My bedside library

Cowtown Pattie left a comment in my New Year's resolution post about bedside reading:
"My bedside always has a pile of books by it (please, no dusting!). I get on a "jag" with a particular author sometimes..."

I can so relate to this. There's a good chance that if you've liked one book by an author, you'll like other things they've written. But that's just the start. What about books ABOUT the author? A biography or autobiography that will set the scene for why an author might have written what they did. And then there's all the stuff OTHER people have written about the author and their works. One of my favorite things to do is to follow up a historical event which has featured in a book I've read, and again Cowtown Pattie set me off on a tangent when she recommended the book "Crow Dog : four generations of Sioux medicine men" by Leonard Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes. After reading that book I now have to do some reading about Wounded Knee. And so it goes.

So how fortuitous it was that the house we bought 11 years ago has built in bedside bookshelves. And to think we were going to rip them out, along with the built in drawers, just so we could fit in our own furniture. Glad we didn't do that!



Here is a fairly modest collection, which includes what I'm currently reading ("On beauty" by Zadie Smith), "Dharma Bums" by Kerouac which I want Mel to read, and "On the road" because now I have to catch up on Kerouac, the new Doctorow book ("The March"), and for complete fun and charm, Alexander McCall Smith's "the Sunday Philosophy Club". I hope it's as good as his first series, "The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency" - Mel and I both devoured the whole series.