Jay Lake: Writer

1. About 1000 at last count (recently culled many).

2. Collection would be bigger, but funding is an issue (as well as my wife’s limitations placed on space occupied by books relative to the size of our apartment).

3. I keep the books that there’s any chance I will want to read again, or that I want my (currently only planned/hypothetical) children to read in the future.

4. Fiction (terribly incomplete list):
-Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land (my first ever sci-fi read)
-The Foundation Trilogy
-The Culture novels by Iain Banks
-Bas-Lag novels by China Mieville
-Ender’s Game, Songmaster, Wyrms, Treason, and the Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card (despite my refusal to buy anything of his anymore)
-Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit
-Hitchhiker’s Guide saga by Douglas Adams
-A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
-More recent pleasures are anything by Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, and Scott Lynch
-Of course anything by Jay Lake (my favorite is Trial of Flowers)

Nonfiction (just a few selections):
-Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage by S. Ambrose
-Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by W. Shirer
-Grand Design by Hawking and that other guy
-Anything by Richard Dawkins
-Anything by Christopher Hitchens

Oh, to have room for 5000 books! I am jealous.

I probably have around 300 or so, and due to space limitations, I have to be pretty ruthless about culling regularly. This means that the cookbooks, writing reference books, knitting reference books, cello/music reference books, fiction, and non-fiction books all have to come under regular scrutiny. A painful process.

My reasons for keeping books range from I love the content so much that I know I will re-read it or use it regularly, I learned something I consider important from the content (this could be about the topic, or how it was written), it comforted me when I was particularly in need of it, it gave me inspiration to want to to do something, it has sentimental value for whatever reason.

As for which are essential, that’s a thinker. I’m going to have to study my collection and see what that might be.

1) How many books do you own?

I estimate between 300 to 400

2) Is there a reason (space, personal philosophy, funding) that your collection is the size it is?

A few reasons. First, I tend to do my leisure reading slowly, not because I can’t speed read but because I enjoy taking my time digesting the information being given. Second, because I typically only do about 1 to 2 hours of leisure reading per day. Third, over the past four or five years a lot of my reading has transitioned to shorter-length material (mags, blogs, short stories, etc), either because (for fiction) the length better fits the time I have available or because (for non-fiction) the length results in a greater likelihood that the material will have the exact information I’m looking for without having to slog through too much depth to access it. As a result of these factors, my physical library grows at a slow but steady pace, reflected in my total book count.

3) Why do you keep the books you keep? (Bibliomania is a perfectly acceptable answer insofar as I’m concerned.)

Aside from some textbooks, I have not done any culling, and I’ve referred back to, or reread, the majority of my library.

4) What books do you consider essential?

In the context this question was presented it appears to be a genre question, which puts me at a disadvantage because I would say 75% of my reading is non-fiction and therefore most of my “essential” books pertain only to my various interests and pursuits. With that in mind, the books I most often recommend to people looking to get into SF/F are:

F:
The Hobbit/LoTR (I’m always surprised how many people haven’t read these)
GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time
Erikson/Esslemont’s Malazan Empire

SF:
Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy (or if you can only read one book, Fallen Dragon)
Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series
Paulo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl (though not a classic, I find it get’s a good response when I recommend to readers who don’t typically read the genre)
Frank Herbert’s Dune (although, I find I don’t often recommend it, since nearly all SF readers have already read it, and non-SF readers tend to get overwhelmed by the technical aspects of the story/setting)

For brownie points:
I have also recommended the Mainspring series on several occasions and gotten largely positive feedback.

My essentials that meet your (a), (b), and (c) criteria are pretty much the same as my responses to the still-ongoing Locus poll; because I still have dozens of mass-market paperback anthologies from the early 1970s, a lot of the shorter works listed are ones I first read in such collections:
Bester, The Stars My Destination
Clarke, Childhood’s End
Benford, Timescape
Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy
Schmitz, The Witches of Karres
Dick, Now Wait for Last Year
Niven, Ringworld
Vance, To Live Forever (aka Clarges)
Stephenson, Snow Crash
Kube-McDowell, Alternities
Ian MacLeod, The Summer Isles (novella version)
Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (novella version)
Russell, …And Then There Were None
Spinrad, The Lost Continent
Vance, Rumfuddle
Gerald Jonas, The Shaker Revival
Bester, 5,271,009
Niven, The Fourth Profession
Varley, Press Enter []
Allen Kim Lang, Cinderella Story
Dick, Faith of Our Fathers
Kornbluth, Shark Ship
Kornbluth, That Share of Glory
Vance, Assault on a City
Bester, Time Is the Traitor
Blish, A Work of Art
Dick, Second Variety
Heinlein, “All You Zombies–”
Kornbluth, Gomez
Clarke, The Sentinel
Shaw, Light of Other Days
Wilma Shore, Goodbye Amanda Jean
Bester, The Four-Hour Fugue
Sheckley, Specialist
George P. Elliott, Sandra
Sturgeon, Hurricane Trio
Lafferty, The World as Will and Wallpaper

Between my wife and I, about 7500 books.

Where do we keep them all? Hint: our two-car garage has no cars and a lot of bookshelves.

Both of us started reading early (about six years old), both of us started accumulating books as soon as we were adults, and we’re both in our sixties. Things add up.

We need to do a serious culling. If nothing else, to make the job easier for when we need to move into assisted living or our son has to deal with our estate.

We went thru the paperback romances a few years ago and cut out about two-thirds of them. There’s a lot more stuff we know we’ll never re-read, and eventually that will get culled as well.