Random books from bertilak's library

The Natural history essays by Henry David Thoreau

Beginning XML (Programmer to Programmer) by David Hunter

Knight of shadows by Roger Zelazny

Mathematical Modeling of Diverse Phenomena by James C. Howard

The Courts of Chaos (The Chronicles of Amber Series, Book 5) by Roger Zelazny

Ancient Light by Mary Gentle

The Swords Trilogy by Michael Moorcock

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Member: bertilak

CollectionsYour library (10,324), Wishlist (57), Darwiniana (75), Currently reading (8), Read but unowned (167), Favorites (26), Fascism (51), All collections (10,540)

Reviews23 reviews — see reviews

Tagsscience fiction (2,460), unread (2,244), fantasy (752), @bsmtsf3 (585), @bsmtsf1 (567), philosophy (532), history (507), illustrated (504), mathematics (495), basement (428) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Groups"I See Dead People's Books", Antiquarian Books, Banned Books, BannedBooksLibrary, Battlestar Galactica, Book Collectors, Bookcases: If You Build/Buy Them, They Will Fill, BookMooching, Bookshelf of the Damned, Brights — show all groups

Favorite authorsPeter Ackroyd, Charles Addams, Artemidorus Daldianus, Matsuo Bashō, Eleanor Elford Cameron, Emmanuel Carrère, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Conrad, H. S. M. Coxeter, Harry Crews, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Daniel Defoe, Samuel R. Delany, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, Knight Dunlap, John Dunning, Lord Dunsany, M. C. Escher, Willard R. Espy, Richard P. Feynman, Jasper Fforde, Jeffrey Ford, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Gardner, Edward Gibbon, Robert van Gulik, Dashiell Hammett, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Zenna Henderson, Christopher Hitchens, Matthew Hughes, Johan Huizinga, Thomas Henry Huxley, Max Jammer, Friedrich von Junzt, Franz Kafka, Michio Kaku, Desmond King-Hele, Tessa Kiros, Nigella Lawson, Wangari Maathai, H. L. Mencken, Robert K. Merton, Mary Midgley, Hope Mirrlees, Richard Mitchell, Hayao Miyazaki, Barry Moser, Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Nashe, Joseph Needham, Charles Nicholl, Joe Nickell, Hesketh Pearson, Edgar Allan Poe, George Pólya, William H. Prescott, John L. Ruth, Dr. Seuss, William Shakespeare, Bob Shaw, Charles Stross, Jonathan Swift, Raymond Tallis, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Silvanus P. Thompson, Lynn Thorndike, Kip S. Thorne, R. Gordon Wasson, Gene Wolfe, Austin Tappan Wright (Shared favorites)

Favorite bookstoresAreopagitica Books, Big Jar Book Store & Cafe, Book Trader, Half Price Books - North High, Robin's Book Store Inc, The Bookworm - Phoenixville, The Cranbury Bookworm, Whodunit?, Wolfgang Books

Favorite librariesBibliotheca Alexandrina, The Library Company of Philadelphia, The Library of Congress

About meOracle DBA and Java, Python, shell, Perl, C++, C, Modula-2, Pascal, FORTRAN, AED, Algol-60, MAD programmer.

My personal philosophy: MYOB.

About my libraryMy library is best described by a Feynman diagram: it is surrounded by a cloud of virtual books. Some are tagged 'borrowed from library' or 'get this'. Some have been annihilated: they are tagged 'deaccessioned' or 'discarded'.
Some are bosons: they are tagged 'dup'. Also see those tagged 'for sale on half.com'.

Each book's antibooks may be identified by using the UnSuggester. My recommendation is to look up the UnSuggestions for L. Ron Hubbard's 'Dianetics' -- this will give you a good reading list.

"A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up reading them". -- Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator

"But my true glory lies within my books: printed or anciently written, bound or unbound, there are near four thousand of them. ... But I need not tell you that there are also marvels within my books -- among them wonderful and rare works by Zoroaster, Orpheus, and Hermes Trismegistus, as well as the sheets of old ephemerides. ... These are not to be found for money at any market or in any stationer's shop, since in truth they are works for secret study." -- Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee

Also on ("bertilak"), BookCrossing, BookMooch, eBay, Flickr, Wordie

Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Member Giveaway

LocationLansdale, PA 19446, USA

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/bertilak (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/bertilak (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (991), Awards (425), Characters (9920), Places (2028)

Member sinceJun 27, 2006

Most recent activity

bertilak rated:
How to See Yourself As You Really Are by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

bertilak rated:
American Tall Tales by Mary Pope Osborne

bertilak added:
The art of war by Sunzi

bertilak added:
Gut symmetries by Jeanette Winterson

bertilak added:
Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile by John Shelby Spong

bertilak added:
This boy's life : a memoir by Tobias Wolff

The critic and erstwhile blogger Lee Siegel, in Against the Machine, a polemic against online habits, makes a list of "five open supersecrets" about bloggers:

1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.

2. Few people have anything original to say.

3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.

4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

5. "Customers" are always right, but "people" aren't.

