Books and books, ad infinitum

I like learning and I like reading, so it seems only natural that I would like books; and oh do I like books.* But, I enjoy books for reasons beyond learning & reading: I like books for very tactile reasons. I like how they fit in my hand -- I prefer smallish paperbacks that I can squeeze into a back pocket, if need be.** A good book, or even a passable one that fits the size requirements, can make an indelible impression: every time I grab Kerman's book on the LvB string quartets, I am brought back to my initial viewing of the jackass movie -- don't ask, it just happens; every time I read, or even hold, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead I remember my first apartment in grad school and the 9/11 attacks.

This passion for books has an unfortunate, financial corollary: I spend too much money on books. Since the holidays passed with me getting a score of new books -- ok, seriously not a score, but double-digits nonetheless; see the list here -- I've decided to implement a new non-buying-of-books policy. Just in at the wire, however, is my $25 gift card to Borders, which I'll use to round out the rest of my year's worth of reading: I'm thinking David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; but it'll have to be way down on the list because I can't start another book of fiction right now.

Which brings me to the great "Fiction vs Non-Fiction" debate. My friend Sarah checks in on the non-fiction side here, and I completely sympathetic to that viewpoint. It's pretty hard to think about the amount of knowledge I don't know -- "amount of knowledge I don't know," who let Yogi Berra into this blog?-- without burying my head in the sand. That being said, it is incredible to discover new worlds, as you let the author guide you deeper and deeper into their universe. I just finished Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and I've blogged about it, or the author, here and here.*** What another fantastic book with a completely original point of view: if you like any combination of hackers; or samurai; or linguistic deep structures; or the worlds of religion, fantasy, science fiction or the Aluets & the Mafia; or binary code, which is Stephenson's go-to metaphor (did I mention he likes hackers?); or future apocalypse than this is the book for you...this is a good gateway drug into Stephenson's authorial world, not only because it's short (the other 2 books I've read topped out at over 900 pgs), but also because it's imagery is incredibly vivid. Two thumbs up, seriously!

But I've been reading alot of fiction lately, so it's about time for a change...Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine, here I come!


* If you want (or need) to give me a gift, books are always good! (Ahem...paging STL-Sarah to aisle 7)

** They must be taller than they are wider, much like myself.

*** It strikes me as odd that my two favorite books (IT and The Fountainhead) are the exact same shape and size, and one of my more recent favs (Cryptonomicon) is also the same. I might have a little chicken-and-the-egg problem here: do I like that shape and size because of those books, or do I like those books because of their shape?