Surrendipity: Treasure found in thrift store

There is a good thrift store near my current abode that has an overstocked books section. The place has the same effect on me that cigarette smoke has on smokers, I think. I can hardly walk by it without straying in to browse through its cluttered shelves.

There are loads of good books and many icky religious ones. It is almost fun sometimes looking through boxes of freshly donated books and magazines wondering about their previous owners. A week ago there were boxes of books and journals on the floor... as if some heirs had just dumped off their dead uncle's stuff without even first peeking a look inside. There was a bunch of personal documents in the box that has names and street addresses and other info you really wouldn't want ID thieves to get a hold of in there (and not just those of the stuff's previous owners either). 

Some of the books I picked up from the thrift shop this year for $1 each.

So, a note to would be book donors, check for and destroy those info before you dump them off, please. It'd be too operatically tragic if your good karma comes back to you via bank notification of unauthorized transactions. It's only a little trouble to prevent much bigger ones from happening. 

Anyhow... I had another browse through the books section's dusty shelves again yesterday and what did I find tucked in a little perused corner of it? Why, the 2000 booklet from the Salzburg Summer Festival's production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte!

What's so exciting about that? That was the production that starred Vesselina Kasarova as the spunky Dorabella and the amazing Karita Mattila as her high-strung sister Fiordiligi! 

Vesselina Kasarova, & Karita Mattila in Cosi fan tutte at Salzburg Festival 2000. (Foto: Matthias Horn)

It's in German, of course, though that's not a minus since I need to brush up on that language in preparation for the release of my favorite diva's memoir, Ich Singe Mit Leib und Seele, this upcoming week!

How lucky is that??? San Diego isn't exactly opera town (though the San Diego Opera is doing well and is doing Donizetti's Don Pasquale at the Civic Theater this month. Tonight is the first performance! I bet there are rush tickets available. I'm going on Tuesday). And my neighborhood isn't exactly upscale or very affluent, though we do have a healthy gay (read opera-loving) population... But a booklet from the Salzburg Festival? It's like finding finding a book about the Burning Man Festival in a bookshop in Berlin. 

Needless to say, I'm a happy smorg this weekend.

And that was 2011

Hello! Hello! I hope everyone is well and having a good end of the year holidays season!

I had a rather unexpected change of residence again a month ago. Was going to move out of state to snowier pasture, but was blown away by a whirling wind of weirdly freaky circumstances and now I'm hanging in limbo for another month. May still move to another state later in January, or may stay put as a Southern Californian beach bum. Don't know how it'll go. We'll see!

For a boring smorg, 2011 was rather eventful: I made some new friends and got closer to a few who are effortlessly even nicer and more caring when the times are rough than when the going is good. Even if you don't know who you are (darn these good Samaritans! They do good deeds so naturally that they don't recognize their own goodness much of the time!), you are a jolly good fellow, fellas. Thanks very much!

Being boring can be a virtue in dog-trainers...

 Inspired by the amazing Youtube clips by Kikopup (Emily Larlham) I also acquired another side job/hobby of dog-training. There are dog-trainers and then there are dog-trainers! It is amazing what you can teach just about any dog to do with positive-reinforcement technique only... with no punishment at all! Once you get the concept, it is quite easy... Of course, the hard part has to do with training the dog owners to stay with the program and not give in to intimidation/punishment-based 'short cuts'. As tempting as they are short cuts have ways of coming back to bite you in the long run! Anyhow, I got to meet quite a lot of cute and cool dogs in the past year for this. It may make the neighborhood cats more wary of me (you look sort of like a human but you smell like 4 or 5 different dogs. What the flea is wrong with you???), but on the whole it really is a lovable experience!

I slacked off this year a bit on the opera/concert-going front, though. I don't know if I'll be around to catch the San Diego Opera's 2012 season yet, but it sure looks a very tempting one! For the first season since the 2008 market crash the SDO now has enough cash flow to put on four operas instead of just three. What's more, they even managed to poach Renee Fleming, who will turn up here in America's Finest City for a concert in March.

