Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 21:09:42 -0600 From: "VALENTINE M. SMITH" Subject: [WRITERS] "1300 Books" (long, please add to filelists if appropriate) Dear readers - One of my list members six years ago asked me for a "seminal list of books" I would or could suggest to people for reading. I keep building on this file, usually because someone reminds me that I haven't done it in awhile. The list that follows reflects my personal tastes and interests at 1997's end, and the reader should be aware that the list contains primarily history, politics and biographies (with a very heavy emphasis on Russia, just slightly less so the United States in the two former categories), various studies of the murder phenomenon (primarily in the US), science fiction, and so-called "mainstream" novels. This list should not to be construed as seminal to _anyone else_, and very much not a definitive list, but it does represent books that have influenced me, taught me, inspired me or that I liked. So, this list of 1300 (actually 1426) books are what I would suggest this month and year as seminal or intriguing for me. I do contend no such lists are the same from any given month to any other given month, and vary greatly from year to year. They are not in order of preference, they are not ranked in any way, though they _do_ reflect _my_ interests, curiosities, whims and tastes, as I said above - lots of history, some fantasy and science fiction, a fair number of novels, a fair number of books about the behavior of murder in the United States, a chunk of Russian history and/or politics, plus a sprinkling of many other things, pursuing a primarily self-taught course of learning about this and that in the world that piqued my "bump of curiosity." This version includes paranthetical comments on about 60% of the titles - the total list could be just as easily be 1500 to 2000. I get letters ... "You left out so-and-so .." a lot, (sometimes they get incorporated in the next gradiation of the list, sometimes not. I'm somewhat capricious about book lists; always tinkering, trying to present those titles which have really meant something one way or another over the years). Also, a key - + means someone I've met, * means someone I know, # represents a book I really valued for one reason or another. I hope you find this of some use or inspiration. VMS 1) Stranger in A Strange Land - Robert Heinlein + (woke me up to a different way of thinking about myself, and though I see its flaws now much more clearly than when I first read it in 1965, I still think the book awakened me after a long personal wanderjahr into a stupid hell I largely forged for myself. But I learned from it nonetheless). # 2) Citizen of the Galaxy - Robert Heinlein (one of the first SF books I read, at 12 or 13 years of age, and it made me think a lot about slavery, and sudden accession into wealth, in a framework at least new to me at the age I read it) 3) PrairyErth - William Least Heat Moon (one of the best micro-histories and personal accounts I've ever read. It's about a county in Kansas) 4) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - William Shirer (perhaps still one of the seminal books dealing with the Nazi period, one I re-read once a decade) # 5) Peter the Great - Robert Massie (well researched, pretty accurate as far as I can tell - a popular history that I have read thrice) # 6) Nicholas and Alexandra - Robert Massie (also a popular history, but one I've read at least four times up to now) # 7) Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (once read this book out loud with a friend in snow-bound Nebraska - winter 1977-78) 8) the Dune series (6 books, especially _Dune) - Frank Herbert (though I generally don't like series, I offer this one as a way to look at a single major SF writers's "definitive project." The later books are not as good as #1, 3 & 4) a) Dune (perhaps the best in the series, if you read none of the others of these, read this one) b) Dune Messiah (probably the weakest in the series) c) Children of Dune d) God Emperor of Dune (I liked this one) e) Heretics of Dune f) Chapterhouse: Dune (inconclusive ending) 9) The First Deadly Sin - Lawrence Sanders (great suspense, perhaps one of the best fictional looks at both the mind of a policeman *and* the mind of a deranged killer I've ever read)) 10) The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien (perhaps the definitive fantasy work in the past fifty years, and though dead, I contend he remains a major influence on the fantasy field to this day. I also contend that these books set the standards and models for most fantasy that has followed it. I have read this trilogy at least a dozen times, maybe more) # a) The Fellowship of the Ring b) The Two Towers c) The Return of the King 11) The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien (good, but more for scholars of Tolkien to my thinking) 12) The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien (geared more to children, a great "quest" tale, and introduces "the Ring" to Tolkien readers) # 13) God Is An Englishman - R.F. Delderfield (I just liked it, a VERY odd novel) 14) the Robot series (8 books, I think) - Issac Asimov 15) Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson (another great classic I read at an early age, and re-read just last year) 16) Robinson Crusoe- Daniel Defoe (the first book I recall reading, at age 6, and still good reading) 17) Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift (hard to read for a child, have never read it as an adult) 18) The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman (a very good book about the beginning of World War I and well-written) # 19) The Embarassment of Riches - Simon Schama (one of the best books on the history of the Dutch at their height I've read, also one of the few histories of the Dutch I've ever seen, I've read it twice) 20) Citizen - Simon Schama (flawed, but well done - about the French revolution, a solid "popular history") 21) a trilogy by W. Bruce Lincoln (all three worth reading, provides the reader with a good view of the end of the Romanov period in Russia and through the World War and the Civil War afterward) # a) In War's Dark Shadow b) Passage Through Armageddon c) Red Victory 22) The Art of War - Sun Tzu 23) The Discoverers - Daniel Boorstein (both of these books 24) The Creators - Daniel Boorstein are excellent) 25) The Story of Civilization series - Will and Ariel Durant (12 books - flawed in many ways, but good writing; I have read eight of the twelve books) # a) Our Oriental Heritage b) The Life of Greece c) Caesar and Christ d) The Age of Faith e) The Renaissance f) The Reformation g) The Age of Reason Begins h) The Age of Louis XIV i) The Age of Voltaire j) Rousseau and Revolution k) The Age of Napoleon l) The Lessons of History (a companion volume if one bought the set) 26) The Double Helix - James D. Watson 27) Einstein, The Life and The Man - Ronald Clark (the best bio of the phycisist's life extant, to my mind) # 28) An American Melodrama, The Presidential Campaign of 1968 - Chester, Hodgeson and Page (best campaign book ever written, in my opinion, and still illuminating today) # 29) The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (excellent book on the birth of a new computer) 30) House - Tracy Kidder 31) The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test - Tom Wolfe (a great account of the Sixties) # 32) The Fatal Shore - Robert Hughes (illuminating on the birth and life of the British transport system, and the birth of Australia as a nation) 33) The Wise Men - Issacson and Thomas (an excellent book about Kennan, Acheson, Lovett, Bohlen, McCloy and Harriman, I value what I learned from this book a great deal, especially about Kennan) # 34) The Glory and the Dream - William Manchester (covers the history of US from 1932-1972 in a unique way) # 35) Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter (two of the most complicated 36) Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter books I've read) 37) The Scarlet Mansion - Allan Eckert (a look at the serial killer H.H. Hudson, AKA Herman Mudgett, of the last century) 38) Cadillac Desert - Marc Reiner (one of the best books on American water policy ever written) # 39) The Uses of Enchantment - Bruno Bettelheim (useful & insightful) 40) the Travis McGee books (21 altogether) - John D. McDonald (the only "thriller" series I've REALLY liked) a) A Purple Place for Dying b) Nightmare In Pink c) The Deep Blue Good-By d) The Quick Red Fox e) The Fearful Yellow Eye f) A Deadly Shade of Gold g) Bright Orange for the Shroud h) Darker Than Amber i) Dress Her in Indigo j) Pale Gray for Guilt k) The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapprer l) Thd Long Lavender Look m) A Tan & Sandy Silence n) The Scarlet Ruse o) The Turquiose Lament p) The Dreadful Lemon Sky q) The Empty Copper Sea r) The Green Ripper s) Free Fall in Crimson t) Cinnamon Skin u) The Lonely Silver Rain 41) Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins (wierd!) 42) Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins (great) 43) Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - Tom Robbins (best novel on hitchhiking I've read, though a *bit* unbelievable) 44) the Mars series (9 books) - Edgar Rice Burroughs 45) Thurber - Burton Bernstein (good bio) 46) The Thurber Carnival - James Thurber (wonderful humor!) 47) The Outline of History (usually in 2 volumes) - H. G. Wells 48) First and Last Men - Olaf Stapleton (mind-blowing! hard to believe this ws written in 1931) 49) Starmaker - Olaf Stapledon (good) 50) The Army of the Potomac trilogy - Bruce Catton (a solid account of the American Civil War) a) Mr. Lincoln's Army b) Glory Road (all excellent) c) A Stillness at Appomatax 51) The Complete Works of O. Henry (some great stories) 52) The Best of Roald Dahl (great short fiction by a twisted, bent and funny writer!) 53) The Mabonogien (the Guest edition is the best I've seen) 54) Le Morte D'Arthur - Thomas Malory, edited by Lumiansky (the best of the many tales about King Arthur) 55) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Paul Kennedy (quite informative) 56) The Best and the Brightest - David Halberstam (becoming a classic about the players in the Vietnam war from the American side) 57) The Powers That Be - David Halberstam (a great book on the media, covering TV and newspapers) # 58) The Reckoning - David Halberstam (good look at US and Japanese auto-making) 59) The Imperial Presidency - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (good writing, to the point and probably right) 60) The Cycles of American History - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (well-written and thought-provoking) 61) Naked Lunch - William Burroughs (strange & intense) 62) Junkie - William Burroughs (bitterly sad, utterly accurate) 63) The Nine Nations of North America - Joel Garreau (innovative ideas, challenging) # 64) Cyteen - C. J. Cherryh + (great SF!) 65) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll (classic stuff) 66) two by Robert Graves (also excellent writing, pretty historically accurate) a) I, Claudius B) Claudius the God 67) the Narnia books (7 books) - C.S. Lewis (good children's allegory) 68) Damien - Herman Hesse (my favorite Hesse) # 69) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (good view of the South and a great novel) # 70) Crime and Punishment - Fedor Dostoevsky (hard) 71) Gilgamesh the King - Robert Silverburg (a good fictional approach to this very old legend of humankind) 72) Tom O' Bedlam - Robert Silverburg (I quite liked this) 73) Earth - David Brin (complex, good writing) # 74) The Complete Sherlock Holmes - A. Conan Doyle (great fun!) 75) Kim - Rudyard Kipling (a personal favorite) # 76) A Fine and Private Place - Peter Beagle (odd!) 77) The Folk of the Air - Peter Beagle 78) The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek (classic anti-war short stories book from the 1920s) # 79) The Merlin Trilogy - Mary Stewart a) The Crystal Cave b) The Hollow Hills c) The Last Enchantment 80) Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel Cervantes (complex, but I reccomend it for everyone) 81) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (some of the best American fiction written this century) 82) The Manchurian Candidate - Richard Condon (classic American fiction from the Sixties) # 83) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (first French novel I ever read at age 15, still regard it as seminal) 84) Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare 85) A Midsummer's Night's Dream - William Shakespeare # 86) Hamlet - William Shakespeare 87) The Tempest - William Shakespeare 88) King Lear - William Shakespeare (I suspect this is my favorite of all of Shakespeare) # 89) MacBeth - William Shakespeare 90) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 91) The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway (intense) 92) For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemningway 93) Islands of the Stream - Ernest Hemingway (posthumous) 94) White Lotus - John Hersey (unsung, but an incredible novel, one of his best fiction works) # 95) The Wall - John Hersey (intense, based on reality) 96) Mila 18 - Leon Uris (on the same theme as _The Wall, equally intense) # 97) Exodus - Leon Uris (opened my eyes to the Holocaust at a very young age, I have read it five times) # 98) Trinity - Leon Uris (about northern Ireland, and "the struggle"; very intense)) 99) Mitla Pass - Leon Uris (an interesting look at a writer's life in Israel) 100) Shogun - James Clavell (good writing, read it the first time in thirteen straight hours) 101) King Rat - James Clavell (chilling in "King Rat's" depravity) # 102) The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsythe (best book about an assassin, his methods and reasonings ever written) # 103) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (very complex, tio understate this book completely, best fictional account of the Napoleonic period in Russia extant) 104) Fables and Fairy Tales - Leo Tolstoy 105) The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy 106) Perestrokia - Mikhail Gorbachev (self-serving, a lot of Leninist cant) 107) The August Coup, The Truth and the Lessons - Mikhail Gorbachev (also self-serving, a bit of deception here and there - I believe) 108) The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (a fun novel, quite bizarre, I read it originally on my first honeymoon in Aacapulco in 1969 in one sitting, and read it yearly, incredibly funny in places. Now there is a new - 1995 - translation of this book, by Diana Burgin and Katherine O' Conner that is superlative to any prior one, and should be the reader's first choice) 109) Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov (classic Russian fiction) 110) V. - Thomas Pynchon (alligators in the sewers, a quite wonderful exploration of a very pervasive American urban legend!) # 111) Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (I recommend one read it 3 times, maybe then it'll make sense - I've only read it once) 112) The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon 113) A Canticle for Liebowitz - William Miller (very good post-nuclear war novel, considered an SF classic by many, and by me) # 114) Little Big Man - Thomas Berger (funny, the movie is good too) # 115) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown (a flawed but excellent book about the destruction of the Western Indians) 116) Chaos, Making a New Science - James Gleick (chaos theory at its best) 117) A Nonconformist History of Our Times (5 volumes that I know of, interesting slant) - I.F. Stone a) The War Years, 1939-1945 b) The Truman Era, 1945-52 c) The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951 d) The Haunted Fifties, 1953-1963 e) In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 118) Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman (great 19th century American poetry!) 