A pretty simple concept (obviously based on #homescreen2014). One Billy shelf* (that's 30 inches of space) – what will you put on it?
Here's the full list, in rough sequence of when-I-read-them, from left to right:
- Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson by Alan Greenberg
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Essential Hemingway (mostly for The Sun Also Rises; but also the vignettes in In Our Time) by Ernest Hemingway
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- Selected Poems by Ezra Pound (really only for Cathay; I will someone would publish this in a lovely little pocket edition)
- Howl by Alan Ginsberg (honestly, it's in there)
- Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa
- The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
- 'Exterminate All the Brutes' by Sven Lindqvist
- Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. James
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
- The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
- Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
- Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
- The Lover by Marguerite Duras
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
- On Photography by Susan Sontag
- Chekhov's Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
- Collected Stories by Isaac Babel (really only for Odessa Tales)
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
- Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion
- There's No Such Thing as Free Speech by Stanley Fish
- The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand
- Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
- Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis
- Holy Land by D. J. Waldie
- The Control of Nature by John McPhee
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen
- Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
- Crime / Guilt by Ferdinand von Schirach
I'm assuming this is a repeat-every-five-years type of exercise, rather than an annual event. With that in mind, these are the books that fell off the shelf, through realistically most of them could easily make a comeback next time around.
- From Hell by Alan Moore
- The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
- The Beat Reader
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
- The White Album by Joan Didion
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
- Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk
- A slightly thicker edition of Huck Finn
* Why a Billy shelf, rather than say 24 titles (i.e. the same severe limit that an iPhone screen has on the number of apps)? I feel like a shelf is the basic unit of measure for books, instead of a screen; but I think we should allow an e-reader screen or reading app screen. I do read in both formats, but interestingly – and worryingly – nothing I had read digitally seemed to make the grade this time around. I'm sure some audiobooks might have made the cut if I'd been more diligent about this exercise.