Renee Fleming is coming to San Diego on March 24th, 2012!

After years of dodging religious evangelists at street corners and bus-stops, I broke my tradition and hung out with a few Mormon missionaries for quite a few months. A few are staying friends even though there isn't much hope of them ever converting me to that strangely socialistic and polytheistic religion. It is possible to love people even while being utterly repulsed by their dogma, I found. I hope our encounters benefited them as much as they benefited me.

Ever since I broke away from religions I've loathed to look back on the days that I spent in one. The missionaries reminded me of my younger evangelical Christian self, and it has been endlessly fascinating to re-examine things from such a different perspective. The more I learned about Mormonism the more inclined I am to worry about my new friends... but these gals are intelligent, I think, perhaps more so than I was. If I could escape my net, then I'm sure they can, too... and their journey is one they have to make themselves.

Having been such a slow reader of late, I am surprised to find that I managed to read more books than I thought I would in 2011. Robert Conot's River of Blood: Years of Darkness about the 1965 Watts Riot in Los Angeles started of the year on an alternatively chilling and instructive note.

I'm a genre-spree reader. I get into a certain sort of books and read a bunch of them one after another. Having labored through Bill Clinton's pudgy biography, My Life, I went a bit flaky and picked up Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story from a pile at a thrift shop's books section... along with one biography of her former spouse, Charles: Prince of Wales, by Anthony Holden. While Morton's homage to Princess Diana seems to have been written by someone a bit overly sympathetic to his subject, Holden's treatment of the young Prince Charles (before he married anyone) is quite fair and incisive. Pele's autobiography, Pele: My Life and The Beautiful Game, was a revelation. I already knew of his technical grace on the football field, but what he overcame to get to where he was and to still maintain his integrity was very inspiring.

Reading Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen somehow didn't make me admire the man more. I love his UK version of Kitchen Nightmares, but the US version put a bad taste in my mouth (why does Fox have to turn every show into another version of hyper-sensationalized Judge Judy?). His sure is an interesting life, though he is such a type-A personality even in writing that I needed a break from the dude by the end of the book.

Even though I'm not a fan of operatic coloratura sopranos (though I'd make exceptions for Edita Gruberova and Natalie Desay), I was not above picking up Beverly Sills' Bubbles while browsing a local bookstore one summer evening. For all the bubbly persona she displayed in her public image, the gal was one tough cookie... and a heck of a singer, too!

I also got into a spree of real life adventures reading with Bear Grylls' Facing Up, Sir Edmund Hillary's 'Nothing Venture, Nothing Win', Stephen Venables' Everest: Alone At The Summit, Freddie Wilkinson's One Mountain - Thousand Summits, and Peter Jenkins' Across China. Except for the last one, these recount high-altitude climbing. Grylls was the youngest Briton to summit Everest in 1998 at age 23. He is better known to us Americans as the weirdo who does dare-devil stuff doing extreme survival things on a tv program where he seems to enjoy taking his clothes off for a skinny dip and eating raw fish fresh from the stream. Somehow his book persona seems quite more normal and sane by comparison. 

Venables' account of his amazing first oxygen-free ascent of Everest via the Kangshung Face is gripping and gives a great glimpse into what sort of mentality drives people to risk so much to achieve something that doesn't really seem to benefit anyone. Freddie Wilkinson's telling of the 2008 K2 disaster not surprisingly made me revisit the similar story of the infamous Everest tragedy of 1996. It amazed me that the only two climbers (Chhiring Dorje and Pemba Gyalje) on K2 in 2008 who had enough stamina to mount a rescue attempt after having summitted the peak themselves were, like Anatole Boukreev and Lopsang Jambu on Everest in 1996, superfit professionals who were climbing without the aid of supplementary oxygen. It's food for thought, at least, that in the end technological short cuts are no match for knowledge and rigorous preparation.

