Too Many Books ....

So what happened is arethusa, you know, tagged me, and here I am, all tagged and confused. I have to say something about books and all that you know. And I like books and, really, a lot of books too. And they also like me you know. And so, here you see, these are some things I want to say about

1. Books I own:
Books are Absolutely Indispensable. I could almost say I have lived more of my time with books than with people. And so I have a few books though the library and the net have always been the prime sources for my reading material. This is the list of books that I cherish most among the ones I own:
Ulysses & Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce, The Portable Nietzsche, Dialogues of Plato, Complete Poems of Donne, Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Rubaiyat, The Portable Milton, The Stranger by Camus, Moby Dick and The Bhagavad Gita.

2. Books I recently bought:
I keep buying books on and off. When the eBay bug bites me usually. In the last month or two, these are the books I bought: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Tragedies of Shakespeare.

3. Books I am reading now:
Books for light reading I finish off quickly and in that section I am reading 'India Wins Freedom' by Maulana Azad and Jane Eyre. Some books I read slowly, and in this section I am reading 'A Kierkegaard Anthology', Buber's 'I and Thou', some Schopenhauer, assorted stuff on Indian History and some Aristotle. There are a few books, however, that I read and re-read often and again, sometimes in parts and sometimes in the whole. In this section are Joyce, Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, the Gita and Cioran.

4. My Favorites:
This should take a long time. I usually read as much for the author as for the book. So most favs will be authors rather than books.

Literature: Joyce - The Dubliners and The Portrait are by themselves guarantee to fame and the 2 most unreadably bold wonderful books ever are also his. Ulysses, my all-time fav. Shakespeare- enough has been said about him. Dostoevsky - Haunting. And Beautiful. Hardy, Dickens - Beautiful. And Haunting. Huxley, Orwell - Nice. Sometimes Daunting. Rushdie, Marquez - Magical. Realism. India. Latin America. Hot! Also for poetry, Donne, the Sufis, Dickinson, the Romantics, some Browning, TS Eliot and some snatches from the moderns. Others - Pride&Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, much of Scott and Wodehouse - fun and perennial favs for lighter reading.

Fantasy/Sci-Fi: Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time turns! Tolkien - He didnt write only LOTR! Douglas Adams - In Parts. Asimov - Theres too much I havent read but really good. AC Clarke - Of Course.

Philosophy: Plato - kickstarting Science and Philosophy as we know it, and open and sublime as we don't know how(with the eternal crowd-puller The Gadfly). Hume - No miracles here! Kant - Just cant read him. Schopenhauer - For the sheer weight of his studied Pessimism. Kierkegaard - Positive Religious Existentialism - I am searching too for "an idea that I could live and die for". Nietzsche- no one writes more lyrical philospohy - not even his mentor Plato. Cioran- Worthy successor to Nietzsche. I can just see the little blue light at the end of the tunnel too.(Plus he was insomniac when young :-)). Russell - Philiosophy for the layman. Math and Logic for the Scientist. And Literature for the Nobel Committee. Camus, Sartre - Lit/Phil - take ur pick. But they should be going out of fashion now, no?!. Every now and then, pick up Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or the Gita for comfort.

I am sure I have missed a few but thats the way it is. And of course, I tag Cue, Sudheer and Varath to post on their fav books etc.