119) In Search of History, A Personal Adventure - Theodore White (poignant) 120) The Making of the President, 1960 - Theodore White (good, maybe the best in the series of these he wrote) # 121) The Once and Future King - T. H. White (a quite different Arthurian tale) # 122) Inside the Third Reich - Albert Speer (shows clearly the "greyness" of the Nazi era by an insider, Hitler's last "Armaments Minister") # 123) Trillion Year Spree, The History of Science Fiction - Brian Aldiss (best history of SF available) 124) The Foundation Trilogy - Issac Asimov (always liked this) 125) Stieglitz, A Memoir/Biography - Sue D. Lowe (informative, also a good look at Georgia O' Keefe) # 126) The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - Robert Caro (powerful biography, though probably more than most people want to know)) # 127) Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (excellent) 128) Cosmos - Carl Sagan (quite informative, general but well done) # 129) Origins - Richard Leakey (useful and eye-opening) # 130) America In Search of Itself, The Making of the President, 1956-80 - Theodore White (great overview of the elections for President for most of my lifetime) # 131) Lucy, The Beginnings of Humankind - Johanson & Edey (the discovery of austrolopithecus afarensis, the oldest known "humans") # 132) Coming of Age in the Milky Way - Tomothy Ferris (quite interesting science essays) 133) American Caesar - William Manchester (good book on Douglas MacArthur) 134) Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan 135) The Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan (informative) # 136) Practicing History - Barbara Tuchman (useful) 137) The March of Folly, from Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Tuchman (a "popular historian's" overview of history) # 138) The Weaker Vessel - Antonia Fraser (good history of women of 16th to 19th centuries) 139) The Holocaust - Martin Gilbert (both grim books 140) The Holocaust - Nora Levin and quite powerful) 141) The Monte Cristo Cover-Up - Simmel (hilarious! a German-written spy story with recipes throughout) # 142) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (seminal for several reasons #) 143) Animal Farm - George Orwell (great, just re-read this book in 1996) # 144) 1984 - George Orwell (intense, a must read, I think!) # 145) The New Russians - Hedrick Smith (quite informative) # 146) The Russians - Hedrick Smith (useful, the "first edition" of _The New Russians) 147) Let History Judge (the 1989 edition) - Roy Medvedev + (one look at Stalinism from a Marxist's point of view) # 148) All Stalin's Men - Roy Medvedev (intriguing, he considers it one of his seminal books, or so he said to me in the summer of 1993, the other Medvedev book I do not have) 149) A Question of Madness - Roy and Zhores Medvedev (good account of the attempt to lock up Zhores in a mental institution, one of two major Medvedev books I do not have a copy of) 150) The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitzen (3 volumes) (intense, a must read for anyone interested in the "Stalin period") # 151) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Khrushchev permitted it to be circulated in the USSR, much to the dismay of hardliners) 152) Rebuilding Russia - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (an odd look at a way to rebuild Russia) # 153) The First Circle - Alexander Solzhenitsyn # 154) August, 1914 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn 155) Now Playing at Canterbury - Vance Bourjaily (quite bizarre, made a strong impression on me, set in the Iowa Writers Workshop to a great degree) # 156) Giles Goat Boy - John Barth (real bizarre) # 157) The Sotweed Factor - John Barth (strange) 158) Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurty (very well written, powerful and sad - I believe a *very* accurate picture of the American West in the 1890s) # 159) Moby Dick - Herman Melville (must read!) # 160) The Cold and the Dark, The World After Nuclear War - Ehrlich, Sagan, Kennedy and Roberts (eerie and dark) # 161) The Essential Ellison - Harlan Ellison (a must for any fan of Ellison's work) 162) Night of the Cooters - Howard Waldrop + (very funny) 163) Siddhartha - Herman Hesse (quite good, spiritual) # 164) Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse (took me eight years and five tries to read this book - quite complex) 165) Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain 166) Ulysses - James Joyce (intense) 167) The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare (my favorite Shakespeare play) # 168) The Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (7 volumes as I recall; I do not own this set, regretfully) 169) Tom Jones - Henry Fielding 170) The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe (a look at the space program, pretty well done) 171) The Fires of Spring - James Michener (a look at life in the poor house, not well known, but an solid example of his early work) # 172) Hawaii - James Michener (a novel I always liked - who can account for taste?) # 173) Across the Wide Missouri - Bernard DeVoto (_very_ good) 174) Ten Days That Shook the World - John Reed (good writing, perhaps the best first hand account of the October Revolution of 1917 written, even though it rather romanticizes a grim event) # 175) The History of the Russian Revolution - Leon Trotsky (good if biased, one of the few accounts by what turned out to be a principal player, originally in three volumes, now in one with complete text) # 176) THe Russian Revolution - Richard Pipes (excellent writing, but flawed assumptions, in my estimation) # 177) Stalin - Adam Ulam (solid) 178) Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy - Dimitri Volkogonov (fair, one of the few Russian-written bios of Stalin extant) # 179) Hitler, A Study in Tyranny - Alan Bullock (considered seminal by historians even today) 180) Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives - Alan Bullock (very good) # 181) A History of the Arab Peoples - Albert Hourani (well written) # 182) Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (powerful, and sad) 183) Babi Yar - Anatoly Kuznetsov (intense, a must read to understand how some Russians see this event) # 184) The Romanovs - W. Bruce Lincoln (definitively informative) # 185) All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren (right on the money, a great fictional account of Huey Long) # 186) Red Star Over China - Edgar Snow (very good) 187) Serial Murders and Their Victims - Eric Hickey (well researched) 188) The Serial Killers, a Study in the Psychology of Violence - Wilson and Seaman (very illuminating) 189) Serial Killers - Joel Norris (considered seminal) 190) Hunting Humans, An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers - Michael Newton (also considered a vital book in studying this behavior) 191) Hunting Humans, Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers - Elliott Leyton 192) Seven Days in May - Knebel and Bailey (intriguing, a novel about an attempted military takeover of the US, a scenario that has so far never occurred)) 193) Going After Cacciato - Tim O' Brien (bizarre, well written, a Vietnam novel) # 194) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera (great, quite intense!) 195) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Vincente Blasco Ibanez (sad) 196) Toolmaker Koan - John McLoughlin (great modern SF) # 197) David's Sling - Marc Stiegler (intriguing ideas) # 198) Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut (first Vonnegut I read, hard to avoid him after this) 199) The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (very well written, quite informative) # 200) The Shadow of the Winter Palace - Edward Crankshaw (good solid history-writing) # 201) The World According to Garp - John Irving (almost too much tragedy for one book) # 202) Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving 203) The Book of Daniel - E. L. Doctorow (a fictional look at the ill-fated Rosenbergs) 204) Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow (bizarre) 205) Disturbing the Universe - Freeman Dyson 206) Weapons and Hope - Freman Dyson (a good look at the difficulties surrounding nuclear weapons) # 207) A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 208) Jedidiah Smith and the Opening of the West - Dale Morgan (one of the few accounts ever about this unsung American hero who was killed at age 33 by Commanches) # 209) The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey (about eco-terrorism) # 210) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (quite wierd, very convoluted) 211) Democracy in America - Alexis d Toqueville (often in 2 volumes - a must read for every American) # 212) The Difference Engine - Gibson and Sterling (A novel about the first computer) 213) Good News From Outer Space - John Kessel * 214) A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara Tuchman ( a very solid look at the Black Plague years) # 215) The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural - Robert Darnton (strange, but informative) 216) Hidden History, Exploring Our Secret Past - Daniel Boorstein 217) The Mismeasure of Man - Stephen Jay Gould 218) Wonderful Life, The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History - Stephen Jay Gould (very complex, good writing) # 219) The Golden Bough - James Frazer (seminal to my way of thinking) 220) Modern History, The World from the Twenties to the Eighties - Paul Johnson (a conservative view) 221) A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn (a "liberal" or "radical left" view) 222) Passages - Gail Sheehy (useful and informative about the stages of human life) 223) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain (great!) # 224) Blue Highways, A Journey Into America - William Least Heat Moon (finally finished while in Russia in 1993 - good! I found this to be one of the best "travel books" I have ever read) # 225) Letters From the Earth - Mark Twain (creates doubts about religion, and is wickedly funny) # 226) Idylls of the King - Alfred Lord Tennyson (a poetic account of the Arthurian legend, too flowery for some, one of my first exposures to this legend) # 227) Mary Queen of Scots - Antonia Fraser (well written) 228) Cromwell: Lord Protector - Antonia Fraser (best book on Cromwell I've ever encountered) # 229) The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron (quite stirring, now controversial) # 230) archy and mehitabel - Don Marquis (funny) 231) The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk 232) Time Wars, The Primary Conflict in Human History - Jeremy Rifkin (informative) 233) Biosphere Politics - Jeremy Rifkin (useful) 234) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (a classic, one of the most beloved of stories for me) # 235) A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain (hilarious) # 236) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (very sad) # 237) Cannery Row - John Steinbeck 238) Peter Pan - James Barrie (first read in 1955) 239) John Brown's Body - Stephen Vincent Benet (powerful) 240) The Matrix, Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide - John Quarterman (useful, great reference, although already obselete) 241) Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede - Brad Denton (Brad is a great guy, and this is a hilarious book) 242) Wrack and Roll - Brad Denton * (good alternate history) 243) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (useful and quite informing about Tolkien's "inner mind") # 244) The Great Terror, A Reassessment - Robert Conquest (I wish I had the _The Great Terror (1968, long out of print), but this is well done) # 245) 334 - Thomas Disch ( I found this a well thought out book) + 246) Oedipus Rex - Sophocles 247) Children of the Arbat - Anatoli Rybakov (striking) 248) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (strange) 249) Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabakov 250) The 900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad - Harrison Salisbury (the best look at the siege I've read) # 251) The Life and Death of Lenin - Robert Payne (very flawed, but interesting) 252) Rude Tales and Glorious, a Retelling of the Arthurian Tales - Nicholas Seare (Lancelot