Sir Edmund Hillary's memoir is now one of my favorite books for his no nonsense and amazingly understated and unassuming narration of his remarkable life. The man was so bent on not crowing about his own abilities that I almost felt the urge to slap my mental image of him in the head... Of course he mentions his ascent of Everest, but that is only an icing on an already remarkable cake, I think. I hadn't known anything of his leading an expedition to the the South Pole, and the various other things that he went about doing that most people would only dream about. It takes a very secure man to not let all that get to his head.

I don't climb high mountains, though that doesn't stop me from reading about them.

Peter Jenkins didn't climb any mountain in his book, though he walked across quite a magnificent expanse of foreign landscape. I was familiar with him from his first book, A Walk Across America, a very interesting tale that got a bit less interesting for me when the dude turned religious toward the end of it.

I got 3/4 way through Rebecca West's venerated tome, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her travel through the Balkans in the 30's, but didn't finish it. It is an amazingly insightful book... though sometimes the author annoys me to no end with her philosophy.

The more interesting books I read this year, though, were Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Akio Morita's Made in Japan, Azar Narfisi' Reading Lolita in Tehran, Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Malinowski's account of the Trobriands of the Kiriwina Island (near Papua New Guinea) almost made me wish that I had majored in anthropology in college instead of biochemistry. If Indiana Jones could write a book about his exploits... I don't know, I think I'd still go for Prof Malinowski's vividly objective prose.

Akio Morita was a co-founder of Sony Corporation, and his self-made story is one capitalist Americans would love to claim for our own but can't. I suppose most of you readers will have read Narfisi's book and already wonder how to write like that in one's second language. Being a slow slug I'm still trying to catch up on the background reading required to completely understand her lessons!

Having to take lots of biology classes in college saved me from having to catch up on much background readings for Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin, though I still found that I feel a bit smarter each time I re-read the book. The man made critical thinking seem so sexy...

Oddly enough, I found Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible reading through one of my favorite Mormon missionaries' favorite books list. It is a remarkable book. I should have liked to come across it while I was still a teenage Jesus-freak. I don't regret having gone down that road once, but I do regret the amount of time I spent on it... that and the lost opportunities. The book probably reads quite differently for those going through a religious phrase than it does for me. All the same it still flabbergasts me a little how anyone can read and like this thing and still volunteer to go on a religious mission afterward.

Anyhow! Tonight the calendar flips to a new page. I guess I will be staying up late, though mostly to try to get more work done than to watch the ball drop in Time Square. I don't think the cats around here even know what a 'new year' is, so I don't really celebrate days like this as much as normal people do (on the other hand, I love it when the wind changes to bring in a new season... or when the earth does strange things like trying to swallow the moon like it did earlier this month!). I'll be too busy to post much here for a week or two, so here is thanking everyone for putting up with my rambling posts. Wishing you all a very happy holiday season and 2012!

Books: Read and Looking For More

Another year already! I finally got around to updating the list of books I've read since the beginning of 2000. Back then I had this ambitious plan of reading a book a month every month. That should tally up to 12 books a year, and 120 books per decade. I started out strong enough since back in 2000 I lived across the street from a St. Louis public library, and the place was opened every day from 7AM to 10PM (5PM on Sundays). The last few years had been slow-going, though, especially since I moved out to rural Chula Vista without a library within a walking distance.

