#Homeshelf2014

A pretty simple concept (obviously based on #homescreen2014). One Billy shelf* (that's 30 inches of space) – what will you put on it?

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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.

Brands

"Brands provide an emotional experience and reduce inconsistency."

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Twitter Needs Trial Follows

I wish social media services had a trial function at the user level. I'd like to be able to follow someone on a 'try it and see' basis. Ideally that would be the default behaviour. After a week or a month I'd be prompted – "have you enjoyed following this person?" – and given a choice about whether to continue to follow them. That way I wouldn't have ended up following 400 people on Twitter and finding my stream boring and overwhelming. My stream would consist of the core group of people who I enjoy following. Same idea with Tumblr, Instagram, etc.

I think this would be good for everyone. Particularly for businesses and artists – people looking to use social media to grow their audience – since they wouldn't simply be looking to acquire new followers but to actively keep them. Everyone would need to be more entertaining, insightful, and interesting.

Detail

In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples, and I have chosen these among the extremer expressions of the religious temperament.

– William James, from the preface to The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature​

(emphasis added)​