and Guinivere as old folks) 253) Wilbur and Orville, A Biography of the Wright Brothers - Fred Howard (great biography) 254) Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All - Allan Gurganus (funny) 255) Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson (short, well written) 256) Beloved - Toni Morrison (intense) 257) Hurry Sundown - K.B. Gilden 258) Russian Spring - Norman Spinrad (bizarre) # 259) Little Heroes - Norman Spinrad (quite strange, a dark view) 260) Darkness At Noon - Arthur Koestler (sad, very powerful, a deep look at how one can be coerced while imprisoned) # 261) Black Earth, Red Star, A History of Soviet Security Policy, 1917-1991 - R. Craig Nation (very informative) 262) Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (classic) 263) The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco 264) Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco (complex) 265) Alas, Babylon - Pat Frank (early 1950s post-nuke book that stayed in my head a long time) # 266) Nightwork - Irwin Shaw (very funny, in a noir kind of way) # 266) Rich Man, Poor Man - Irwin Shaw 267) Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes (some quite sad stories, including the title story, from which the movie "Charli" was made) # 268) Revenge of the Lawn, Stories From 1962-70 - Richard Brautigan 269) Sombrero Fallout - Richard Brautigan (several of us read this aloud once in 1982) 270) Lord of the Flies - William Golding 271) The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCulloch (I liked this "saga") 272) Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (very strange, well written) 273) Warday - Whitley Streiber & James Kunetka (about a nuclear attack on the United States and the aftermath) # 274) Nature's End - Whitley Streiber & James Kunetka (ecological novel) 275) Failsafe - Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler (what happens if the nation's nuclear safeguards fail? this novel explores this issue) 276) The Shoes of the Fisherman - Morris West (first look at the inside of the Papacy I had as a student) 277) Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo 278) True Grit - Charles Portis (good) 279) The Genius and the Goddess - Aldous Huxley 280) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 281) Truman - David McCulloch + (good writing, a powerful biography) # 282) The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - James Gunn (useful and informative) 283) The Stand (revised) - Stephen King (not a King fan, but this was OK reading) 284) The Sunlight Dialogues - John Gardner 285) Safire's Political Dictionary - William Safire # 286) East of Eden - John Steinback (I liked this very grim novel) # 287) The Red Pony - John Steinback (the first Steinback I read, at about age 11 or 12, apparently the first Steinback for a lot of readers I know) # 288) The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck 289) The Bog People - P.V. Glob (very strange, but quite interesting, got this for Christmas the year before my first marriage broke up - 1972) # 290) Erewhon - Samuel Butler (an 1880s exploration of potential utopia) 291) The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone 292) The Dogs of War - Frederick Forsyth (a pretty realistic look at African mercenary activity despite fictional form) 293) Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse 294) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (one of the best accounts of Fifties mental institutions I've read) # 295) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Hannah Green (Joanne Greenberg) (intense, accurate, seminal for me) # 296) The Brethern - Woodward & Armstrong (good look at the inner workings of the Supreme Court in the Seventies) # 297) My Life - Leon Trotsky 298) The Last Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky (bizarre, hard to swallow that anyone survived the death of the Romanovs) 299) Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917 - Harrison Salisbury (very useful, well written, very good) # 300) Justice At Nuremburg - Robert Conot (a good look at the Nuremburg trials) 301) The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (intense, well-written) # 302) War for the Oaks - Emma Bull + (good modern fantasy) 303) The Good Earth - Pearl Buck 304) Native Tongue - Suzette Haden Elgin + # 305) Tough Guys Don't Dance - Norman Mailer (strange and well-written) 306) Duncton's Wood - William Horwood (a look at life from a mole's point of view) # 307) Tailchaser's Song - Tad Williams (a look at life from a cat's point of view) 308) The Armageddon Rag - George R.R. Martin + (good rock and roll alternate history novel) # 309) Gorbachev, Heretic in the Kremlin - Dusko Doder and Louise Branson (informative) # 310) Dreamsnake - Vonda McIntyre (vintage SF) # 311) The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun - Paul Gallico ( a child's tale, funny) 312) The End of the World News - Anthony Burgess 313) Hyperion - Dan Simmons (well written, intense) 314) The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Essays on Science Fiction - Samuel Delaney (hard going, but useful look at SF) # 315) Dahlgren - Samuel Delaney (my favorite Delaney) # 316) The Glittering Plain - William Morris 317) The Well at the World's End - William Morris (perhaps *the* predecessor to Tolkien's Ring trilogy) # 318) The Prince of Whales - R.L. Fisher 319) Bill, the Galactic Hero - Harry Harrison (hilarious) 320) The Stone and the Flute - Hans Bemmann 321) Pillar of the Sky - Cecelia Holland 322) Aton - Irving Greenfield (intense) 323) Little, Big - John Crowley (quite odd) 324) Engines in the Night, Science Fiction in the Eighties - Barry Malzburg (good) # 325) Grendel - John Gardner (a look at the Beowulf story from the "monster's" point of view) # 326) O'Keefe, The Life of an American Legend - Jeffrey Hogrefe (very good!) # 327) The Source - James Michener (interesting, one of his better novels in my estimation) 328) The Magician of Lublin - Isaac Bashevis Singer 329) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne (loved it) 330) The Autobiography of Malcom X - told to Alex Haley (read it in my twenties, quite moving) 331) Balkan Ghosts - Robert Kaplan (informative and current) 332) Memoirs - Andrei Sakharov (enlightening, a good look at this man's thinking) # 333) The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire - edit. Gwertzman & Kaufman (good, useful, topical) # 334) The Collapse of Communism - edit. Gwertzman & Kaufman (also quite useful and adtes the period well) # 335) The Elephant and the Kangeroo - T. H. White 336) Anything for Billy - Larry McMurtry (a fictional look at the life of Billy the Kid) 337) Eugene Debs, The Making of an American Radical - Ray Ginger (a good look at the best American labor man ever to have organized in this country) # 338) A Sorrow in Our Heart, The Life of Tecumseh - Allan Eckert (very well written, history via "documents," one of the best accounts of an Indian's life since the 1943 biography of Crazy Horse by Sandoz) # 339) a set of six, The Winning of America series - Allan Eckert (good books about early American history) # a) The Frontiersman b) The Conquerors (all excellently written) c) Gateway to Empire d) The Wilderness e) Wilderness Empire f) Twilight to Empire 340) The Making of the President, 1968 - Theodore White (a good look at the campaign I was first "blooded" in at the national level) 341) The Russia House - John LeCarre (one of the most poignant of LeCarre's novels) # 342) Kingdom of the Wall - Robert Silverberg 343) The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life and the Cold War - Ralph Inglis (intriguing social history) 344) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West (an excellent account of Yugoslavia between the wars, out of print and hard to find, don't have a copy) 345) The War in Eastern Europe - John Reed (very rare) 346) Russia Leaves the War - George Kennan (won Pulitzer)# (both excellent!) 347) The Decision to Intervene - George Kennan # 348) Future Shock - Alvin Toffler (useful) # 349) Power Shift - Alvin Toffler (fascinating, great bibliography) # 350) The Ides of March - Thornton Wilder 351) Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 352) The General in His Labyrinth - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 353) Division and Reunion: 1829-1889 - Woodrow Wilson (written before he was President, one of the few "scholarly works" by a US President) 354) The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society - Norbert Weiner 355) Breach of Faith, The Fall of Richard Nixon - Theodore H. White (good account of the "last days" of the Presidency of RMN) # 356) Being There - Jerzy Kosinski (funny) 357) The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski (tragic & bitterly, hauntingly sad) # 358) Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues - "Michael Douglas" (bizarre, but accurate) 359) Babbit - Sinclair Lewis (banal, but quite accurate about the times) 360) Main Street - Sinclair Lewis (powerful) 361) The Boys From Brazil - Ira Levin (bizarre book about Hitler clones) 362) Too Far to Walk - John Hersey 363) Hiroshima - John Hersey (powerful eyewitness accounts of this grisly event) # 364) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (sad) 365) Loose Change - Sara Davidson (an odd novel about women in the Sixties which I quite liked) # 366) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou (haunting) 367) Selected Poems - John Ciardi 368) Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition - Ed Regis (interesting science writing) 369) The Classics Reclassified - Richard Armour (funny) # 370) The Dosadi Experiment - Frank Herbert (intriguing) # 371) Grant, A Biography - William McFeely (solid) 372) Roosevelt and Hopkins - Robert Sherwood (very good) # 373) A Thousand Days - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (slanted, but well done) 374) Profiles of Courage - John F. Kennedy (good) # 375) Huey Long - T. Harry Williams (excellent) 376) The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (extraordinary novel about the Depression years in the US) # 377) The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters - Robert Lewis Taylor (Pulitzer fiction winner, well-written) 378) Sharky's Machine - William Diehl (I just liked it) 379) Boris Yeltsin, A Political Biography - Solovyov and Klepikova (very good, also very flawed) # 380) The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler # 381) Sandkings - George R.R. Martin (bizarre, good stories) 382) Syzygy - Frederick Pohl + 383) Michaelmas - Algis Budrys + (intriguing) 384) Augustus - John Buchan 385) Malevil - Robert Merle (another post-nuke book set in France) # 386) Killings - Calvin Trillin (odd collection of essays) 387) Ivan the Terrible - Henri Troyat (only book on this man I've ever seen) # 388) Shudder Child - Warren Norwood (quite good, a different kind of catastrophe book - post-earthquake that destroys the structure of the old USA, set in Warren's beloved Texas, 70 years after the "Shudder," the king-hell earthquake of all earthquakes!) # 389) The Birth of the People's Republic of Antartica - John Batchelor (very bizarre, quite dark) 390) Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, Further Reflections in Natural History - Stephen Jay Gould 391) The Zimmerman Telegram - Barbara Tuchman 392) The Further Adventures of Halley's Comet - John Batchelor 393) Assassination in America - Jim McKinley + * (seminal on the theme, unfortunately out of print, and I've known this man for years and still can't get a copy!) # 394) Billy Bathgate - E.L. Doctorow (quite strange but good) 395) Blackburn - Brad Denton (a novel from a serial killer's point of view) # 396) Waiting For Godot - Samuel Becket (intense) 397) The Tin Drum - Guntar Grass 398) Dinner at Deviant's Palace - Tim Powers + (very good SF) 399) Five Smooth Stones - Ann Fairbairn (a novel about bi-racial relationships, a schmaltzy book, a saga, but I always liked it)) # 400) Other Americas - Norman Spinrad 401) Crow Killer - Thorp and Bunker (the "true" mountain man that later was fictionalized as _Mountain Man, also known as "Liver Eatin' Johnson") # 402) Nova - Samuel Delaney 403) Babel-17 - Samuel Delaney (very good) # 404) Rite of Passage - Alexi Panshin (intriguing) # 405) Triton - Samuel Delaney (quite complex set far in the future) # 406) Time Storm - Gordon Dickson (well done, have had and lost two copies of this book) # 407) Arthur Rex - Thomas Berger (unusual Arthurian novel) 408) Neighbors - Thomas Berger 409) The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan - Anthony Brown (about the head of the OSS, the precursor organization to the CIA) 410) Count Zero - William Gibson (great collection of stories) 411) Neuromancer - William Gibson (the best of and considered a prime progenitor of "cyberpunk") # 412) The Marching Morons - C.M. Kornbluth (old "classic" SF) 413) Around the Cragged Hill - George Kennan (a personal memoir as his life draws to a close) 414) The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Stephen Donaldson (I liked this series, and I apparently am rare in doing so, but it is grim, I did not like the three books in the series he wrote afterward that continue this theme and main character. Very few people seem to like these books, and it is quite depressing in places. The followup trilogy is even more so) # a) Lord Foul's Bane b) The Illearth War c) The Power That Preserves 415) The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge - Carlos Castenada (I remember most "finding one's spot" from this book) # 416) A Separate Reality - Carlos Castenada 417) Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley # 418) Island - Aldous Huxley 419) Rogue in Space - Frederic Brown 420) Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan (first Brautigan I recall reading) # 421) Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt - Richard Brautigan 422) Trout Fishing In America - Richard Brautigan (I always liked this one) # 423) Public Opinion - Walter Lippmann 424) Soldiers Three - Rudyard Kipling (racist, but very good dialogue