I don't know if I actually made the 132 books quota or not, but here are the books I've read in the past 11 years - some I still remember well, some not (I'm currently re-reading Rebecca West's Balkan tome, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The next book on my hit list is Christopher Hitchen's God Is Not Great):

A
ADAMSON, Joy: Born Free, Living Free, Forever Free, The Queen of Shaba, The Spotted Sphinx
ALBOM, Mitch: Tuesdays with Morrie
ALBRIGHT, Madeleine: Madam Secretary
ALEXANDER, Larry & Richard D. Winters: Biggest Brother
ALI, Tariq: Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms, The Book of Saladin, Shadow of the Pomegranate Tree
AMBROSE, Stephen: Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers, D-Day
AMORY, Cleveland: The Cat Who Came For Christmas
ARIOSTO, Ludovico: Orlando Furioso
ARLEN, Michael J: Passage to Ararat   
ARMSTRONG, Karen: History of God
ARMSTRONG, Lance: It’s Not About The Bike, Every Second Counts

"Even if you reject everything, it is always better to know what it is you are rejecting." Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms

B
BACH, Richard: A Gift of Wings
von BAEYER, Hans Christian: Rainbows, Snowflakes and Quarks
BARROW, John D: The Constants of Nature
BERGER, Karen & Dan Smith: Where the Waters Divide
BERGMAN, Ingrid: My Story
de BEAUMARCHAIS, Pierre Augustin Caron: Le Marriage de Figaro, Le Barbière de Seville
BLAIR, Clay: Ridgway’s Paratroopers
BLAY, Michel: Les Raisons de l’Infiniti
BOOLE, George: The Law of Thoughts
BOROVIK, Artyom: Hidden War
BOUKREEV, Anatoly N: The Climb, Above the Clouds
BOWDEN, Mark: Black Hawk Down, Guests of the Ayatollah
BRYSON, Bill: A Walk in the Woods, In a Sunburned Country, Neither Here Nor There, Notes From A Small Island
BUCHANAN, Patrick: Where the Right Went Wrong
BUCHWALD, Art: Washington Is Leaking
BUCKLEY, William (jr): Up From Liberalism
BULGAKOV, Mikhail A: Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog, Diaboliads, The Fatal Egg, Flight, Black Snow, The White Guards, Days of the Turbins
BURGETT, Donald R: Currahee!, The Road to Arnhem

"But people, straining to explain something to themselves or to others, are often content with mere illusion or a meaningless phrase which, although comfortable, explains nothing." Artyom Borovik, Hidden War

C
CALDICOTT, Helen: If You Love This Planet
CAMUS, Albert: La Mythe de Sisyphus, The Stranger, The Plague
CANTOR, Norman: In the Wake of The Plague
CARLÈS, Emilie: Une Soup Aux Herbes Souvages, A Life of Her Own
CARSON, Rachel L: The Sea Around Us
CARUS, Lucretius: The Nature of Things
CASTI, John: Complexification, Kurt Godel
CÉLINE, Louis-Ferdinand: Voyage au bout de la nuit
CHANDRASEKHAR, S: Truth and Beauty
CHAPLIN, Charlie: My Autobiography
CHAPMAN, Simon: Explorers Wanted
CHEKHOV, Anton: Uncle Vanya, the Cherry Tree
CHOMSKY, Noam: Blowbacks
CHRISTIE, Agatha: A Pocketful of Rye, Murder in the Vicarage, Miss Marple, Poirot Investigates, Murder on the Orient Express
CLANCY, Tom: The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games, The Sum of All Fear, Debt of Honor, Without Remorse, Executive Order, Rainbow Six, Red Rabbit
CLARKE, Arthur C: Report on Planet Three & Other Speculations
CLARKE, Richard A: Against All Enemies
CRÈSPIN, Regine: On Stage, Off Stage
CORELLI, Marie: The Mighty Atom, Barabbas, The Soul of Lilith
COPLAND, Aaron: What to Listen for in Music
CRICK, Francis: The Double Helix
CUNNINGHAM, Clark: The Spyglass Cup

