Member: rebeccaallen

I'm new to LT and am just reaching 200 books in my online library. Today you came to the top of my list of members with similar books. I am amazed that we share so much of Doc Smith, but practically nothing else. Like two starships on intersecting hyperbolic orbits around the same black hole, like the intersection of Seaton/Duquesne value systems.

I'll stay tuned as I catalog more of my books to see if we have other common interests. Meanwhile, welcome to New England and best wishes for your young family. And stay clear of Roche's Limit!

posted by WilfGehlen at 5:26 pm (EST) on Jan 5, 2009

I'm almost done cataloging my library; I expect it to be about 1500 books total. I used to have a lot more books, but I've moved across country a couple of times (okay, three) now so I've gotten very picky about what I keep.

My current major reading area is parenting, because I have a son (August 17, 2005) and the ignorant, abusive bigots who brought me into the world provided only a model of how NOT to be a good parent. Fortunately, I have real world models -- friends, mentors and extended family -- I respect and admire, and to calibrate the books.

My preferred fun-reading includes funny romances (contemporary, primarily, but also Georgette Heyer), science fiction, fantasy and supernatural fiction with female protagonists, and non-fiction books with a strong authorial voice/narrator/character who is learning about a topic and dragging the reader along with her (or him) while meeting (or sometimes stalking) the experts in the field. I also have a real weakness for Doom -- the End of the World, the Apocalypse, etc. Y2K was tons of fun. Climate change/Peak Oil is my current favorite. I find terrorism and literal-minded apocalypses fairly dull.

Previous reading areas include: religion (particularly its intersection with race and gender), anarcho-capitalism (oh, that was a mistake), "minority" politics (gender, class and race -- minority is in quotes because women are a majority numerically), education (particularly un/de-schooling, which I was interested in long before becoming a parent), the history of technology/innovation, and martial arts/self-defense (particularly, again, women involved in).

I like to walk, hike, bicycle and camp (which leads to a fair number of guidebooks devoted to those topics. I've lived over thirty years in Seattle, and a few years in Brookline, NH, leading to a number of books devoted to those areas. I like dabbling in languages (French, German and Dutch) and my love of opera supports that activity (explaining another clump of books).

I also love to cook, and and have a long-standing interest in "domesticity": cooking, cleaning, textiles -- "women's work". My feelings about this have varied wildly over the years, as I value the results, but drudgery is drudgery and oppression is oppression.

posted by rebeccaallen at 12:56 am (EST) on Nov 10, 2006