writing, written about eighty years ago))# 425) 1919 - John Dos Passos 426) Bridge Over the River Kwai - Pierre Boule 427) The Postman Always Rings Twice - James Cain (intense) 428) The Crucible of Time - John Brunner (perhaps one of his best) # 429) Stand On Zanzibar - John Brunner (a Hugo winner, excellent!) # 430) The Shock Wave Rider - John Brunner (sited in KC; very, very good) # 431) Kent State - James Michener (the only account of this event I've ever sen) 432) The Drifters - James Michener (an intriguing novel of the Sixties) # 433) Islandia - Austin Tappan Wright (old fantasy) 434) The Complete Venus Equilateral - George Smith (I liked, and still do, these now rather dated stories) # 435) Richard Nixon - Fawn Brodie (a very black look) 436) Dog Years - Guntar Grass 437) A Browser's Dictionary - John Ciardi 438) Earth in Upheaval - Immanuel Velikovsky (bizarre, and wrong) 439) Worlds In Collision - Immanuel Velikovsky 440) Lord of the Trees & The Mad Goblin - Phillip Jose Farmer (rather sexually graphic, first SF in that style I ever encountered) 441) Heart of the Comet - Benford and Brin (a ride on Halley's comet) 442) The Complete Rhyming Dictionary - edit. Clement Wood (useful) 443) The Fan Man - William Kotswinkle (funny) 444) The Past Through Tomorrow - Robert Heinlein (his "future history" series of stories) # 445) Time Enough For Love - Robert Heinlein (what *I* consider as his seminal work) # 446) To Sail Beyond the Sunset - Robert Heinlein (his last work of fiction, and not as good as earlier work; his exploration of the incest theme, again, may strike some as rather bizarre) 447) The Long Winter - John Christopher (strange) # 448) No Blade of Grass - John Christopher (intense) 449) Does God Exist? - Hans Kung 450) Polymath - John Brunner (just liked this SF too) # 451) Coming From the Country - John McPhee 452) The Tontine - Thomas Costain ( a VERY unusual lottery) # 453) The Black Rose - Thomas Costain (great "historical fiction") 454) The Spider King - Lawrence Schoonover (first book on Louis XI I ever read, good despite being "historical fiction," I wish I could find a "real" biography of this ruler) # 455) The Great Train Robbery - Michael Crichton ~ 456) The Wanting of Levine - Michael Halberstam (a Jew becomes President of the US, rather funny) 457) King of the Gypsies - Peter Maas (good look at these elusive people) 458) Tom Horn - William Goldman (pretty accurate for fiction) 459) The Seventh Day - Hans Helmut Kirst (another look at post-holocaust behavior) 460) The Group - Mary McCarthy 461) Vandenberg - Oliver Lange (intense) 462) Kalki - Gore Vidal (bizarre tale of humanity's lemming like urge to self-destruction) 463) She - H. Rider Haggard 464) The Harrad Experiment - Robert Rimmer (eye-opening about 1960s sexual relationship exploration) # 465) The Rebellion of Yale Marratt - Robert Rimmer 466) Revolution 1776, A Short History of the United States - John Preston (an excellent account of the American Revolution, more accurate than most of the pap we grew up with) 467) The Luck of Roaring Camp & Other Stories - Bret Harte 468) Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell (excellent essays) 469) Sinai Tapestry - Edward Whittemore (quite convoluted) 470) Advise and Consent - Allan Drury 471) The Mosquito Coast - Paul Theroux 472) Sacajawea - Anna Lee Waldo (long historical fiction, but well done) 473) The Sand Pebbles - Richard McKenna (also long historical fiction, set in China between the two world wars) 474) The Magus - John Fowles 475) The Lady of the Lake & Other Poems - Sir Walter Scott 476) Lady Chatterly's Lover - D.H. Lawrence (vaguely racy) 477) Traveler - Richard Adams (about Robert E. Lee's horse from the horse's point of view) 478) The Art of Fiction - John Gardner (useful) 479) The Encyclopedia of Military History - Dupuy and Dupuy (quite a good reference book) # 480) The Fall of the Dynasties - Edmond Taylor (informative, it recounts the fall of the empires of the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs) # 481) The Brothers Reuther - Victor Reuther (good) # 482) An End to Silence - edit. Stephen Cohen 483) The Seven Sisters - Anthony Sampson (good look at the oil industry) 484) Backfire, American Culture and the Vietnam War - Loren Baritz 485) The Prize, The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power - Daniel Yergin (an excellent look at the oil industry from its beginnings to the present) # 486) Blind Ambition - John Dean (a "tell all" after his conviction) 487) All The President's Men - Woodward and Bernstein (good, and informative) # 488) The Lincoln Conspiracy - Balsiger and Sellier 489) The Jefferson Airplane - Ralph Gleason (a cultural history of the West Coast music scene in the Sixties) 490) Moscow Coup - Martin Sixsmith (informing about the odd events of 1993) # 491) Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches - Marvin Harris 492) Cannibals and Kings - Marvin Harris 493) Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucenogenic Drugs - Aaronson & Osmend (a standard on this theme) # 494) Writing On Both Sides of the Brain - Henriette Klauser (very useful for a writer) # 495) A Bright Shining Lie, John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam - Neil Sheehan (maybe one of the better histories of the Vietnam conflict, won a Pulitzer) 496) Dispatches From The Barricades - John Simpson (about all of the events around the world in 1989) # 497) I'm OK -- You're OK - Thomas Harris (seminal for me) # 498) Zen Buddhism - D.T. Suzuki (very complex) # 499) The Greening of America - Charles Reich (provocative) 500) Russia and History's Turning Point - Alexander Kerensky 501) The End of the Soviet Union- Helene d'Encausse (solid) # 502) Job, A Comedy of Justice - Robert Heinlein 503) Preparing for the Twenty-First Century - Paul Kennedy # 504) The Secret Ascension or Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas - Michael Bishop (wonderful) 505) Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson 506) Redwall - Brian Jacques (another story from animal's point of view) 507) Glory Season - David Brin 508) Perils of Perestroika, Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, 1989-1991 - edit. Isaac Tarasulo 509) Conquest Without War - Edit. Mager and Katel 510) Indians of the United States - Clark Wissler 511) Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson 512) East of the Sun, The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia - Benson Bobrick (well done) 513) The Unwound Way - Adams and Brooks 514) Nothing Sacred - Elizabeth Scarborough * 515) Raft - Stephen Baxter (very bizarre) 516) Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States, 2nd Edition - John D. Gaddis 517) Ethnicity in International Politics - Daniel P. Moynihan 518) Scharansky, Hero of Our Time - Martin Gilbert 519) King Arthur and the Grail, The Arthurian Legends and Their Meaning - Richard Cavendish 520) The Moscow Correspondents, Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost - Whitman Batlow 521) Judgement Day Archives - Andre Moscovit 522) The Second Russian Revolution - Angus Roxburgh # 523) Russian-English Translator's Dictionary, A Guide to Scientific and Techical Usage, 3rd Edition - Mikhail Zimmerman and Claudia Vedeneeva (perhaps the best book I brought back from Russia in 1993) # 524) Old Vladivistok - trans. Alexander Melnikov (gave me an idea of the vastness of Russia, and before it, the Soviet Union, and the difficulties of the old "empire" to rule such a huge land; one of the few dual language - Russian and English - books I own) 525) The History of the Haymarket Affair - Henry David 526) The Universal Myths - Alexander Eliot (quite intriguing) 527) A Harvest of World Folk Tales - edit. Milton Rugoff 528) Creative Brooding, Readings to Provoke Thought and Trigger Action - Robert Raines (it *is* thought provoking) 529) Russia and the West - Jerry Hough 530) The Russian Syndrome, One Thousand Years of Political Murder - Helene D' Encausse (well done) # 531) Conversations With Stalin - Milovan Djilas (quite insightful) # 532) Master of Middle Earth, The Fiction of J. R.R. Tolkien - Paul Kocher 533) The Cabala - Thornton Wilder 534) Utopia in Power, The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present - Heller & Nekrich (excellent, though with flaws!) # 535) Moscow Spring - William and Jane Taubman (good) 536) Bakunin on Anarchy - edit. Sam Dolguff 537) American Psycho - Brett E. Ellis (sick, an odd view) 538) Breaking with Moscow - Arkady Shevchenko 539) The Sunset of the Romanov Dynasty - Iroshnikov, Protsai, and Shelayev (a Russian look at the last years of the Romanovs in a coffee-table book style, many great photographs) # 540) THe Future: A Guide to Information Sources - edit. World Future Society (useful info) 541) A Question of Character, A Life Of John F. Kennedy - Thomas Reeves 542) ...the Heavens and the Earth, A Political History of the Space Age - Walter McDougall (very good) 543) Mikhail Bulgakov and His Times - compiled by Vyacheslav Vozdvizhensky 544) The Falcon and the Snowman - Robert Lindsey (espionage history) 545) Essays in Contemporary History, 1946-1990 - Vladimir Alexandrov (a Russian look at history) 546) Kingdoms of Europe - Gene Gurney (useful) 547) The Will to Doubt - Bertrand Russell (very strange) 548) Revolution from Above, Where is the Soviet Union Going? - Tariq Ali 549) Wired - Bob Woodward 550) Robert Capa, A Biography - Richard Whelan (an excellent account of a great photographer's life) 551) Russia 2010, and What It Means for the World - Yergin and Gustafson (one of the best projections and speculative books about Russia's future I've read; a project of the Cambridge Energy Reasearch Associates, it is eminently readable, and worth reading, although way too optimistic to my way of thinking) # 552) Broken Bonds, the Disintegration of Yugoslavia - Lenard J. Cohen (a very recent book, it is quite excellent) 553) Beria, Stalin's First Lieutenant - Amy Knight (the most recent biography of this monstrous man) # 554) Sexual Personae - Camille Paglia ( a very odd book, but an unusual look at sexuality, feminism and the interactions of women and men) # 555) Steel Beach - John Varley 556) The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus - L. Frank Baum (written in 1902 and recently reprinted, a delightful tale about Santa Claus' early life, and the development of all the traditions of Christmas; light reading but heart-warming) 557) Partridge's Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English - Eric Partridge (a great reference book) 558) The Wives of Henry VIII - Antonia Fraser (the newest book on this theme, and as well written as Lady Fraser's books usually are) 559) Russia and the Old Regime - Richard Pipes (originally done in 1974, this second edition is a useful look at the last days of Tsardom) # 560) Post-Communist Studies & Political Science, Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology - edit. Fleron and Hoffman (a scholarly look at the field of Sovietology after the "fall of Communism") # 561) Gorbachev - Zhores Medvedev (two interesting bios) 562) Andropov - Zhores Medvedev 563) Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick (a wonderful account of this very talented man's life, written by the author of _Chaos) 564) Mothers and Daughters - Elena Bonner (an autobiographical book by Sakharov's widow about her mother, grandmother and herself) 565) The Truth About Chernobyl - Grigori Medvedev (no relative of the twins Zhores and Roy, this account of the disaster by the former deputy deputy chief engineer may be one of the best accounts of the catastrophe so far written) 566) The Mammoth Book of Killer Women - edited by Richard Jones (an account of famous women murderers in the US, primarily, pretty bizarre) 567) The Best American Essays, 1993 - editor Joseph Epstein (a great set of essays, a good look at current styles of essay writing of that year) 568) What It Takes - Richard Ben Cramer (probably a definitive account of the 1988 US Presidential campaign) 569) The Birth of the Modern, World Society 1815-1830 - Paul Johnson (a conservative's look at the immediate post-Napoleonic period) 570) The Complete Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (an EXCELLENT book!) # 571) Clockers - Richard Price (a chilling novel that is an all too accurate look at the drug business) 572) Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, Moscow, August, 1991 - James Billington (an account of the 1991 putsch by the Librarian of Congress) # 573) The Icon and the Axe - James Billington (considered one of the standards on Russian history, extremely well written - I read it in Russia in 1994 and gave it to one of my hosts) # 574) Dinotopia - James Gurney (a delightful fantasy about dinosaurs and humans on a remote island, the artwork is incredible!) 575) The American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition (one of the best new dictionaries to come down the pike in a long time) # 576) Journey Into the Whirlwind - Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg (an extraordinary account of Stalin's Terror) # 577) Sometines a Great Notion - Ken Kesey (a greatly underated novel) 578) Sailor's Song - Ken Kesey (his newest, the guy ages well) 579) Molotov Remembers, Inside Kremlin Politics, Conversations with Felix Chuev (one of the survovors of the Stalin era, in the apparatus from Lenin to Khrushchev, an enlightening look at the range of Soviet history from an insider's point of view) 580) The Legacy of Chernobyl - Zhores Medvedev (a scientist's look at the risks of nuclear power) 581) The System, An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics - Georgi Arbatov (the head of the US-Canada Institute, one of Gorbachev's "inside men," an intriguing account of the later Soviet period. My copy is now autographed, I met Arbatov this year) # 582) Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (another damning novel of the gulags!) 