D
DANTE: Divine Comedy
DAVIS, MAYHEW, MILLER: Under the Perfect Sun
DAVIS, Nuel Pharr: Lawrence & Oppenheimer
DAWKINS, Richard: The God Delusion
DEAN, WINTON: Handel’s Operas 1704-1726, Handel’s Operas 1726-1741
DICKENS, Charles: Great Expectation, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend, Oliver Twist
DIDEROT, Denis: Jacques le Fataliste
DINESEN, Isak: Out of Africa
DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor: Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, White Night, Notes from the Underground, Diary of a Madman, A dream of a Ridiculous Man
DOYLE, Arthur Conan: The Hound of Bakerville, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four, Return of Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia
DUDLEY, Barbara & Eric SEABORG: American Discoveries
DUMAS, Alexandre (pere): Les Trois Musketaires, Man in the Iron Mask, Adventures in Czarist Russia

"Sleeping on a plank has one advantage - it encourages early rising." - Alexandre Dumas (père)

E
ECO, Umberto: Foucault’s Pendulum, The Name of the Rose
EINSTEIN, Albert: Ideas & Opinions, The World As I See It, The Theory of Relativity
ELIOT, T.S: The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
ELLIS, Joseph J: Founding Brothers
ERB, Christy M: A Lifetime of Contradictions, Have Golf Swing - Will Travel

F
FARRELL, Eileen: Can’t Help Singing
FERRIS, Timothy: The Whole Shebang
FEYNMAN, Richard P: Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Characters of Physical Laws, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, The Meaning of It All, Elementary Particles and the Law of Physics, Six Easy Pieces, QED
FLAGGS, Fannie: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
FLEMING, Renee: The Inner Voice
FLETCHER, Colin: The Secret World of Colin Fletcher
FRANCE, Anatole: Thaïs, Revolts of the Angels
FRANKLIN, Benjamin: Of Liberty and Necessity
FRIEDMAN, Johanna: Molto Agitato
FRIEDMAN, Thomas L: Longitudes and Attitudes

"It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another." - Richard P Feynman, The Meaning of It All

G
GAMMELGAARD, Lene: Climbing High
GAVIN, James M: On to Berlin
GEORGE, Jean Craighead: My Side of the Mountain  
GIBBON, Edward: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
GLADWELL, Malcolm: Blink, The Tipping Point
von GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang: Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Theory of Colors
GÖDEL, Kurt: On Formerly Undecidable Proposition of Principia and Related Systems
GOGOL, Nicolai V: Nevsky Prospekt, The Nose, The Overcoat
GOLDBERG, Bernard: Bias
GOODWIN, Joy: The Second Mark
GORDEEVA, Ekaterina: My Sergei
GORDON, Richard: The Alarming History of Medicine
GOSSETT, Philip: Divas and Scholars
GRANT, Michael: The World of Rome
GRASS, Guenter: Cat and Mouse
GREEN, David: A Pacific Crest Odyssey
GREENE, Brian: The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos
GREENLAW, Linda: The Hungry Ocean, The Shrimp Chronicles, All Fishermen Are Liars
GRIBBIN, John: Schrödinger’s Kitten and the Search for Reality, Who’s Afraid of the Schrödinger Cat?
GRISHAM, John: The Firm, The Client, The Pelican Brief, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, The Innocent Man, The last Juror, The Painted House

H
HALL, Shirley J: Shirley and Pipsi
HAMMERSKJOLD, Dag: Markings
HARNONCOURT, Nikolaus: The Musical Dialog
HAWKING, Stephen: A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Nature of Space and Time
HEISENBERG, Werner: Physics and Philosophy, An Encounter with Einstein
HERZOG, Maurice: Anapurna
HESSE, Hermann: Märchen
HISCOCK, Eric: Sou’west in Wanderer IV, Cruising Under Sails
HOLLAND, Barbara: Secrets of the Cat
HORNE, Marilyn: The Song Continues
HOTTER, Hans: Memoir   
HUGO, Victor: Les Miserables, Notre Dame de Paris, Les Chatiments
HURWITZ, David: Getting the Most Out of Mozart: The Vocal Works
HUXLEY, Aldous: Brave New World

