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.