583) The Lost Revolutionary, A Biography of John Reed - O'Conner and Walker (a bio of the man who wrote _Ten Days That Shook the World, one of two Americans buried in the Kremlin Wall - I saw his marker in the wall in 1993) 584) The Fall of a Titan - Igor Gouzenko (a powerful, stirring, haunting novel) 585) Russia 1917, The February Revolution - George Katkov (a history of the lesser known of the two 1917 revolutions of Russia, written by a Russian) # 586) War and Anti-War, Survival At the Dawn of the 21st Century - Alvin and Heidi Toffler (provocative) 587) Playboys and Killjoys, An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy - Harry Levin (exploring a sub-theme of life always of fascination to me) 588) Double Star - Robert Heinlein (a switch, rather artful even if dated) 589) Khrushchev's Russia - Edward Crankshaw ( another look at the period by a solid historian) 590) A Documentary History of Communism in Russia, From Lenin to Gorbachev - Robert V. Daniels (an excellent account, told by the documents of the times) # 591) Goodnight! - Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) (he was tried for writing this book and smuggling it to the West) 592) The First Socialist Society, A History of the Soviet Union From Within - Geoffrey Hosking 593) A Study of History - Arnold J. Toynbee (a truly seminal book for any would-be historian) 594) The Opium War, 1840-1842 - Peter Ward Fay (a well-written account of an obscure event) 595) Schismatrix - Bruce Sterling (vintage "cyberpunk") 596) Notes of a Dirty Old Man - Charles Bukowski (gave me an idea of what the "range" of "creative writing" could be) 597) The Flamingo's Smile, Reflections in Natural History - Stephen Jay Gould 598) K.C., A History of Kansas City, Missouri - Brown and Dorsett (one of the best histories of my adopted home of 29 years written that I'm aware of) # 599) The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank (I had forgotten this book, and my 11 year old read it recently, and reminded me of how much it had affected me as a teenager) # 600) The Fifties - David Halberstam (the best account of my coming-of-age-years I've read) # 601) The History of Middle Earth series - edited by Christopher Tolkien (some folks find this series very pedantic, but I have found it quite illuminating, intriguing, a look at a writers entire body of work) # a) The Book of Lost Tales, Volume 1 b) The Book of Lost Tales, Volume 2 c) The Lays of Beleriand d) The Shaping of Middle Earth e) The Lost Road f) The Return of the Shadow g) The Treason of Isengard h) The War of the Ring i) Sauron Defeated j) Morgoth's Ring k) The War of the Jewels 602) The Summer of '64 - David Halberstam 603) Russia Speaks, An Oral History from the Revolution to the Present - Richard Lourie (well done) 604) The Dune Encyclopedia - edit. by Willis McNelly # 605) The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 - Hugh Seton-Watson (very strong writing and solid history) # 606) Sex, Art and American Culture - Camile Paglia 607) American Assassins, The Darker Side of Politics - James W. Clarke (an excellent study of this phenomenon in America) 608) War and the Rise of the State - Bruce Porter 609) Winston Churchill - Henry Pelling 610) two by Kissinger, his memoirs a) White House Years b) Years of Upheaval (a bit self-serving, but an interesting look into a premier foreign policy mind that appears to have been passed by in time) 611) Buffalo Bill, Last of the Great Scouts - Helen Cody Wetmore (an as-told to, Wetmore was Cody's sister, this is a reproduction of an 1899 edition)1 612) Brave Companions, Portraits in History - David McCullough (has a portrait of one of my ancestors, Harriet Beecher Stowe) # 613) See How They Ran, The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate - Gil Troy 614) The Politics Presidents Make - Stephen Skowronek 615) Life After Nuclear War - Arthur Katz (chilling, hopefully a book never coming true, but intriguing too) 616) Rainer Maria Rilke - Patricia Brodsky + * 617) A History of Russia - George Vernadsky # 618) A Collection of Essays - George Orwell (bought in Russia, I found these useful to my writing) 619) The Thinking Game, A Guide to Study - Eugene Meehan 620) Primal Fear - William Diehl (very strange story of a multiple personality, or was he?) 621) The Next Century - David Halberstam 622) Russia at the Barricades, Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup - Bonnell, Cooper & Freidin # 623) The Russian Anarchists - Paul Avrich 624) The Bolsheviks - Adam Ulam (pretty insightful for its datedness) 625) The Communists - Adam Ulam 626) The Russian Revolutionary Intelligensia - Philip Pomper 627) Lenin, A New Biography - Dmitri Volkogonov (very solid) # 628) Mr. Bliss - J.R.R. Tolkien 629) Caliban's Hour - Tad Williams 630) From the Periphery: Poems and Essays - H. Palmer Hall + * 631) The Living Presidency - Emmett John Hughes 632) Disclosure - Michael Crichton 633) The Daisy Chain - James O' Shea (about the "looting" of a Texas S & L) 634) Witches, Wraiths and Warlocks - edit. Ronald Curran 635) Anne Frank's Tales From the House Behind - Anne Frank 636) The Great Fear - David Caute (about the anti-Communist "purges"of the 1950s) 637) The Nuclear Age - Tim O' Brien 638) Jaguar - Loup Durand 639) Trying Conclusions, New and Selected Poems 1961-1991 - Howard Nemerov + (pretty definitive collection) 640) Heavy Time - C.J. Cherryh 641) Searoad - Ursula LeGuin 642) Private Pleasures - Lawrence Sanders 643) Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas - Tom Robbins (funny) 644) Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy 645) Sarajevo Survival Guide - FAMA 646) The Tomorrow File - Lawrence Sanders (his only "SF" work) # 647) Capital Crimes - Lawrence Sanders (a parallel Rasputin in the US is the theme) 648) The Case of Lucy Bending - Lawrence Sanders (quite sad) 649) The Passion of Molly T. - Lawrence Sanders (odd) 650) The Pleasures of Helen - Lawrence Sanders (end will surprise you) 651) The Norton Book of Science Fiction - ed. by LeGuin and Attebery 652) The Stress of Her Regard - Tim Powers 653) Gypsy Folk Tales - Diane Tong 654) Grumbles From the Grave - Robert Heinlein 655) Pointed Home: A Cross-Country Essay - W. Scott Olsen (I just liked this too) + 656) Just This Side of Fargo - W. Scott Olsen + 657) Gearing of Love - John Oughton + 658) Wool Highways and Other Poems - David Ray + * 659) Mata Hari's Lost Words - John Oughton + (great stuff!) 660) The Jaipur Sketchbook - Judy Ray * 661) Okla Hannali - R.A. Lafferty 662) Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again - John Gilgun + 663) Pigeons in the Chandeliers - Judy Ray + 664) From the Inside Out - John Gilgun + 665) From Beirut to Jerusalem - Thomas Friedman (very good look at Middle Eastern politics and events) 666) A History of Russia - Bernard Pares (excellent if dated) 667) A History of Russia, 4th edition - Nicholas Riasanovsky (a fifth edition is out, but I'm told it's not as good as this one, "done too hurriedly," one professor told me) # 668) The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought - Nicholas Riasanovsky 669) The Disintegration of the Monolith - Boris Kagarlitsky 670) Empire of the Czar, A Journey Through Eternal Russia - the Marquis de Custine (last century's writing, but very accurate fior the times) 671) We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (banned in Russia for decades) 672) Selected Poems - Osip Mandelstam (an OK collection) 673) Selected Poems - Boris Pasternak (read this book in Russia, given to me by my closest friend there) # 674) Predatory Dinosaurs of the World - Gregory S. Paul 675) The Dance of Anger - Harriet Lerner 676) The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla - Thomas Martin (intriguing) 677) Breakout Into Space - George Elias 678) A World Lit Only By Fire - William Manchester (evokes a wonderful sense of what pre-Renaissance life was like for most people) # 679) Spencerville - Nelson DeMille 680) Buffalo Girls - Larry McMurtry 681) Sarah Canary - Karen Fowler 682) Christmas Magic - edit. David Hartwell 683) The Beats - edit. Seymour Krim 684) The Golden Room - Irving Wallace (a fictional account of the infamous Everleigh sisters and their brothel in Chicago) 685) Shadows Fall - Simon Green 686) Smilla's Sense of Snow - Peter Hoeg (very good!) # 687) The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis 688) A Creed for the Third Millenium - Colleen McCullough 689) The Father Christmas Letters - J.R.R. Tolkien 690) ten by Laura Ingalls Wilder - a) Little House in the Big woods b) Little House on the Prairie c) Farmer Boy d) On the Banks of Plum Creek e) By the Shores of Silver Lake f) The Long Winter g) Little Town on the Prairie h) These Happy Golden Years i) The First Four Years j) Little House in the Ozarks, The Rediscovered Writings 691) The Portable Russian Reader - selected by Bernard Guerney 692) The Conquest of a Continent, Siberia and the Russians - W. Bruce Lincoln (very informative) 693) The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog - edit. Howard Rheingold 694) Daemon in Lithuania - Henri Guigonnat 695) The Hole in the Flag - Andrei Codrescu (about Romania) 696) The Empire of the Tsars - Elisabeth Heresch 697) The Oxford Book of Science Fiction - edit. Tom Shippey (excellent collection) 698) The Dinosaur Heresies - Robert Bakker (thought provoking) # 699) The Velvet Prison, Artists Under State Socialism - Miklos Haraszti 700) The Once and Future Goddess - Elinor Gadon 701) The Postman - David Brin (very powerful) # 702) Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke 703) An Encyclopedia of Fairies - Katherine Briggs (useful reference) 704) The Penkovsky Papers - Oleg Penkovsky 705) Tolkien and the Critics - Isaacs and Zimbardo 706) A History of the Soviet Union - Georg von Rauch # 707) The Dream That Failed - Walter Laqueur 708) A History of Russia - Jesse Clarkson # 709) A Short History of Russia - D.H. Sumner # 710) Armand Hammer - Steve Weinberg 711) Toward A Better World - Mikhail Gorbachev 712) Watership Down - Richard Adams (a delightful look at life from the point of view of rabbits) # 713) Maia - Richard Adams (his longest novel, even longer than _Shardik) 714) The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett 715) The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler 716) The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 717) Freedom - William Safire (a long novel about the Civil War) 718) Burr - Gore Vidal (very well written) 719) Something of Value - Robert Ruark (a novel about the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya) 720) The Indian Wars - Paul Wellman (solid) 721) The Iron Mistress - Paul Wellman (a novel about the Bowie knife, and James Bowie) 722) Ancient Evenings - Norman Mailer 723) Good As Gold - Joseph Heller 724) Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut 725) Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut 726) Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut 727) The Devil's Alternative - Frederick Forsythe 728) The House of Spirits - Isabel Allende 729) Close Encounters With the Deity - Michael Bishop (uses the late Phil Dick as a major character) 730) The Way of the Pilgrim - Gordon Dickson 731) The Dosadi Experiment - Frank Herbert 732) The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula LeGuin 733) Always Coming Home - Ursula LeGuin (perhaps her best novel) 734) Endangered Species - Gene Wolfe 735) Friday - Robert Heinlein 736) Gateway - Frederick Pohl 737) Catherine the Great - John Alexander (well done, my copy is an autographed one) + 738) The Kremlin Letter - Noel Behn (one of my favorite spy novels) # 739) Ancient of Days - Michael Bishop 740) Tau Zero - Poul Anderson 741) Macroscope - Piers Anthony (one of his earlist, *I* think he went downhill from this book) 742) The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth - Roger Zelazny (great collection of his stories) 743) This Immortal - Roger Zelazny 744) Emma Goldman- John Chalberg 745) Tamerlane - Harold Lamb (one of the few books about this legendary conquerer, albeit fiction) 746) The Viking Process - Norman Hartley (an excellent thriller) 747) Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin 748) The JFK Assassination, the Facts and the Theories - Carl Oglesby (a "left" look at this event) 749) Nixon Agonistes - Garry Wills (insightful) 750) The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac 751) The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac 752) The Iceman Cometh - Eugene O' Neill 753) Ford, The Men and the Machines - Robert Lacey (very good) 754) The Kingdom - Robert Lacey (about the origins and rise of Saudi Arabia, very useful and informative) # 755) Peace - Gene Wolfe 756) The Lost Legends of Earth - A.A. Attanasio 757) The Stranger - Albert Camus # 758) The Fall - Albert Camus 759) The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus 760) The Informer - Liam O' Flaherty (intense) 761) Terms of Endearment - Larry McMurtry 762) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 763) Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (bizarre but powerful) 764) The Order of the Death's Head, The Story of Hitler's SS - Heinz Hohne (a grim, but in-depth, history of Hitler's SS police and their infamous deeds) 765) After the Good War - Peter Breggin (an odd in-the-future novel from Britain) 766) Interface - Stephen Bury 767) White Fang - Jack London (the best dog book of my boyhood) # 768) Gracie - George Burns (I liked this) 769) Silverlock - John Myers Myers (classic fantasy) # 770) Ringworld - Larry Niven (well written) 771) Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe (an ancestress of mine, and recently written of in David McCullough's _Brave Companions - her book is a classic) 772) Marriage Lines - Ogden Nash 773) Victim Prime - Robert Sheckley 774) The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara (a novel about the Civil War and the Indian wars) 775) CIA Diary - Philip Agee 776) Her - Lawrence Ferlinghetti 777) Howl - Allen Ginsberg (his best known work) # 778) Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe 779) The Last of the Mohicans - James Fennimore Cooper 780) The Sea Wolf - Jack London 781) Present at the Creation - Dean Acheson 782) Isak Dinesen, The Life of a Storyteller - Judith Thurman 783) My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. - Coretta Scott King 784) Citizen Hearst - W.A. Swanberg (educational) 785) Sybil - Flora Schreiber (strange) 786) The Puzzle Palace - James Banford (an excellent book about the National Security Agency) # 787) The Comforts of Madness - Paul Sayer 788) And Chaos Died - Joanna Russ 789) Queen Victoria - Cecil Woodham-Smith (informative) 790) The Status Civilization & Notions Unlimited - Robert Sheckley 791) The Cornelius Chronicles - Michael Moorcock 792) The Trial of the Catonsville Nine - Daniel Berrigan 793) Prince Ombra - Roderick MacLeish ("nice" fantasy) 794) The Last Coin - James Blaylock (very contemporary fantasy, and well written) 795) Starshine - Theodore Sturgeon (classic SF) 796) Love Medicine - Louise Erdrich 797) A Little Revenge, Ben Franklin and His Son - Willard Randall 798) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (the only book of Rand's I like - I disagree with most of her politics) # 799) Libra - Don Delillo 800) White Noise - Don Delillo (bizarre) 801) Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy - Henry Kissinger 802) Remembering America - Richard Goodwin 803) Theophilus North - Thornton Wilder # 804) In Cold Blood - Truman Capote (the first account of a mass murder I'd ever read) # 805) A Man Called Intrepid - William Stevenson 806) Journey to the East - Herman Hesse 807) Panic on Wall Street - Robert Sobel (an excellent look at American economic history) # 808) The Maltese Falcon - Dashiel Hammett 809) The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane 810) The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (the very first SF I encountered, read aloud by my sixth grade teacher) # 811) My Life and Hard Times - James Thurber (the best!) # 812) The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments - James Thurber 813) Fables For Our Times - James Thurber 814) Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze - James Thurber 815) The Owl in the Attic - James Thurber 816) The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester 817) Master of Middle Earth, the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien - Paul Kocher 818) Tolkien: A Biography - Humphrey Carpenter 819) A Guide to Middle Earth - Robert Foster # 820) Of Time, Space and Oher Things - Issac Asimov 821) A Punishment for Peace - Philip Berrigan 822) Silent Spring - Rachel Carson 823) The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin # 824) The Population Bomb - Paul Ehrlich 825) Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones - Samuel Delaney 826) The Duke of Deception - Geoffrey Wolf 827) Twentieth Century Russia - Donald Treadgold (the author died in December, 1994, but this book went through six or seven editions) 828) A Howard Nemerov Reader - Howard Nemerov (my copy was autographed by him less than a month before he died) 829) Diane Arbus Magazine Work - Diane Arbus (Nemerov's sister, a suicide, and an excellent photographer) 830) Twenty Letters to A Friend - Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin's daughter, this was written after she fled to the West) 831) The Man That Changed the World - Gail Sheehy (about Gorbachev) 832) I Hope - Riasa Gorbachev 833) Russia and the West - George Kennan # 834) Perestroika and Soviet National Security - Michael MccGwire 835) A New Russia? - Harrison Salisbury 836) Milestones in Glasnost and Perestroika - edit. by Hewett and Winston # 837) Political Essays - Roy Medvedev # 838) The Glasnost Reader - ed. Joanthan Eisen 839) The Soviet Union 2000 - Walter Laqueur 840) A Window on Russia - Edmund Wilson 841) The Sixties - Edmund Wilson # 842) Starkweather - William Allen (about the Charlie Starkweather murder spree of 1959) # 843) Glitz - Elmore Leonard 844) Maximum Bob - Elmore Leonard 845) Stick - Elmore Leonard 846) The Green Hills of Earth - Robert Heinlein # 847) The Child Buyer - John Hersey 848) Forty Thousand in Gehenna - C.J. Cherryh 849) Shardik - Richard Adams 850) Radix - A.A. Attanasio 851) Across the Sea of Suns - Gregory Benford 852) Hell's Angels - Hunter Thompson 853) a trilogy by the notorious Hunter S. Thompson - # a) The Great Shark Hunt, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1 - Hunter Thompson b) Generation of Swine, Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2 - Hunter Thompson c) Songs of the Doomed, More Notes on the Death of the American Dream, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3 - Hunter Thompson 854) The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo - Oscar Zeta Acosta 855) The Autobiography of Ben Franklin - Ben Franklin 856) Tortilla Flat - John Steinback 857) The Making of a Quagmire - David Halberstam (about Vietnam) 858) Blood and Money - Thomas Thompson 859) Jack in the Box - William Kotswinkle 860) The Leopard's Tooth - William Kotswinkle 861) Seducton in Berlin - William Kotswinkle (not as substantial as the others, but wonderfully illustrated) 862) And the Sea Will Tell - Vincent Bugliosi (a sad tale about a true murder case, powerfully written) 863) Helter, Skelter - Vincent Bugliosi (about the Manson case) # 864) The Family - Ed Sanders (also about Manson) 865) O' Jerusalem - Collins and Lapierre (about Israel coming to independence) # 866) Freedom at Midnight - Collins and Lapierre (about India's coming to independence) # 867) The Venerable Bede - Richard Condon 868) Arigato - Richard Condon 869) The Conspiracy - John Hersey (a novel about Nero) 870) The Algiers Motel Incident - John Hersey (non-fiction about an incident during the Detroit riots of 1967) 871) My Petition for More Space - John Hersey 872) The Making of a Counter-Culture - Theodore Roszak (very good) # 873) Windhaven - Martin and Tuttle (good collaborative SF) 874) Farewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler 875) Fatal Vision - Joe McGinniss (about the Jeffrey McDonald murder case) 876) The Naked Ape - Desmond Morris 877) Crusaders, Criminals, Crazies - Frederick Hacker 878) The Teamsters - Steven Brill 879) Crazy Horse - Mari Sandoz (done in 1943, but well-written) # 880) Louis XIV - John Wolf (definitive) # 881) Power - Bertrand Russell (odd, but illuminating) 882) The American Writer and the Great Depression - Harvey Swados 883) Senator Joe McCarthy - Richard Rovere (informative work about a dastardly guy) 884) The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti - Felix Frankfurter # 885) The Color Purple - Alice Walker 886) In Search of Our Mother's Gardens - Alice Walker 887) William Carlos Williams - Paul Mariani (quite definitive) # 888) Daniel Boone - John Bakeless (reprint of older book, but well done) # 889) Son of the Morning Star - Evan Connell (an odd, well-written book about Custer) 890) The Trial - Franz Kafka 891) History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell (hard to get through but useful) 892) The Fate of the Earth - Jonathan Schnell 893) Megatrends 2000 - Naisbitt & Aburdene # 894) Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book - Edwin Betts (only a record keeper could like this book!) 895) Utopian Thought in the Western World - Manuel & Manuel 896) America's Political Dynasties - Stephen Hess 897) The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce (excellent, biting humor) # 898) The Ottoman Centuries - Lord Kinross # 899) Lone Star, A History of Texas and the Texans - T.R. Fehrenbach (good) # 900) A History of Russia, the Soviet Union and Beyond, 4th edition - MacKenzie & Curran (excellent textbook) # 901) To Bear Any Burden - Al Santoli (Vietnam book) 902) Vietnam - ed. Marvin Gettleman 903) A Rumor of War - Phil Caputo 904) The Battle of Dienbienphu - Jules Roy 905) Decent Interval - Frank Snepp (a CIA look at Vietnam) 906) The Ten Thousand Day War, Vietnam 1945-1975 - Michael Maclear (very well done) # 907) Ataturk - Lord Kinross # 908) World Polity: Conflict and War - James Speer 909) Snow Crash - Neil Stephenson (excellent 1992 SF) # 910) The Rockefellers, An American Dynasty - Collier & Horowitz 911) The Lottery, Adventures of the Demon Lover - Shirley Jackson 912) There Are Alligators in the Sewer & Other American Credos - Dickson and Goulden (funny) 913) Tom's Town - William Reddig (a life of "Boss" Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, maybe the best done so far) # 914) Images of Man - C. Wright Mills 915) The Emergence of Man - John Pfeiffer 916) The Damon Runyon Omnibus - Damon Runyon 917) The Phenomenon of Man - Tellhard de Chardin 918) Soul on Ice - Eldridge Cleaver # 919) A Mencken Chrestomathy - H.L. Mencken 920) Today's Isms (9th edit.) - Ebenstem & Fogelman 921) The Open Mind - J. Robert Oppenheimer 922) Edge of the Taos Desert - Mabel Dodge Luhan 923) Morrow: His Life and Times - A.M. Sperber (very moving) # 924) Dorothy Day, A Biography - William Miller 925) Love and Will - Rollo May 926) The Origins of Race - Carleton Coon 927) The Ascent of Man - J. Brownowski 928) The Panda's Thumb - Stephen Jay Gould 929) Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony - Lewis Thomas (more great science essays) # 930) Working - Studs Terkel (an excellent oral history, and sociological exploration) # 931) FDR, 1882-1945 - Joseph Alsop 932) Martian Time Slip - Philip Dick 933) African Genesis - Robert Ardrey 934) In the Days of the Dinosaurs - Roy Chapman Andrews 935) All About Dinosaurs - Roy Chapman Andrews (my "first" dinosaur book) # 936) The Mormon Experience - Arrington & Battor 937) 1947, When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball - Red Barber (the year that I was born, an interesting way to look at that year) 938) Bryan - Louis Koenig 939) Robert M. LaFollette - David Thelen # 940) Walter Lippmann and the American Century - Ronald Steel 941) Only One Year - Svetlana Alliluyeva 942) Summerhill - A.S. Neill 943) Shah of Shahs - Ryszard Kapuscinski (good writing) # 944) The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan 945) Abraham Lincoln - Benjamin Thomas 946) The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran # 947) They Call Us Dead Men - Daniel Berrigan 948) Tolkien's World - Randell Helms 949) Tolkien and the Silmarils - Randall Helms 950) The Royal Road to Romance - Richard Halliburton (the greatest travel writer of earlier in this century) # 951) The Great Mother - Erich Neumann (interesting) 952) Spiritual Midwifery - Ina May Gaskin (a *great* book about natural childbirth that I read through twice before helping birth my third through fifth children) # 953) FDR - Ted Morgan 954) Revolutions, a Comparative Study - ed. Lawrence Kaplan 955) Fire in the Streets, America in the 1960s - Milton Viorst 956) The Wobblies - Patrick Renshaw (about the International Workers of the World union) # 957) Patience and Fortitude: Fiorella LaGuardia - William Manners 958) Spycatcher - Peter Wright 959) Boss - Mike Royko (about "Boss" Daley) # 960) The Rainbow Cadenza - J. Neil Schulman (libertarian SF) 961) Backfire: American Culture and the Vietnam War - Loren Baritz 962) The Berrigans - ed. William Casey 963) Bulfinch's Mythology # 964) Rascals in Paradise - Michener & Day (about various characters in the South Seas) 965) Mythology - Edith Hamilton 966) The Dain Curse - Dashiel Hammett 967) The Beet Queen - Louise Erdrich 968) The Grand Failure - Zbigniew Brzezinski 969) A Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold (NOTE: the next 32 titles deal exclusively with murder) 971) The Green River Killer - Smith and Guillen (a strange look at one of the worst case of serial murders in the US - the killings are still unsolved. Unlike the police, I believe there were two killers). 972) "Son," A Psychpath and His Victims - Jack Olsen 973) Thou Shall Not Kill - Mary Ryzuk 974) Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders - Sullivan & Minkin (sad, I could not believe how long this guy evaded capture) 975) The Michigan Murders - Edward Keyes 976) The Stranger Beside Me - Ann Rule (about Ted Bundy) 977) Serial Murder - ed. Ann Crockett 978) Zodiac - Robert Greysmith 979) Serial Murderers and Their Victims - Eric Hickey (an excellent book) 980) Give A Boy a Gun - Jack Olsen 981) The Mormon Murders - Norteh and Smith (the best of several accounts of this case) 982) Nutcracker - Shana Alexander 983) Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper - Gordon Burn (bizarre) 984) Bitter Blood - Jerry Bledsoe 985) Murderers Among Us - Michaud & Aynesworth 986) Two of a Kind, The Hillside Stranglers - Darcy O' Brien (a sad story) 987) A Gathering of Saints - Robert Lindsey 988) The Shoemaker - Flora Schreiber 989) No Deadly Drug - John D. MacDonald 990) Echoes in the Darkness - Joseph Wambaugh 991) The Misbegotten Son - Jack Olsen 992) The Boston Strangler - Gerold Frank 993) Small Sacrifices - Ann Rule (a very sad case of a mother slaying her children pre-Susan Smith) 994) Monkey on a Stick; Murder, Madness and the Hare Krishnas - Hubner and Guson 995) Buried Secrets - Edward Humes 996) The I-5 Killer - Ann Rule 997) Final Harvest - Andrew Malcolm 998) Thrill Killers, True Portrayals of America's Most Vicious Murderers - Clifford Linedecker 999) Poisoned Blood - Philip Ginsburg 1000) A Rose for Her Grave & Other True Cases - Ann Rule 1001) You Belong to Me and Other True Cases - Ann Rule 1002) For the President's Eyes Only, Secret Intelligence ans the American Presidency from Washington to Bush - Christopher Andrew 1003) The Presidents Speak, The Inaugeral Addresses of the American Presidets from Washington to Clinton - Davis Lott (an excellent reference book that I have found interesting to browse through) # 1004) Summer of Love - Lisa Mason (her second SF novel, set in Haight Ashbury of 1967, replete with strange aliens from the future) 1005) The Yugoslavs - Dusko Doder (an interesting basic history of this volatile area) 1006) Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime - Richard Pipes # 1007) This Way Madness Lies - Thomas Simpson 1008) Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus - John Gray (funny, as I think he generalizes too much) 1009) Mars and Venus in the Bedroom - John Gray (ditto the above) 1010) The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (quite intense) 1011) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales - Oliver Sacks (touching and sad) 1012) Darkness Visible, A Memoir of Madness - William Styron (his account of how he dealt with depression) 1013) Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the 60's Generation - Annie Gottlieb (a fascinating book, a good look at what happened to my generation) # 1014) Three Mile Island, The Hour-By-Hour of What Really Happened - Mark Stephens (useful) 1015) Marathon, The Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976 - Jules Witcover (an excellent account of the alst Presidential campaign I actually worked in) 1016) Comrade Criminal, Russia's New Mafyia - Stephen Handelman (current, on the mark and quite illuminating) # 1017) Caliban - Tad Williams 1018) The White Album - Joan Didion (wildly somber) # 1019) Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion 1020) A Book of Common Prayer - Joan Didion 1021) A History of the World in the Twentieth Century - JAS Grenville (an excellent general overview, second edition, of the history of the 20th century) 1022) On Thermonuclear War - Herman Kahn (intense and cold-blooded) 1023) On Escalation - Herman Kahn 1024) Nature, Man and Woman - Alan Watts 1025) The Gypsies - Jean-Paul Clebert (qan excellent general history of this odd people who has been persecuted so much, and that so little is known of) 1026) Power, Politics and People - C. Wright Mills 1027) Modern Dictators, Third World Coup Makers, Strongmen and Populist Tyrants - Barry Rubin (illuminating) 1028) Mother Tongue, English and How It Got That Way - Bill Bryson 1029) The Warrior Queens - Antonia Fraser (an eduactional book, especially for men) # 1030) Lucy's Child, The Discovery of a Human Ancestor - Johanson & Shreeve (quite good) 1031) The Population Explosion - Paul & Anne Ehrlich (disturbing but informative) 1032) Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev 1033) Beyond Good and Evil - Frederich Nietzsche 1034) Thus Spake Zarathustra - Frederich Nietzsche (hard) 1035) The Last Days of Socrates - Plato 1036) Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges 1037) On War - Carl von Clausewitz (very informative) # 1038) The Keys to Happiness, Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia - Laura Engelstein (an odd look at a basic behavior) 1039) Gorky, A Biography - Henri Troyat # 1040) Lenin's Tomb, The Last Days of the Soviet Empire - David Remnick (an excellent book, very informed, I've now read it twice) # 1041) Bloody October in Moscow, Political Repression in the Name of Reform - Buzgalin & Kolganov ( a look at the '93 October crisis by Russians - very good) # 1042) Anna Akhmatova, Poet and Prophet - Roberta Reeder (very detailed & well done) # 1043) Against the Grain - Boris Yeltsin (quite intriguing) # 1044) The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd edition - Ronald Suny 1045) Pale Blue Dot, A Vision of the Human Future in Space - Carl Sagan (slick) 1046) Metzger's Dog - Thomas Perry (funny if a bit improbable) 1047) Wanderings, Chaim Potok's History of the Jews - Chaim Potok 1048) The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California - Curt Gentry (dated now, came out in 1968, but a fascinating look at what the nation would lose if California fell into the sea) # 1049) The Crucial Decade and After: America, 1945-1960 - Eric Goldman 1050) Gorbachev's Russia - Basile Kerblay 1051) Comrades, 1917 - Russia in Revolution - Brian Moynahan (still another look at 1917, I enjoyed it) 1052) Stalin's Generals - ed. Harold Shukman 1053) Lewis Wetzel, Indian Fighter, The Life & Times of a Frontier Hero - C.B. Allman # 1054) The Art of the Persaonal Essay, An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present - ed. Phillip Lopate (really good!) # 1055) Incident at Simms Center - G.P. Schultz (very bizarre, set in Kansas) 1056) The World Wide Web Unleashed - December & Randall (one of the best books I've found so far on this subject) 1057) What really happened to the class of '65 - Medved & Wallechinsky (my high school graduating class, but in another state, California; quite intriguing) # 1058) The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Union - John B. Dunlop (an excellent look at the current political situation - up to 1993 - of Russia since the rise of Gorbachev) # 1059) Water of Life - Henry Robinson (a great novel about the making of bourbon whiskey) # 1060) The Walnut Door - John Hersey (haunting) 1061) The Earth Abideth - George Dell (about rural Ohio, written by my paternal great-uncle) 1062) a trilogy by John Varley (about an alive Gaia, odd SF) a) Wizard b) Titan c) Demon 1063) The Hidden Nations, The People Challenge the Soviet Union From Lithuania to Armenia, the Ukraine to Central Asia - Diuk & Karatnycky (solid and informative) 1064) Soviet Disunion, A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR - Nahaylo & Swoboda (very good) 1065) Half the Day is Night - Maureen McHugh (SF, her second novel, quite intense) 1066) Hot Sky at Midnight - Robert Silverberg 1067) A Generation on Trial, U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss - Alistair Cooke 1068) The Farther Reaches of Human Nature - Abraham Maslow 1069) That Man Cartwright - Ann Fairbairn (I liked this novel, about a small town publisher) 1070) The Philadelphian - Richard Powell 1071) Fidel, A Critical Portrait - Ted Szulc (very good biography) 1072) Imperium - Ryazard Kapuscinski (excellent book!) # 1073) On the Teaching & Writing of History - Bernard Bailyn 1074) The Cuba Reader - ed. Brenner, LeoGrande, Rich and Siegel 1075) Kissinger, The Uses of Power - David Landau 1076) Oscar Wilde - Richard Ellmann (the best bio of Wilde extant) 1077) When Knighthood Was in Flower - Edwin Caskoden 1078) CNN Reports: Seven Days That Shook the World - ed. Loury & Imse (good in a general way about the August, 1991, attempted putsch in Russia) # 1079) The Other Europe, The Rise and Fall of Communism in East-Central Europe - Jacques Rupnik 1080) On Stranger Tides - Tim Powers (a novel about Edard Teach, better known as Blackbeard) 1081) The Boat of a Million Years - Poul Anderson 1082) Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias - W. Bruce Lincoln (well written and very well researched) # 1083) The Gentle Barbarian, The Life and Work of Turgenev - V.S. Pritchett 1084) Boris Godunov, Transpositions of a Russian Theme - Caryl Emerson (odd, but infornative) 1085) Dirty Work - Pat Cadigan + 1086) Communicating With the World - Hans Tuch + # (I took a class from this guy) 1087) M.C. Escher, His Life and Complete Graphic Work - ed. J.L. Locher (best book about Escher around) # 1088) History of Russia (3 Vol.) - ed. Paul Miliukov, et al (real good, Miliukov was a leader of the Kadet party and a Foreign Minister of the Provisional government) # a) From the Beginnings to the Empire of Peter the Great b) The Successors of Peter the Great c) Reforms, Reaction, Revolutions 1089) The Oak and the Calf, A Memoir - Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1090) Hidalgo's Beard, A California Fantasy - Conger Beasley (a local KC writer) 1091) The Charm School - Nelson DeMille (intense novel about American POWs from Vietnam trapped ih Russia pre-perestroika) 1092) The General's Daughter - Nelson DeMille (sad) 1093) Make-Believe Presidents, Illusions of power from McKinley to Carter - Nicholas von Hoffman 1094) American Places - Porter, Stegner & Stegner 1095) Destiny - O. Nuckel (this book goes back to my childhood) 1096) Starburst - Frederik Pohl 1097) Serpent's Reach - C.J. Cherryh (the first of her amny books I ever read) 1098) Cats Have No Lord - Will Shetterley 1099) Fools - Pat Cadigan 1100) Is Shakespeare Dead? - Mark Twain 1101) The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields (quite intense and sad) 1102) Range of Motion - Elizabeth Berg (the first book I ever bought because I liked the sound of the author's voice) 1103) Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb - Richard Rhodes (a "companion" to his Pulitizer-winning _The making of the Atomic Bomb) 1104) Mein Kampf - Adolf Hitler (poorly written, but an excellent insight into this creature's mind, predicting exactly what he would do if he got power. He did an awful lot of it. I had to read it for a class) 1105) The Fall of the Romanovs - Steinberg and Khrustilev (excellently done) 1106) Liege-Killer - Christopher Hinz (solid SF) 1107) Nicholas II - Dominic Lieven 1108) Ukraine, a History - Orest Subtelny (the first definitive history of just this region I've ever found) # 1109) A History of Poland - Oscar Halecki (informative) 1110) The Baltic Revolution, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence - Anatol Lieven (the first book on this period of this place I've discovered) 1111) The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire - David Pryce-Jones (a journalist's account of "the fall") # 1112) Perestroika - Mikhail Gorbachev (the first look I had into how this leader thought) 1113) The Search for Modern China - Jonathan Spence (powerful, almost too much information but quite illuminating) 1114) The Hero With A Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell (very good) 1115) The Sixth Extinction - Leakey & Lewin (intriguing speculations) 1116) Jesus - Edward Schillebeeckx (the first "biography" of this seminal person I've ever seen) 1117) To the Finland Station, A Study in the Writing and Acting of History - Edmund Wilson 1118) The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (3 vol.) - Edward Gibbon (the best, what else can I say?) 1119) The Annotated Mother Goose - Gould & Gould (excellent!) 1120) The Media and the Gulf War, The Press and Democracy in Wartime - ed. Hedrick Smith 1121) Women Who Run With the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype - Clarissa Estes (illumuinating, instructive, important, insightful and inspirational) # 1122) Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, A Mountain Journal - Alan Watts 1123) Leaving Cheyenne - Larry McMurtry (funny) 1124) The Soviet Union: The Fifty Years - ed. Harrison Salisbury 1125) Silent Coup, The Removal of a President - Colodny and Gettlin 1126) Class and Society in Soviet Russia - Mervyn Matthews 1127) The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan 1128) Pretty Boy Floyd - McMurtry & Ossana 1129) Oswald's Tale, An American Mystery - Norman Mailer (detailed) 1130) Robert Kennedy and His Times - Arthur Schlesinger (biased but good) 1131) High Treason, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and and the New Evidence of Conspiracy - Groden & Livingstone 1132) The Arthurian Legends, an Illustrated Anthology - Sel. by Richard Barber 1133) Deadly Thrills - Jaye Fletcher (about Chicago's most notorious murderers) 1134) The Presidential Character, Predicting Performance in the White House - James Barber (excellent) 1135) In the Arena, A Memoir of Victory, Defeat & Renewal - Richard Nixon (while I would never buy a Nixon book new, I collect them & read them when I find them in used book stores) 1136) Nuremburg, Infamy on Trial - Joseph Persico 1137) Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles Mackay (a reprint of this incredible book first published in 1852) # 1138) Destructive Generation, Second Thoughts About the '60s - Collier & Horowitz (a critical look at the 1960s) 1139) Breakout Into Space, An Argument for the Settlement of Space - George Elias 1140) Apollo, The Race to the Moon - Murray & Cox 1141) Not By Fact Alone, Essays on the Writing and Reading of History - John Clive 1142) The Hungarian Revolt - Lettis & Morris 1143) Kafka, The Complete Stories & Parables - ed. Nathan Glazer 1144) Yugoslavian Inferno - Paul Mojzes 1145) The Tiniablas Trilogy - R.M. Koster a) The Prince b) Mandragon c) The Dissertation 1146) The Oak and the Calf, a Memoir - Alexander Solzhenitsyn (don't have a copy of this book, but seminal Solzhenitsyn all the same) 1147) The Russian Question At the End of the Twentieth Century - Alexander Solzhenitsyn 1148) Radical Reform in Yeltsin's Russia, Political, Economic and Social Dimensions - Nelson and Kuzes 1149) Transition to Democracy, Political Change in the Soviet Union, 1987-1991- Chiesa with Northrup 1150) Boris Yeltsin, From Bolshevik to Democrat - John Morrison 1151) The Struggle for Russia - Boris Yeltsin 1152) The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights - John Steinbeck 1153) Merlin - Norma Goodrich 1154) King Arthur - Norma Goodrich 1155) The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent - Esin Atil 1156) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution - ed. Harold Shukman # 1157) Dictionary of War - George Kohn 1158) Poloroid Land Photography - Ansel Adams 1159) The Camera - Ansel Adams ( a set of books, 1160) The Negative - Ansel Adams very instructive, by a premier American 1161) The Print - Ansel Adams photographer ) 1162) How to Write the Story of Your Life - Frank Thomas (I keep hearing I ought to use this book more assiduously!) 