I
IBSEN, Henrik: Peer Gynt, The Wild Duck

J
JACKSON, Robert: Dunkirk
JENKINS, Mark: Off the Map
JENKINS, Peter: A Walk Across America
JUNGER, Sebastian: The Perfect Storm, Fire

K
KAFKA, Franz: Metamorphosis, Three Parables
KAKU, Michio: Beyond Einstein, Hyperspace
KAPLAN, Robert: The Nothing That Is, Balkan Ghosts
KEAN, Thomas & Lee H HAMILTON: The 9/11 Report
KENEALY, Thomas: Schindlers Liste

KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald: Profiles in Courage
KIRSHNER, Robert: Exploding Stars and the Expanding Universe
KNAPPE, Siegfried & Ted BRUSAW: Soldat
KRAKAUER, Jon: Into Thin Air
KUNSTLER, James H: A Geography to Nowhere 

"We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles." John F Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

L

LAMONT, Lansing: Day of Trinity
LEAST HEAT MOON, William: Blue Highways
LEE, Harper: To Kill A Mockingbird
LEIGHTON, Ralph: Tuva or Bust!
LEHMANN, Lotte: My Many Lives  
LEM, Stanislaw: Solaris
LERMONTOV, Mikhail Y: A Hero of Our Time
LEOPOLD, Aldo: A Sand County Almanac
LEROUX, Gaston: The Phantom of the Opera
LINENGER, Jerry M: Off the Planet
LONDON, Jack: The Call of the Wild
LORD, Nancy: Green Alaska
LOVELL, Jim: Apollo 13
LUDLUM, Robert: Apocalypse Watch, The Bourne Identity, The Scorpios Illusion
LUDWIG, Christa: And I Wanted to Be A Prima Donna, In My Own Voice  

"Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea." - Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

M
MACK, Burton L: Who Wrote the New Testament?
MAGRIS, Claudio: Danube
MAKINE, Andrei: Le Testament Français
MALKIN, Michelle: In Defense of Internment
MANN, Thomas: Death in Venice and Other Stories
MARCUS AURELIUS: Meditations
MARKHAM, Beryl: West With the Night
MARSHALL, Catherine: Christy
MARSHALL, James: Walk About   
MATHEOPAULOS, Helena: Diva - The New Generation
MAYO, Charles W: The Mayo Clinic
McCourt, Frank: Angela’s Ashes, Mawrdew Czgowchwz
McMULLEN, James: Cry of the Panther  
MEIER, Andrew: Black Earth
MELVILLE, Herman: Moby Dick
McARTHUR, Edwin: Kirsten Flagstad
MLODINOW, Leonard: Euclid’s Window, Feynman’s Rainbow, The Drunkard’s Walk
MOLIERE: L’Avare
de MONTAIGNE, Michel Eyquem: Selections from the Essays of Montaigne
MORAN, Martin: Alps 4000
MOSS, Cynthia: Portraits in the Wild
MULLIS, Kary: Dancing Naked in the Mined Field

"It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you've got it an inch from the earth." - Beryl Markham, West With the Night

N
NABOKOV, Vladimir: Lolita
NEWMAN, Ernest: The Life of Richard Wagner
NEWTON, Isaac: Principia Mathematica
NIETZSCHE, Friedrich: Also sprach Zarathustra, Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo
NILSSON, Birgit: La Nilsson   

"You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?" - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

O
O’REILLY, Bill: Who’s Looking Out For You?
ORSER, Lori L: Spooky Creepy North Dakota
ORWELL, George: 1984, Animal Farm
OWENS, Mark & Delia: Cry of the Kalahari, Eye of the Elephants, Secrets of the Savannah

P
PAINE, Thomas: Common Sense, The Age of Reason, The Rights of Man
PASTERNAK, Boris: Dr. Zhivago, Zhenya Luver’s Childhood
PELEVIN, Viktor: Omon Ra, The Yellow Arrow
PENROSE, Roger: The Road to Reality
PROUST, Marcel: Le Temp Retrouvé,
PUSHKIN, Aleksandr: Evgeni Onegin, The Queen of Spade