The above is quoted from http://www.nplusonemag.com/lingering

posted by bertilak at 11:51 am (EST) on Jun 18, 2009

Late Spring in Philly
Sees migratory oysters
Back on Sansom Street.

posted by bertilak at 12:02 pm (EST) on Jun 11, 2009

Saw your comment in the "LT names" thread re: hapax legomenon. Don't suppose you're a Dinosaur Comics fan? There was one recently on the subject:
http://qwantz.com/archive/001434.html

posted by Medellia at 3:50 pm (EST) on Apr 13, 2009

Hello! Thank you for your suggestion about the Merton title Our system doesn't own it, so I've requested a copy thru ILL.

Your library here looks VERY interesting. I am very new at this. Seeing your library gives me something like a goal to shoot for: Can my interests and my reading result in a library that might be equally as broad and (I hope) as interesting to other readers.

Thanks again!

Best -- jt (traderj -- the "handle" I go by in my offline life is jt)

posted by traderj at 9:53 am (EST) on Mar 12, 2009

Hi,

I see that you are interested in books about religion and atheism. So am I. By far the best I have read recently in that area is "Atheism Advanced" by the anthropologist David Eller. You should really take a look at it on amazon!

Not the angry type of book like Dawkins or Hitchens. None of the boring refutations of the proofs of God's existence. But a very interesting analysis of religion as a cultural/socialogical/psychological phenomenon by an anthropologist.

Hans

PS: We are also sharing other interest, like cosmology and and evolution.

posted by hnn at 11:25 am (EST) on Mar 9, 2009

Dropping by to mention that I really liked your review of Nashe's Unfortunate Traveler AND your reply to the earlier reviewer on the Tosches book! Having visited, I also enjoyed the quotes you've posted.

posted by slickdpdx at 7:17 pm (EST) on Jul 3, 2008

"Coal will run out one day – that much is certain. So a forced idleness will impose itself on the entire world's machinery, unless some new fuel replaces carbon." --
Jules Verne, 1877:
The Underground City

posted by bertilak at 1:05 pm (EST) on Jun 29, 2008

Hello to Bertilak in Lansdale!

We share 32 books, although that's not really a lot considering you have almost 9,000 books listed! Still, I had to stop by and say hello, since you live in Lansdale, and I pass that exit every time my family drives the NE extension of the turnpike from Chester County on our way to the Poconos, where we have a vacation home at Jack Frost Mountain.

Our shared books include some of my favorite authors -- Bujold, Zelazny, Willis, Pratchett, McDevitt, and Tepper.

posted by dsalerni at 11:42 pm (EST) on Mar 29, 2008

"Love is a sweet essence that burns before God, but it is so secret a mystery that few can describe it or tell by what inward affections it is conveyed to the heart. Few know that content and gladness, when the powers of man and woman leap in the bowels of the body for joy at the instant of recognition." -- Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee

posted by bertilak at 8:28 am (EST) on Aug 26, 2007

“The Nothing is a big place,” I said without fear of understatement, “and mostly empty. Theoretical storyologists have calculated that the readable BookWorld makes up only twenty-two percent of visible reading matter – the remainder is the unobservable remnants of long-lost books, forgotten oral tradition and ideas still locked in writers' heads. We call it 'dark reading matter.'”
Jasper Fforde,
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels

posted by bertilak at 10:37 am (EST) on Aug 25, 2007

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

Freeman Dyson,
HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

posted by bertilak at 1:50 pm (EST) on Aug 21, 2007

Quantum fluctuations are the monkeys that program the universe.
Seth Lloyd,
Programming the universe : a quantum computer scientist takes on the cosmos

posted by bertilak at 8:46 pm (EST) on Aug 14, 2007

Saying that we often manage to work around shortages is not the same as saying that "natural resources are basically infinite." We've staved off the calamaties of Malthusian prediction through an extraordinary explosion of scientific endeavor. We'll see how things stand in a century or two, with fossil fuel depletion, topsoil erosion by cash crops (and growing corn for fuel), increased environmental pollution (especially the loss of food fish in the oceans), global warming, unrestricted population growth, etc. (the usual progressive litany). Survival may well depend upon a cooperative model rather than the competition of the marketplace. Food for thought, as it were.

posted by jhevelin at 3:02 pm (EST) on Aug 3, 2007

"To me, the Internet is as basic a thing for humanity to be doing as cities have been. It’s that primal."
William Gibson

posted by bertilak at 1:11 pm (EST) on Aug 1, 2007

Internet “wakes up?” Ridicu -
no carrier.
- Charles Stross

Very Short Stories

posted by bertilak at 4:36 pm (EST) on Jul 24, 2007

"... prescriptions are futile. One can't tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path."

Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1976.

posted by bertilak at 11:15 pm (EST) on Jul 19, 2007

"Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow—patterns in an energy flow.... It is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organization."

Carl Woese quoted by Freeman Dyson

posted by bertilak at 5:30 pm (EST) on Jul 17, 2007

The late economist Julian Simon was in the habit of claiming that natural resources are basically infinite. His refrain: "A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11846185...

posted by bertilak at 8:26 am (EST) on Jul 17, 2007

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