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Ohhhh, yeah…

The every day project resurrects itself. Inspired by something Jodi told me about somebody she “knows” who is trying to get rid of half of everything they own, and remembering my own musings about getting rid of some books, I decided to tackle the fiction shelves with the intention of getting rid of half of what’s there. The list of stuff to go is below, but for some reason I feel I should check with somebody first.

For now, these are just piled up under the piano. If anybody wants any of these, just let me know. Or if you think you know somebody who might want some, feel free to send them here. I won’t vouch for the condition, but they range from crappy yellowed paperbacks to relatively decent hardcovers, one of which is even signed by the author. Some are covered in scribbles having been bought for my undergrad; others, having been bought for my undergrad, have never been opened.

  1. Canadian short stories: fourth series
  2. Scholes and Sullivan, Elements of fiction
  3. Ashley and Moseley, Elizabethan fiction
  4. 50 great short stories
  5. Holman, A handbook to literature
  6. Great Canadian short stories
  7. Modern Canadian stories
  8. Short novels of the masters
  9. Short story masterpieces
  10. Douglas Adams, Mostly harmless
  11. —So long, and thanks for all the fish
  12. Richard Adams, Shardik
  13. —Watership Down
  14. Margaret Atwood, Cat’s eye
  15. Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice
  16. —Sense and sensibility
  17. Simone de Beauvoir, The mandarins
  18. Albert Camus, L’etranger
  19. Joseph Conrad, 6 novels in one!
  20. Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a coma
  21. Robertson Davies, The cunning man
  22. —Fifth business
  23. —The lyre of Orpheus
  24. —The manticore
  25. —A mixture of frailties
  26. —What’s bred in the bone
  27. —World of wonders
  28. Defoe, Moll Flanders
  29. Dickens, An xmas carol
  30. —David Copperfield
  31. —Hard times
  32. Eliot, Middlemarch
  33. —The mill on the floss
  34. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, She
  35. Timothy Findley, The butterfly plague
  36. —Dinner along the Amazon
  37. —Famous last words
  38. —Headhunter
  39. —The last of the crazy people
  40. —Not wanted on the voyage
  41. —The telling of lies
  42. —Spadework
  43. —The wars
  44. Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby
  45. Forster, A passage to India
  46. William Golding, Lord of the flies
  47. Goldsmith, The vicar of Wakefield
  48. Gunter Grass, The tin drum
  49. Hardy, Far from the madding crowd
  50. —The return of the native
  51. —Tess of the d’Urbervilles
  52. —The woodlanders
  53. Hermann Hesse, Demian
  54. John Irving, The cider house rules
  55. —The Hotel New Hampshire
  56. James, The portrait of a lady
  57. Joyce, Dubliners
  58. —A portrait of the artist as a young man
  59. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at noon
  60. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The leopard
  61. C. S. Lewis, The Narnia chronicles
  62. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and ale
  63. —Then and now
  64. Great short works of Herman Melville
  65. Walter M. Miller, A canticle for Liebowitz
  66. Farley Mowat, The dog who wouldn’t be
  67. Vladimir Nabokov, Bend sinister
  68. Michael Ondaatje, In the skin of a lion
  69. George Orwell, 1984
  70. Nino Ricci, In a glass house
  71. —Lives of the saints
  72. David Adams Richards, Mercy among the children
  73. Mordecai Richler, Jacob Two-Two’s first spy case
  74. Gabrielle Roy, The tin flute
  75. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s children
  76. Saltykov, The Golovlevs
  77. Kate Taylor, Mme Proust and the kosher kitchen
  78. The new Tolkien companion
  79. Tolkien, Unfinished tales
  80. —The fellowship of the ring
  81. —The two towers
  82. —The return of the king
  83. —The silmarillion
  84. Tolstoy, Master and man
  85. Anthony Trollope, The way we live now
  86. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead revisited
  87. H. G. Wells, The first men in the moon
  88. T. H. White, The book of Merlyn
  89. —The once and future king
  90. Elie Wiesel, Night
  91. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  92. —Orlando
  93. —To the lighthouse
  94. —The waves
  95. Emile Zola, The masterpiece

Well, in the end, that’s only about a third. Odds are I won’t touch 95% of what’s being kept until ten years from now when it’s time to purge again.

Posted by pzed on February 7, 2007 at 10.28pm
Categories: every day

Comments on "Ohhhh, yeah…"

Some of those books are actually mine. Numbers 2, 20, probably one or two of numbers 21 through 27, likewise one or two of numbers 35 through 43, numbers 67, 68, and possibly also 85. That said, I trust your judgement and can live without these, although Not Wanted on the Voyage is among those books that I sometimes take down and read again. But I can take it out of the library if I ever need it again.

Here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth given that I am the one temporarily living away from home while you must deal with our mountain of stuff on your own: the handful of authors I mentioned last time you wrote on this topic must stay, at least for now. In addition I’d really like to continue collecting the New Canadian Library. Non fiction books, of course, we should go through together. But for everything else, even if it belongs to me, go ahead and give it away.

Posted by jodi on February 8, 2007 at 12.32am :: link

Well, If you’re really getting rid of them, but could stand to hold on to a few for a bit longer, I’d happily take the Robertson Davies (haven’t read any, been told I should) and the Narnia series (don’t have my own copy yet). Maybe a Findlay or two, or something else even, if you’d reccommend them. Of course, I’m a terrible book-hoarder, so this could be dangerous…

Posted by Emer on February 8, 2007 at 10.29am :: link

[...] Well, not so long ago it was mostly empty. Today, it is more than mostly full, and four and a half boxes that were cluttering up Claire’s bedroom are now neatly nested and tucked away in the basement. A careful observer will notice that a lot of these books are rather old. Some belonged to my grandparents, some belonged to Jodi’s grandparents, a few belonged to my dad, and some were mine and/or Jodi’s all along. [...]

Posted by words » Blog Archive » what could possibly be interesting about this bookshelf. . . on March 28, 2007 at 8.33pm :: link

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