Alex just posted about his compulsive book buying habits, and it made me think of all the books I’ve bought in the last few months while here in Anchorage, books I’m now going to have to ship home when I leave in nine days. When I left for Alaska back in February, I told myself I wouldn’t buy any books while here. As the list below makes clear, I’m not very good at not buying books. Every time I go by a bookstore, I should make like Odysseus and tie myself to the mast to prevent me from falling prey to its siren song.

So, these are some of the books I bought while here. Most of them came from an cool used-book store called “Title Wave,” hence the name of this post:

• Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson.
  I finished this one, and, so far, it is my favorite book this year. It’s the first part of his Baroque Cycle trilogy. To give you an idea, it has Newton and Leibniz as main characters, as well as several other historical intellectual and royal figures. If you have any interest in the ideas that have led to where we are today, as told by a first-class writer who has a knack for making you smarter at the same time as he makes you laugh, check this book out. I can’t recommend it enough.

• Portrait of an artist as an old man, by Joseph Heller.
  Read this one too. Heller wrote “Catch 22,” and this book, published after his death, is almost a last testament. Both funny and sad, I never put it down, finishing it in just one sitting.
• Pinball, by Jerzy Kosinski.
  Started this one last night. Not bad so far, but there’s an awful lot of telling (as opposed to showing), Kosinski wrote the novel behind one of my favorite movies of all time, “Being There,” with Peter Sellers. The blurb says that Pinball was written for George Harrison and “is a rock ‘n’ roll mystery centered on a superstar who, despite his success, has managed to keep his identity a secret, even from his closest friends. But a beautiful young woman, obsessed with him, stalks him relentlessly, driven by a secret goal that justifies all means.” Sounded cool to me.
• Tales of Neveryon, by Samuel R. Delaney.
  I’ve read some of this. It’s a collection of related short stories that take place in the fantasy land of Neveryon. In one of them, the main character invents writing (you could see why I’d be interested in something like this). Some tales better than others. A really good bathroom read.
• Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgement, both by Immanuel Kant
  I read excerpts of each of these for an informal “class” I took at the end of the semester (more like a book club than a class, since we didn’t get credit). I liked the ideas in them, to some extent, but they didn’t blow me away like I hoped they would. Probably because they were written at the tail end of the eighteenth century and most of the philosophy I’ve read has already internalized and expounded upon the basic Kantian systems.
• Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest, by Eric Nisenson
  Dawn and I had to do a presentation on Coltrane for our “Creativity, Madness, and Self Expression” class, so we used this book as our main source. It was a pretty good read, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had some grounding in music theory. It’s not a biography of Coltrane, in the normal sense, but more of an appreciation of what he tried to do with his music. It gets a bit hyperbolic at times, but Nisenson’s obvious passion for Coltrane’s music is the fuel that moves you through the whole book, so his excitement, rather than being distracting, is the one of the reason’s I enjoyed the book so much. If you are ever looking for a rationalization to explain the unexplainable reasons why you enjoy jazz, this book could help.
• Reconstruction in Philosophy, by John Dewey
  Found this one for sale cheap. I haven’t read it yet, but since one my professors wrote a book on Dewey, I found it obligatory to own at least one book by the dude. Historic note: Printed in 1957, The price on the cover says $1.95, but I had to pay $6.00 for it.
• Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, by Sherry Turkle
  I started to read this for some help on that “Morality & The Blogosphere” thing I’ve been working on, but since I’m taking an independent study next semester on “Theories of the Internet,” I figured I’d wait until next semester to really dig into it.
• Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
  A classic in the realm of theories of mind, Hofstadter’s book uses math, painting, and music to explain the way our minds work. A bit technical at times, the books seems to be the kind you read in pieces, as opposed to cover-to-cover. From the pieces I’ve read, I can easily recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.
• “Unknown Title”, by William Gibson
  I can’t remember the name of this book, but I bought it because it was next to the register at Borders and I always wanted to read something by Gibson (he wrote “Necromancer,” which I haven’t read, but always wanted to). It was an impulse buy. The reason I can’t remember the title is that I never ended up reading it. Instead, I sold it to a used book store, during the Great Anchorage Purge of 2005, when Dawn and I sold all the books we didn’t feel like mailing back home. I knew I wasn’t going to read it anytime soon, so away it went.
• Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_OncoMouse(TM), by Donna Haraway
  I have no idea how to explain this book. I’ve read the first part, where she explains why she’s doing what she’s doing, but not the second part, where she does it. Here’s a quick quote to give you an idea of what the book is (but not what it is “about”):
  

  Interfacing and mixing narrative fiction, biological argument, historical analysis, political inquiry, mathematical jokes, religious reworkings, literary readings, and visual imagery, this book is itself genetically heterogeneous. Its mixed genres and its interdigitating verbal and visual organs ask for a generous literacy from the reader. In its most basic sense, this book is my exercise regime and self-help manual for how not to be literal minded, while engaging promiscuously in serious moral and political inquiry about feminism, antiracism, democracy, knowledge, and justice in certain important domains of contemporary science and technology.

  As hard as she is to read, Haraway is a fascinating thinker, and if you want to have an explosive mind experience, I highly recommend her.

• The Work of Mourning, by Jacques Derrida
  A collection of the different essays/eulogies Derrida has written upon the death of his friends and colleagues. The one about Levinas made me cry. Most of them are deeply moving investigations of what it means to be a friend (this is almost a companion piece, the editors say, to Derrida’s work, “The Politics of Friendship”). The best thing is that these are not essays simply “about” mourning, but rather they are pieces written “in” mourning. An utterly moving book, and if you have interest in the “personhood” of Derrida, it is a must read.

So that’s it. Those are the books I bought while promising myself not to buy any more books, or at least, those are the ones I can remember. I think there might have been some more in the Great Purge, but except for the Gibson one, I can’t remember them.