What are you reading back there?

There was an amusing item in the New York Times on what famous people’s bookshelves reveal. Whenever I see someone with a book, I have to know what it is. I almost never ask, since I almost never know the person in question, but I usually try to get a view of what it is they are reading. Sometimes I just wonder if it is something I have read before, sometimes I wonder if it is something that will interest me down the road. This extends to movies and television. I sometimes pause a show to see if I can identify the books on the shelves (who would have thought Isaac Asimov would show up in The Wire?) The Times article refers to the bookshelves behind the famous people in their Zoom, FaceTime, and other video chats that they are doing in this time of physical distancing.

Above is the view people see of me and one corner of my office during Zoom and Team meetings. Like many of the famous people, I have bookshelves in the background. They aren’t designed to be for show, and indeed, the two that appear in the background are 2 of 10 that encircle 3 sides of my office. That said, people may wonder, as I do, what books are on these bookshelves. The two behind me are the first alphabetically in my collection. (I arrange my books alphabetically by author, and then chronologically within a given author.) 9 of the 12 shelves in these bookcases contain books by Isaac Asimov. But there are some other interesting books here as well:

1. A first edition history of the Civil War published in 1865.
2. The official 4-volume chronology of the Apollo spacecraft.
3. Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan
4. A signed copy of Asimov’s Murder at the ABA
5. Several signed copies of Ray Bradbury books (The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Ahmed and the Oblivion Machine, which he signed for me in December 1998.

I’ve read many, but not all of the books on these shelves.

The remaining 8 bookcases cover the C’s through Z’s. The only book I have within reach while working are Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition), Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern Usage, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (circa 1993), 2019 World Almanac (I’m due for a new one), and The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

And what am I reading while stuck at home? Yesterday I finished Camino Island by John Grisham, and today I finished The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. It’s not all light reading though. I’m currently reading The Black Ice (also by Connelly), John Adams by Page Smith, and A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram.