The data behind My Ideal Bookshelf. (Via BoingBoing.)
(Amy has commissioned one of these paintings for me as a present, and now I have to decide what books to select! I am leaning towards a subset of the style books, as I'd love to have a sort of visual representation of that project - Emma, Madame Bovary, The Golden Bowl, Proust vol. 1, The Line of Beauty, Barthes and Koestenbaum and St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, the Anthony Burgess 99 Novels - but it seems a little narrow, I may go more eclectically in the direction of lifetime reading of significance to me (Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, Pride and Prejudice, a book each by Diana Wynne Jones and Dick Francis, David Copperfield, Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Richard Holmes's The Pursuit, Clarissa!).
Seeing that data could make me very self-conscious about choosing my books. The first for me would be Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, which is my most-loved book ever. Then what comes to mind are Anne Frank, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. Hmm, not sure how much further I would want to go...
ReplyDeleteThe Presentation of Self would seem to be the perfect inclusion.
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