1163) Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg (solid exercises) # 1164) Fountains of Kansas City, a History & Love Affair - Piland & Uguccioni (*my* interests, no other reason to include this than that) 1165) Land of the Firebird, The Beauty of Old Russia - Suzanne Massie (too rosy, but I liked it) # 1166) Crazy States, A Counterconventonal Strategic Problem - Yehezkel Dror (an odd book, but quite illuminating about "crazy countries") # 1167) International Terrorism and Political Crimes - ed. M. Cherif Bassiouni 1168) A Condensed History of the Kansas City Area - George Green (again, local history, primarily of interest to me alone) 1169) The Scientific American Revised Cyclopedia of Receipts, Notes and Queries - ed. Albert Hopkins (this book originally emerged in 1891, my edition is from 1900, a great look at what folks believed was useful 95 years ago) 1170) The Hour of Our Death - Phillppe Aries (an intriguing look at death and dying over the centuries) # 1171) Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland - Ronald Hutton 1172) Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T.E. Lawrence 1173) Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian - Francis Simkins 1174) How Jimmy Won, The Victory Campaign from Palins to the White House - Kandy Stroud (an interesting campaign book about the 1976 Carter campaign, my last national campaign) 1175) Researching the Presidency, Vital Questions, New Approaches - ed. Edwards, Kessel & Rockman # 1176) Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic - Daniel O'Keefe 1177) How to Study History - Cantor & Schneider 1178) The End of the European Era, 1890 to the Present (1984) - Felix Gilbert 1179) The 13th Juror - John Lescroart (a strange novel about a battered wife, and the killing of her husband & son, and the subsequent trial) 1180) Cycles, The Mysterious Forces That Trigger Events - Edward Dewey (even if you don't buy his theories, this will set you to thinking) # 1181) Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy - Sanford Horwitt # 1182) Life Sketches - John Hersey (portraits of people and groups Hersey saw as "extraordinary" from 1944-1989) 1183) The Haight-Ashbury, a History - Charles Perry (I revisted this place this summer, it seemed so strange to come back for the first time in 16 years - I spent most of "The Summer of Love" here) # 1184) Isadora (formerly My Life) - Isadora Duncan # 1185) Political Man, The Social Bases of Politics - Seymour Lipset 1186) The Twenties - Edmund Wilson 1187) Re-inventing the Corporation - Naisbitt & Aburdene 1188) The Collapse of the Third Republic, An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 - William Shirer 1189) Gothic Politics in the Deep South - Robert Sherrill 1190) The 3 Faces of Eve - Thigpen & Cleckley 1191) Willie's Time, A Memoir of Another America - Charles Einstein (about Willie mays and heroes) 1192) The Planet Pirates - McCaffrey, Moon & Nye 1193) Tesseracts - ed. Judith Merril (Canadian SF) 1194) Rumors of Spring - Richard Grant 1195) Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the Last Days of the Soviet Empire - Neil Felshman # 1196) Stalin Against the Jews - Arkady Vaksberg 1197) A Harvest of Sorrow, Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine - Robert Conquest # 1198) A Soviet Heretic, Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin - ed. Mirra Ginsburg 1199) Tales of the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov 1200) The Dragon, Fifteen Stories - Yevgeny Zamyatin 1201) Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabakov 1202) The System, The American Way of Politics At the Breaking Point - Johnson & Broder # 1203) The Tailor of Panama - John LeCarre (piquant) 1204) Faith and Treason, The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 - Antonia Fraser 1205) Trotsky, The Eternal Revolutionary - Dmitri Volkogonov (first bio of Trotsky that I have seen in my lifetime, and quite well done despite Volkogonov's biases) # 1206) Radio Priest, Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio - Donald warren (this man operated within a few miles of where I grew up) # 1207) Sir Walter Raleigh - Robert Lacey 1208) Tolstoy - Henri Troyat 1209) Lost Opportunity - Marshall Goldman (already dated, but good look at the Russian economic situation) 1210) Confessions of a European Intellectual - Franz Schoenberner 1211) Montana, High, Wide and Handsome - Joseph Howard (acquired because I have a friend there) 1212) Memoirs - Mikhail Gorbachev (he's more honest here than in prior books) # 1213) The Great Documents of Western Civilization - Milton Viorst # 1214) Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (3 books) - G.I. Gurdjieff (very odd) 1215) Black Hundred, the Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia - Walter Laqueur # 1216) Eternal Russia, Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy - Jonathan Steele 1217) The Andropov File - Martin Ebon (one of the few sdtudies of this somewhat enigmatic figure available besides that of Zhores Medvedev's) 1218) Intimacy and Terror, Soviet Diaries of the 1930s - ed. Garros, Korenevskaya & Lamusen # 1219) Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin - Yegor Ligachev # 1220) After the USSR; Ethnicity, Nationalism and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States - Anatoly Khazanov 1221) Women, Resistance and Revolution - Shiela Rowbotham 1222) We Won't Go, Personal Accounts of War Objectors - collected by Alice Lynd + (a lady I once met, and an interesting view of that "dissident" period in US life) 1223) Blaming Technology, The Irrational Search for Scapegoats - Samuel C. Florman 1224) Discovering Moscow, The Complete Companion Guide - Helen B. Semler # 1225) History of Russia - Walter Kirchner 1226) The Unquiet Ghost, Russians Remember Stalin - Adam Hochschild 1227) Executive Orders - Tom Clancy (I liked this book, and it was the most political, so far, of the "Jack Ryan" novels Clancy has written, though I must say I find Clancy's politics a bit prehistoric) 1228) French Utopias, An Anthology of Ideal Society - ed. Manuel and Manuel 1229) Divine Invasions, A Life of Philip K. Dick - Lawrence Sutin (fascinating account of a troubled man's life) 1230) Reader's Digest North American Wildlife - ed. Susan Wernert (the best guide like this I've found so far) 1231) Korea, The Untold Story of the War - Joseph Goulden 1232) Marc Chagall - Franz Meyer 1233) Scandanavian Folk and Fairy Tales - ed. Claire Booss (I have read this book twice, and find the tales strangely evocative of Tolkien on occasion)# 1234) The Norse Myths - retold by Kevin Crossley-Holland # 1235) Indian Place-Names - John Rydjord 1236) Japanese Tales - ed. Royall Tyler 1237) Folk Tales of All Nations - F.H. Lee (very useful) 1238) The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs - Michael Fox 1239) The Fairy Mythology - Thomas Keightley # 1240) Scottish Lore and Folklore - compiled by Ronald M. Douglas (my mother got me into reading Scotch-related things, and this stirred me) # 1241) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - Clute & Nicholls (quite definitive) # 1242) Israel, A Personal History - David Ben-Gurion 1243) The Pelican Brief - John Grisham (fast moving) # 1244) The Client - John Grisham 1245) The Rainmaker - John Grisham (I liked this novel, seeing the little guy both win and lose at the end seemed very realistic) 1246) The Chamber - John Grisham (odd and sad) 1247) Four Ways to Forgiveness - Ursula LeGuin 1248) Maxfield Parrish - Coy Ludwig (beautiful pictures) # 1249) The Dictionary of Imaginary Places - Manguel & Gaudalupi 1250) The Four Horsemen, The Flames of War in the Third World - David Munro (useful reference book) 1251) Canyon de Chelly - Conger Beasley, Jr (essays and photos about one of the most beautiful places I'm aware of) 1252) Icon - Frederick Forsythe (fast moving thriller set in Russia, well-written and fascinating, albeit a bit preposterous) 1253) A Gentle Madness, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the eternal Passion for Books - Nicholas Basbanes (this book made me how aware of how insignificant my 21000 book collection is compared to some of these people) # 1254) Constantinople, City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924 (an excellent history from the Ottoman accession to the takeover of Turkey by Ataturk, illuminating and informative about a place few of us are probably aware of) 1255) Ancient Ruins of the Southwest - David Grant Noble (a good basic guide on a subject I've always found fascinating) 1256) The Soviet Experimen; Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States - Ronald Suny (excellent and _very_ current!) # 1257) Russian Politics and Society, 2nd Ed. - Richard Sakwa (also current and quite full of info, including a copy of the current Russian constitution) # 1258) Cat and Mouse - James Patterson (his latest) 1259) Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (can't believe I forgot this one, he pulls several characters from early novels into this one, sadly funny) 1260) An American Century of Photography, From Dry-Plate to Digital - Keith Davis (beautiful photographs and informative text, a very classy book) 1261) A People's Tragedy, A History of the Russian Revolution - Orlando Figes (the newest work on this important subject, a very useful book) 1262) The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, The Revolution and the Civil Wars - ed. Vladimir Brovkin (a specilaist's book, but illuminating to such a person) 1263) The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, 2 vol. - E.H. Carr (older, but very useful and well-written) 1264) The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 - Leon Trotsky (written from 1908-1913, long out of print, quite good at seeing conditions during the first two Balkan wars) 1265) A Lifelong Passion; Nicholas and Alexandra, Their Own Story - Andrei Maylunan and Sergei Mironenko (brand new, utilizes a great bit of their correspondence, from books long out of print) 1266) The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory, Why and How? - Arthur Adams (old, but insightful) 1267) The Treasure Box - Orson Scott Card (this is not an author I like very much, but this was an interesting stand alone tale) 1268) Plum Island - Nelson DeMille (his newest, by an author who rarely writes a bad book) 1269) Stalin - Eduard Radzinsky (allegedly utilizing new materials, badly cited and again, as with his other book, making assertive claims without evidence or foundation) 1270) The Year of the Young Rebels - Stephen Spender (written just after the passionate year of 1968, examines student and citizen revolts in France, then-Czechoslovakia, Germany and Columbia University in New York) 1271) Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon (his newest, written almost in a John Barth-like style, very archaic English form, but unusual and complex, as is often the way with Pynchon's works) 1272) A Guide Through the American Status System - Paul Fussell (strange, but illuminating) 1273) Russia, People and Empire, 1552-1917 - Geoffrey Hosking (very well done) # 1274) The Arts of China, Rev. Ed. - Michael Sullivan (an exhibit book, but with a solid text and plenty of information, but now out of print) 1275) My Life and My Country - Alexander Lebed (very self-serving) 1276) Stalin's Letters to Molotov - ed. Lih, Naumov and Khlevniuk (useful) 1276) The Gorbachev Factor - Archie Brown 1277) The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life - Herrnstein and Murray (controversial, but thought-provoking too even if I don't agree with author's premises) 1278) 19 Purchase Street - Harold Browne (1982 novel of international conspiracy I found amusing) 1279) Absolute Power - David Baldacci (both of these novels are fast-moving and 1280) Total Control - David Baldacci intense) 1281) The Gameplayers of Zan - Michael Foster (1977 SF, burt extremely well-written and quite complex) 1282) Rasputin, The Saint Who Sinned - Brian Moynahan (the first Russian history I've _ever_ read that uses "f***" often in the text, but informative, more or less - I think Moynahan is trying to make Rasputin out as a better guy than history has judged him to be, and I think he fails) 1283) Reader's Encyclopedia of Eastern European Literature - eds. Pynsent and Kanikova (_very_ useful to a soul who doesn't know this literature) 1284) The Fall of Yugoslavia, The Third Balkan War (really good) 1285) Resurrection, The Struggle For a New Russia - David Remnick (excellent, current and useful) 1286) George Wallace, American Populist - Stephan Lesher (first useful book about this man I've found) 1287) The Russian Revolutions of 1917, The Origins of Modern Communism - Leonard Schapiro (useful) 1288) The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire, Forty Years That Shook the World, From Stalin to Yeltsin - Fred Coleman (another journalist's look at this seminal event) 1289) Where the Wasteland Ends - Theodore Roszak 1290) The Proud Highway, Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, The Fear and Loathing Letters, vol. 1 - Hunter Thompson (Dr. Gonzo strikes again) 1291) The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights - John Steinback (still another, though well done, trip through this ancient myth) 1292) James, The Brother of Jesus - Robert Eisenman (a radical interpretation of Biblical events and characters, supposedly "way out there," but thought-provoking all the same) 1293) A History of Reading - Alberto Manguel (speaks for itself, though I was surprised at some of the directions this author went, interesting) # 1294) The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 - Ronald Kowalski (an excellent look at source material for this period) # 1295) Kiss the Boys Goodbye, How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam - Jensen-Stevenson & Stevenson (heavily biased, but still _a_ look at a complex question) 1296) Jack and Jill - james Patterson (another thriller writer I like, astonishing conclusion, after these characters knock off a President!) 1297) Out of Sight - Elmore Leonard (newest from a Detroit author I've always liked) 1298) Twelve Masters of the Short Story, Moderns and Contemporaries, 2nd ed. - Baumbach and Edelstein (helpful) 1299) The Educated Reader - Gerald Levin (good collection) 1300) The File on the Tsar - Summers and Mangold (written over thirty years ago, totally inaccurate, but an amusing set of speculations on the fate of Tsar Nicholas II) Afterword - there probably aren't enough women writers here, though more than there were, (and each updated book-list adds to the number of women I have on the list) plus there's too much emphasis in this list on murder (which I've "studied" for thirty years), and a great deal of emphasis on US Presidential studies, SF/fantasy, politics in general, folk tales and Sovietology/Russian history. There also isn't enough poetry, or drama, though the last two versions of the list have added _some_ poetry, or bios of poets, at least. These areas aren't my main interests, where the others are. I keep at it, though I may stop at "1500 Books," I still don't know, as this list keeps being added to over time. VMS