I eat books.

I’ve been trying to start this blog up but I’ve had trouble coming up with what I want this to be about…since I don’t really have a clue, nor the money to rent one, I’ve decided to stick with what I know.

Not much.

Now that we covered that I’ll delve into what I enjoy. I love to read. I could sit in a room with a book(s) for weeks at a time. Seriously, I might pause here and there to stop my stomach from devouring itself, and maybe to find out whom the United States Government (USG) has decided to bomb. There’s little else that I find as enjoyable as diving into and swimming through as books. Actually, that’s all I like to swim in as water gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I can ravish a work of fiction in three hours or less. Nonfiction on the other hand takes me days, a week, maybe even months depending on what I call the density of the text. Some books I read, Noam Chomsky comes to mind, are like running into a brick wall of text. It’s hard to decipher and process such a large amount of brain data. I work through this by reading books in chunks and assigning books to different rooms. I got my car books, my lunch break books, my bathroom books, my bedroom books—I just cleaned out under my bed and found forty books down there!

To feed my habit I spend a lot of time wandering through used books stores, flea markets, garage sales, and estate sales. I also hit up and take any text books I can con off of college students. As most of those text books are not purchased back by the school. I’m also fascinated by dictionaries and reference books as a whole. Something about finding out anything I want in alphabetical order makes me get erect. I’ve found NPR and the internet to be an invaluable tool in pointing towards books and authors I may want to read. If there’s anything that I’ve missed in my massive reading journey it’s the classics of literature. I find them toilsome to read. That’s something coming from someone that does read dictionaries. I am trying to read more classics as I get older but I find myself enjoying nonfiction too much. Here’s some of the books I’ve picked up lately, some read, some not…

Abercrombie, Nicholas; Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner. The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1915.
Baldwick, Chris. Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford, 2001.
Barnes, J. A. Who Should Know What? Social Science, Privacy and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Barth, John. The End of the Road. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971.
Binder, Frederick M. The Way We Lived; Essays and Documents in American Social History, Volume I: 1607 – 1877. New York: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996.
Bruce, Robert V. 1877: The Year of Violence. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989.
Bunker, M. N. Handwriting Analysis. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Co., 1959
Burnam, Tom. The Dictionary of Misinformation. New York: Crowell, 1975.
Burrough, Bryan and John Helyar. Barbarians at the Gate. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
Cornell, James. The Great International Disaster Book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Vintage Books, 1946.
Dawson, Jim. Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart. Berkley: Ten Speed Press, 1999.
Delany, Sheila. Counter-Tradition: The Literature of Dissent and Alternatives. New York: Basic books, Inc., 1971.
Dobson, Christopher and Ronald Payne. The Terrorists; Their Weapons, Leaders and Tactics. New York: Facts on File, 1982.
Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. Obsession. New York: Scribner, 1998.
Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Dye, Thomas R. Politics in America. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Friedman, Thomas. The World Is Flat. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005.
Grater, Michael. Paper Play. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1972.
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt; a History. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.
Hoff, Benjamin. The Te of Piglet. New York: Dutton Book, 1992.
Inbau and Reid. Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. Baltimore/London: Williams & Wilkins, 1983.
Jensen, Carl. 20 Years of CENSORED News. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control; The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
Lapham, Lewis. Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executions. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1973.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Lesberg, Sandy. Assassination In Our Time. New York: Peebles Press International, 1976.
Lung, Dr. Haha and Christopher Prowant. Mind Manipulation: Ancient and Modern Ninja Techniques. New York: Citadel Press, 2002.
Maggio, Rosalie. How to Say It; Choice Words, Phrases, Sentences & Paragraphs for Every Situation. Paramus: Prentice Hall, 1990.
Malvern, Marjorie M. Venus in a Sackcloth; The Magdalen’s Origins and Metamorphoses. London: Feffer & Simons, Inc, 1975.
Margolies, Edward. Native Sons. New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1968.
Maurois, André. Disraeli. New York: Time Inc., 1965.
McLeish, Kenneth. Guide to Human Thought. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.
McKeon, Richard. The Basics Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1941.
Moliére as translated by Richard Wilbur. The Misanthrope & Tartuffe. New York: Harvest, 1965.
Montessori, Maria. The Absorbent Mind. Oxford: Clio Press, 2004.
Nasty, Mack. Take No Prisoners: Destroying Enemies with Dirty and Malicious Tricks. Port Townsend: Loompanics Unlimited, 1990.
Pentagram. Puzzlegrams. London: élan press, 1989.
Petronius. The Satyricon and Seneca The Apocolocyntosis. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
Pringle, David. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; The Definitive Illustrated Guide. Carlton, 1997.
Rosefsky, Robert. The World 1929 Almanac and Book of Facts. America: Workman Publishing Co., Inc, 1971.
Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1998.
Sterba, James P. Morality in Practice. United States: Wadsworth, 2004.
Simmons, J. L. Deviants. San Francisco: Michigan State University Press, 1985.
Simon, David R. Elite Deviance. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002.
The New American Desk Encyclopedia. New York: New American Library, 1989
Tillman, Norma Mott. How to Find Almost Anyone, Anywhere. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998.