Rare books meme
Meme from mathew and Ashley. Ten books I have on my shelves that I think are not on yours.
- Kurt Diemberger, The Endless Knot. Climbing K2 and dying. “As I wake up, I notice that I have been asleep with my hand in the snow. All feeling has gone from several fingertips-they’re frostbitten.”
- Colin Greenland, Death Is No Obstacle. A collection of interviews with Michael Moorcock in which Moorcock sets out his highly disciplined techniques for writing pulp fantasy. “In a sword and sorcery novel you can use the prophecy in the same way that, in a detective novel, you use the dying man’s last words.”
- Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. “When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the ‘big canoe’ of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosom the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys...”
- John Miller, ed., On Suicide. A collection of essays from Plato to Alvarez. When I was an undergraduate, a cleaner who spotted this book in my room was so worried that she reported it to the college authorities. “A man who takes a knife and slices deliberately across his throat is murdering himself. But when someone lies down in front of an unlit gas oven or swallows sleeping pills, he seems not so much to be dying as merely seeking oblivion for a while.”
- Yukio Mishima, On Hagakure: the Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan. “Hagakure is an attempt to cure the peaceful character of modern society by the potent medicine of death.”
- Nicholas Monsarrat, The Master Mariner. Unfinished novel retelling famous maritime events through the eyes of an immortal English sailor. “First, after two days, a young priest delivered on board a piece of flesh, nine pounds in weight, from Cook’s thigh.”
- The National Cycle Network: Guidelines and practical details. “Where build-outs or segregation islands are constructed the designer should consider highway drainage requirements.”
- David W. Perry, Bike Cult. “Like the Jews of medieval Europe, [bicycle] messengers make an objective contribution to the local economy, but are viewed as utterly foreign, existing tenuously on official tolerance punctuated by specific harassment.”
- John White, Rescue! True Stories from Lake District Mountain Rescue. “I heard a whistling sound, and a fine looking Herdwick dropped past me, not ten feet away, to land a hundred feet lower, smashed to a pulp by the jaged rocks in the gully bed.”
- John K. Wilson, The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education. “By invoking the myth of political correctness ... conservatives were able to convince much of the country, and many within academia, that a conspiracy of leftist students and tenured radicals had taken control of higher education and was suppressing conservative ideas.”
Not rare enough:
- C. J. Cherryh, Voyager in Night. Science fiction with typographical aliens. “‘((()))!’ <> shouted at the culprit, but ((())) ran, evaded a wandering segment of ==== and kept screaming.” (Owned by 11011110.)
- Kurt Gödel, On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems. “Bew(x) = (Ey) y B x” (Owned by gjm11.)