Older, but no wiser

Books on shelves tend to stay there. Books that are read get scattered around the house. I tidied up these volumes of recent and current reading the other day, and put them together on top of a chest of drawers in the bedroom.

In one sense, this is an arbitrary selection out of the hundreds of books I own. Some were read many months ago and never put away, some have yet to be started; some have been read many times over, others probably will never be finished. It’s an eclectic mix – poetry next to economics; science rubbing shoulders with spirituality. If I’d been deliberately trying to select a list of a dozen books that represent me, probably only three or four of these would have been on it. But looking at the titles along the row of multi-coloured, multi-sized spines I couldn’t help thinking that this selection is a pretty good reflection of who I am:

The Support Economy – Shoshana Zuboff & James Maxmin
Cold Mountain – poems by Han Shan
New and Selected Poems – Mary Oliver
Dark Star Safari – Paul Theroux
Wind, Sand and Stars - Antoine de Saint Exupery
The Elegant Universe – Brian Greene
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Road Less Travelled – M Scott Peck
Life, the Universe and Everything – Douglas Adams
The Path of Least Resistance – Robert Fritz
Clear Waters Rising – Nicholas Crane
The Forest for the Trees – Betsy Lerner
Frogs into Princes – Bandler and Grinder

And cheating a little, because the most current reading isn’t together with the rest, I’ll include these:

The Artist’s Way –Julia Cameron
On Becoming a Person – Carl Rogers
HTML for the world wide web – Elizabeth Castro