Terry Teachout is typically compelling this morning on the subject of readings lists as found objects:

James Tata recently posted a list of "the last twenty books of fiction or literary essays I have read." I enjoy reading this kind of list, in much the same way that I like looking at other peopleís bookshelves. When the listkeepers in question also happen to be famous, of course, the results are interesting for a different reason. Justice Holmes, for example, kept a written record of every book he read as an adult, and I find it both amusing and illuminating to know that he read (among many other things) both Swann's Way and Rex Stout. Yet I take equal pleasure in knowing what my fellow bloggers are reading, looking at, or listening to, not only because Iím interested in them as personalities but also because such knowledge can lift me out of my own preoccupations and preconceptions. Though I own a wide variety of books and CDs, I have a tendency to run the plow through the same old furrows when left to my own devices. Sometimes a passing mention by a fellow blogger reminds me of a book I love but havenít reread for years, or makes me want to click through to amazon.com and buy one I have yet to read.

I also like the fugitive nature of reading lists, which I find wholly compatible with the fugitive nature of blogging itself.

Tata's list is of the last twenty books he has read, in reverse chronological order. Terry didn't post his, though I wish he would. Here's mine, with asterisks by the ones I've reread for classes I'm teaching:

Nuala O'Faolain, My Dream of You*
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend*
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Brian Friel, Translations*
Willa Cather, O Pioneers
Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest*
Sheridan LeFanu, Uncle Silas*
Charles Dickens, Hard Times*
James Joyce, Dubliners
Charles Dickens, Bleak House*
William Thackeray, Barry Lyndon*
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop*
David Mamet, Oleanna
Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl*
Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers*
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent*
Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
Mark Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair

Readers are invited to post their own lists in the comments below.

Historians find lists of books read unusually helpful when thinking about the influences upon historical figures. For example, what was Martin Luther King reading at different important stages in his life? What was Eisenhower reading before D-Day? We know that Kennedy had been reading Barbara Tuchmann's book on the outbreak of World War I at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis...all of these things make for a much more interesting world.

Erin, you quote Terry as indicating that lists are approximations of people's shelves. Terry could just as easily have said they are an approximation of our selves. I feel more exposed posting this list than posting just about anything else.

I put these in alphabetical order rather than chron as I am not quite sure of the order. Here they are:

Vasily Aksyonov, Island of Crimea
Vasily Aksyonov, Generations of Winter
Paul Auster, Book of Illusions
Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel
Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
Carl Hiaasen, Basket Case
Michel Houellebecq, Platform
Michel Houellebecq, Elementary Particles
John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbor
Andre Makine, Music of a Life
Andre Makine, Confessions of a Fallen Standard Bearer
Andre Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers
Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Trilogy
Naguib Mahfouz, Children of the Alley
Walter Mosley, Bad Boy Brawly Brown
Anatoly Rybakov, Children of the Arbat
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales
Vladimir Voinovich, Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Ivan Chonkin
Vladimir Voinovich, The Fur Hat

I can't list the last twenty books. Which is strange, because I always have two or more going at once. Maybe I'm just retreading the same ones over and over. My brain is dissipating. I'm going to start keeping a journal.

Time of the Dragons, Alice Ekert-Rotholz
Dinner at Deviant's Palace, Tim Powers
Forsake the Sky, Tim Powers
The Great Influenza, John M. Barry
The Peshawar Lancers, S.M. Stirling
Everything's Eventual, Stephen King
Victoria's Daughters, Jerrold M. Packard
Portrait of a Killer, Patricia Cornwell
The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton
Queen Victoria's Family, A Century of Photographs, Charlotte Zeepvat
Bury Him Among Kings, Elleston Trevor
Six Wives, the Queens of Henry VIII, David Starkey
Daughters of Britannia, Katie Hickman
And some reading for work, about the chemistry of vitamins.

And before that I can't remember.

Well, it's an eclectic mix.

Stolypin, I'll have to look up some of yours, because they look very interesting.

Here's my list...

Current work in progress:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Gary Kinder, editor, William Lewis Hearndon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon

James McManus, Positively Fifth Street

Bernard DeVoto, editor, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Patrick O'Brien, Master and Commander

John Wesley Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons

Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-Rich War Torn Post-Soviet Republic

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbellly

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier

Alton Brown, Gear for Your Kitchen

Ernest Shackleton, South

Roger Rosen, Georgia: A Sovereign Country of the Caucasus

Darra Goldstein, The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

No favorites, except Krishnamurti. All worth reading, depending upon interest, except Wittgenstein, because I still can't understand what he writes, even though I know what he is trying to say. Right now I've got going:

Basic Economics -- Thomas Sowell
The Blank Slate -- Pinker
Six not so easy Pieces -- Feynman
The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest -- Josephy
[The above are very clear.]

Some great anthologies, read piecemeal, involving American Indian myths and stories, battles with the U.S., quotes from Indians ["I Have Spoken", "Coming to Light", "Legends and Lore of the American Indians"]

Read/reread recently:

Total Freedom -- J. Krishnamurti
A History of Western Intellectual Tradition -- J.Bronowski
Surely You're Joking -- Feynman
Don Juan -- Castenada
Socialist Humanism -- Fromm
Sources of The Self -- Taylor
Relativity [for simpletons] -- Einstein and Leupold
On Liberty -- J.S. Mill
Philosophical Investigations -- Wittgenstein
Of Men and Mountains -- W.O. Douglas
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee -- Black Elk
Gulliver's Travels -- Swift
Reaching 50 [?] -- Bill Cosby
Nature Rambles the Wallowas -- Elmo Stevenson

Prof. O'Connor--

I hastily assembled this list and while it is only approximate it does fairly reflect my tastes in reading these days. I was struck how little intellectual rigor is in evidence in my list, but I am a retired guy and at a stage of life where I read mostly for entertainment. The hell with self-improvement.

