. I would scour the small towns in which I lived for anything resembling a book. I found some odd things in strange places: the writings of Karl Marx on a wire rack in a doll shop in oil-mad West Texas; a copy of Charlie Gillette's "The Sound of the City" gathering dust in a service station that was literally in the middle of one of North America's largest deserts; the aforementioned von Daniken/FATE issues in a junk shop in Roswell, New Mexico, years before the Chamber of Commerce came to the awareness that they could make a buck off kitsch and public gullibility. A book could give temporary relief from the unbearable. Sometimes it still can.

As of April 17, 2008, I have completed entering the bulk of my collection into LibraryThing. That's not to say that a few loose volumes aren't laying around, but the heavy lifting is done. This does not include the hundreds of books owned by my wife and children, although a few children's books have worked their way into the catalog. Maybe one day I will enter the Seuss collection.

What is the purpose of this catalog? Data entry was part of the attraction - laying to rest the question of just how many books I have, re-finding old friends. A deeper motivation was to leave a kind of record. As we are constantly reminded, put something on the internet, and it will be there FOREVER. So maybe one day my sons and grandchildren will look in out of curiosity and have what I never really had- a view into the old man's mind. And maybe they will speak the inevitable questions: "What the...!? Was he crazy!!?"

Good luck and happy reading!

Homepagehttp://www.makifat.blogspot.com

Also onBlogger

LocationPhoenix, AZ

Favorite authorsNone specified

Account typepublic, lifetime

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

Member sinceNov 5, 2006