books

Here are some books I've enjoyed in the past couple years:

• Paul's list of recent good books (in QuickBase)

The above list does not include reference books (I read a bunch of them, on lots of weird topics), business and technology books (I try to read as few as possible), or books which were not really good (I only recently learned to take pleasure in putting them down early).

It was an interesting exercise to try to categorize the books that I liked. Rather than categorize primarily by form (novel, nonfiction, biography, etc) I tried to categorize where possible by broad interest-- China, India, Ocean, etc.

I don't read nearly enough. It was only this year that I realized I'm not going to live long enough to even read all the books I already own, let alone all the books I want to read.

Maybe I should pick my favorite 50 categories and try to read 100 books for each one by the time I die. That would still only be less than 25% of the books that Teddy Roosevelt read during only the first half of his life, and he was kind of a busy guy too.

See also books.f7.net which is an Internet book club I belong to.

I also love reading Amazon reviews (cf) although I'd appreciate better topic browsing and also somehow discount reviewers who have different opinions than me. E.g., there seem to be lots of "five star" books rated by thousands of born again Christians. Netflix does this nicely with "Ratings of viewers like you". See also my Amazon Feedback.

You can buy some of my used books at half.com.