CURRENTLY READING:
Tenured Radicals/ Roger Kimball
In a Dry Season/ Peter Robinson
LAST 20:
1 The New Anti-Semitism/ Phyllis Chesler
2 Guns, Germs, &Steel/ Jared Diamond
3 Girl With a Pearl Earing/ Tracy Chevalier
4 The Birth of Venus/ Sarah Dunant
5 American Sucker/ David Denby
6 In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage/ John Earl Haynes, Harry Klehr
7 A Short History of Nearly Everything/ Bill Bryson
8 Batavia's Graveyard/ Mike Dash
9 The Rule of Lawyers/ Walter Olson
10 The Devil in the White City/ Erik Larson
11 The Case for Israel/ Alan Dershowitz
12 The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
13 When the Women Come Out to Dance/ Elmore Leonard
14 The Whore's Child/ Richard Russo
15 Rock Garden Design and Construction
16 Cuba Libra/ Elmore Leonard
------------------------------
I have a very long list of MYSTERIES. I read about 2 a week with great pleasure. Here are some of the recently read and most enjoyed:
Murder Room/ P.D. James
The Detective is Dead/ Bill James
Shudder Island/ Dennis Lehane
The Havanna Room/ Colin Harrison
The Conspiracy Club/ Jonathan Kellerman

These are the last twenty books I have read this year:

1. The Black Book/Lawrence Durrell
2. The Good Soldier/Ford Maddox Ford
3. Lord Gnome's Literary Companion/ed. Francis Wheen
4. The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven/Rick Moody
5. The gods of Revolution/Christopher Dawson
6. The Lost Library/Walter Mehring
7. The Clash of Civilizations/Samuel Huntington
8. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine/Tom Wolfe
9. The Vodi/John Braine
10. A Clockwork Orange/Anthony Burgess
11. Birdsong/Sebastien Faulks
12. Eye Deep in Hell/John Ellis
13. Isaac Newton/James Gleick
14. Kipling's Pocket History of England/Rudyard Kipling
15. In Flanders Fields/Leon Wolff
16. Yellow Dog/Martin Amis
17. Nightmare Alley/William Lindsay Gresham
18. Hermsprong/Robert Bage
19. The Long Goodbye/Raymond Chandler
20. Sea Room/Adam Nicolson

Great lists, fun to scan and contemplate! If I'm ever short a guest or two for a dinner party, it'll be to the Comments that I'll come trawling...

Current: Dear Bunny Dear Volodya and HMathews, Cigarettes
Last 20, approximately counterclockwise:
R.Queneau, Children of Clay
U.Eco, Baudolino
E.Wilson, Memoirs of Hecate County
F.Ayala, Usurpers
J.Hynes, Publish & Perish
M. Amis, Heavy Water and other stories
S.Johnson, Rasselas
Nabokov's Butterflies (ed. Pyle)
C.Ozick, Fame & Folly
G. Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
J.L.Borges, In Praise of Darkness
J. Saramago, Baltasar & Blimunda
G. Greene, The End of the Affair
C. Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy
G. Bassani, The Heron
R.K.Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants
G. Eliot, Middlemarch
A.D.Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down
S.Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
R. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

Oh, dear, sins of omission: RBarthes' Sade/Fourier/Loyola, CJames' Flying Visits, Racine's Phaedra, and a coupla Zweig shorts, Twain's Hadleyburg, Tennyson's In Memoriam, all in there somewhere ...

Laura & AMac, nice to see you both (still)here.
Laura, read some very good reviews about the Great Influenza and hope you found it worth reading. Its on my want to read list. If you had to pick anything from my list - I would go with Andrei Makine. He is a beautiful writer (French/Russian background and writes in French) and to use a hackneyed cliche he combines the soul of the best Russian writers with the studied grace of the best French writers. Music of a Life had a great impact on me in many ways. A short book, virtually a novella, but very moving.

Stolypin,

The Great Influenza is a masterful medical detective story, rare for a popular-press book in that it gets all of the biology right (to my knowledge, anyway).

It is also notable for the Barry's unflinching portrayal of President Wilson's moralistic reasons for bringing America into World War I, and for presenting a picture of nationwide repression, censorship, and enforced patriotism. This view of the domestic events during the war years is often passed over in historical surveys. Its connections with the Red Scare of the '20s is obvious; in his book, Barry describes this mentality's dire conseqeunces towards public health.

A worthwhile read.

Thank you AMac. I'll add it to my (ever growing) list. Somehow, no matter how much I read the list keeps getting longer.

There's a whole lot of The Great Influenza that's not about the flu. The history of the development of medical science is very interestingly covered. We have our own 1918 flu story in our family: my grandfather had gone off to join the army, and caught the flu at his army base. He was thought to have died, and his body was place in a makeshift morgue where those whose families could manage it could retrieve them for burial. We're all lucky he wasn't just shoved in a trench. While his parents were traveling to collect his body, someone walked through that room and saw him move, so they found not a corpse, but a very sick young man. The war was over for him, of course. He died before I was born; his lungs apparently never really recovered. Now this is very, very off-topic; sorry, Erin. And while I'm off-topic, Stolypin (nice to see you, too), I guess you've seen these 1910 photographs of Russia, but I'll post the link anyway:
The Empire That Was Russia

Laura, thanks for the link. I had not seen the exhibit. It also reminds me that though I work about a mile or so from the Library of Congress I rarely go there. Having just viewed the exhibits on line I realize there is much there to see and treasure. Thanks for the reminder.