Books, Books, and More Books

This job of mine is really taking up too much of my time. It's not that I put in long hours, because I don't; it's just that there are so many other more enjoyable, productive things I could be doing with that time. For example, reading books. I am a book fiend. The weekly Borders Rewards coupon has turned me into a dangerously regular book buyer, and over time I'm accumulating a stack of books-to-be-read that, at this point, will take me probably two years to go through.

Here's the breakdown of my recent, current, and future reading:

I recently read Sam Harris' excellent End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, both of which blew me away and about which I plan to blog when I can collect my thoughts properly.

I'm currently reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Robert Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader.

For a how-can-I-say-no mere five bucks, yesterday I bought a book called Forever Remembered: The Fliers of WWII, a compilation of interviews with pilots from the war.

Last week in the Borders Bargain Book section I found Stephen Hawking's The Illustrated Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell.

Friends have lent me C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and William Goldman's The Princess Bride.

My next round of books will be Daniel Dennett's Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon and Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. After that, in no particular order, the lineup consists of:

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB And The Battle For The Third World, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokin

The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind, by MIT AI guru Marvin Minsky

The Labyrinth of Solitude, by renowned Mexican writer Octavio Paz

The Twentieth Century, by lefty historian Howard Zinn

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (read it years ago, absolutely loved it, and have been telling myself to read it again since then)

Duel of Eagles, by Peter Townsend, about the Battle of Britain

Essential Buddhism, by Jacky Sach

Margins of Reality, by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunn

Fighter Combat, by Robert Shaw (got to improve those flight sim dogfighting skills)

And somewhere in there are the entire Castaneda series (have read the first three so far), The Essence of Rumi by John Baldock, The Way of the Bodhisattva, and The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology.

On top of all that, for the past few months I've been trying to read as many international relations journals as possible, sampling at least one of each, before deciding on which ones I'd like to subscribe to. Some of these bi-annual journals are quite big, up to 300 pages.

And so, that's the list. Of course, I've got a handful of books on my Amazon wishlist too, and surely another irresistible 30% off Borders coupon will come along soon, so I expect the waiting list to continue growing.

One of these days I'm going to need to just quit my job and sit somewhere - preferably warm and sunny - with my wheelbarrow's worth of books waiting to be read and just plow through the whole load.