I tend to read in spurts. For example, I will read an enormous amount of books in a single month (usually while I sit on the
throne) and then will maybe hibernate for six months or more. Of course, I read all the time; my research dictates it. However, reading for pleasure (other than a casual look at news sources and magazines) is an entirely different animal.
I have been known to read over forty novels in a single month! I once had a job as a beach manager. Let me tell you; it is absolutely and completely boring to the n-th degree to just sit and watch the cute lifeguards watch people swimming for eight hours. During one of these many boring moments, I dashed off to the local library and checked out John Gardner's "
No Deals, Mr. Bond," a book in the James Bond series. I remember reading it in three hours. I had never been to the library more than once in a single day until that fateful day. I proceeded to read the remaining
Gardner books in this series. That month, I read 42 novels.
I read both fiction and non-fiction, although I prefer a good story to just take me away to la-la land. Anything by
Robert Ludlum is great, but I really enjoy his
Covert One series. The
Bourne trilogy is great, although I did not find Eric van Lustbader's "
The Bourne Legacy" addition nearly as good as the others.
I bought a UPC scanner (gun) so that I could scan all of my books. I also wrote some software to automatically take that scanned UPC/ISBN and fetch the important details (i.e., title, author, etc) and dump it in a database. I also have UPC codes on my shelves that I use to easily find a book in my collection. That way I don't have to resort to mundane sorting and inserting in between books and crap like that. A new book is easily added in an empty spot on any shelf. To date, I have 1,371 books in my inventory! I automatically generate a
simple list and a
more exhaustive one (add a
.csv extension and open it in some spreadsheet software like
LibreOffice Calc) that I use to quickly find a book I'm looking for. I also have a
list of books I want (useful when I head to the book store).
The following is in no way an exhaustive list of some of my favorite books (pretty much in the order that I read them within each author subset):
Ian Fleming is by far the best writer of
James Bond novels. After all, he created the character. I enjoy reading all of his books in this series.
John Gardner, Fleming's follow-up, has probably written the most Bond novels, and
Raymond Benson currently has the torch, so to speak. I have read them all, including some from other authors. I also enjoy re-reading some of the teen fiction I used to read as a kid (I used to read a lot back then). Some of my favorites as I recall were:
In terms of non-fiction, I tend to prefer subjects with some educational content. History and politics are not something I enjoy, so I tend to stick my nose in something slightly more scientific (physics, electronics, etc).
Richard Feynman is definitely my favorite non-fiction author.
Jean Gourd 