"The Word of God is the creation we behold, and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that god speaketh universally to man." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

R
RAND, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead
RANDALL, Lisa: Warped Passages  
RASPUTIN, Valentin: Siberia on Fire
REMARQUE, Erich-Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front
RIDGEFIELD: The Celestine Prophecy, The Tenth Insight
RODENBACH, Georges: Bruges la Morte   
ROONEY, Andy: My War
ROSTAND, Edmond: Cyrano de Bergerac
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract, Confessions
ROWLING, JK: Harry Potter series (all); The Philosopher's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire, The Order of the Phoenix, The Half-Blood Prince, The Deathly Hallows
RUSHDIE, Salman: The Satanic Verses, Raoun and the Sea of Stories, Step Across This Line

S
SAGAN, Carl: The Demon-Haunted World
SANDERS, Lawrence: McNally’s Secret, The Fourth Deadly Sin
SASSER, Charles W: Smoke Jumpers
SASTRE, Jean-Paul: La Nausee, No Exit
SCHILLER, Friedrich: Wilhelm Tell, The Visit
SCHRÖDINGER, Erwin: What Is Life?
SEAMANS, Arthur: The Dead One Touched Me From The Past
SHAFFER, Earl V: Walking With Spring
SHALAMOV, Valam: Kolyma Tales
SHAKESPEARE, William: Much Ado About Nothing, Henry IV, Othello, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice
SMITH, Hedrik: The New Russians
SMULLYAN, Raymond: The Riddles of Scheherazade and Other Amazing Puzzles
SPAETHLING, Robert: Mozart’s Letter, Mozart’s Life
SOLZHENITSYN, Aleksandr I: Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, August 1914
SPONG, John Shelby: Why Christianity Must Change or Die
STASSINOPOULOS, Arianna (Huffington): Maria Callas
STENDHAL: Life of Rossini
STOSSEL, John: Give Me A Break
SZILARD, Leo: The Voice of the Dolphins

"Even if we accept as the basis tenet of true democracy that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?" - Leo Szilard, The Voice of the Dolphins

T
TASKER, Joe: Savage Arena
TAYLOR, Jeffrey: Siberian Dawn, Facing the Congo
TEALE, Edwin W: Wandering Through Winter
THATCHER, Margaret: The Downing Street Years
THOMAS, Lewis: Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail
THUBRON, Colin: The Lost Heart of Asia, Among the Russians, Jerusalem
TOLKIEN, Christopher: The Return of the Shadow, The War of the Rings, The Treason of Isengard
TOLKIEN, JRR: The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, The Simarillions, The Books of Lost Tales I & II, Tales from the Perilous Realms, Unfinished Tales, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
TOLSTAYA, Tatiana: Sleepwalker in a Fog, On Golden Porch, Sweet Shura
TOLSTOY, Alexandra: The Last Secrets of the Silk Road
TOLSTOY, Leo: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Death of Ivan Ilych, Kreutzer Sonata
TREFIL, James: The Unexpected Vista, Meditations at Sunset
TUCHMAN, Barbara: The Guns of August, The March of Folly, The Proud Towers, The Distant Mirror, The Zimmerman Telegram, Practicing History
TURGENEV, Ivan: Father and Son, Torrents of Spring

U
USTINOV, Peter: My Russia

V
VARNAY, Astrid: 55 Years in 5 Acts  
VISHNEVSKAYA, Galina: Galina   
VOINOVICH, Vladimir: Monumental Propaganda
VOLTAIRE: Candide ou l’obtisme, Du Juste et de l’injuste, L’Ingenu

"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
   winds somewhere safe to sea."
- A.C. Schwinburne, The Garden of Proserpine

W
WALSH, David: From Lance to Landis
WEST, Rebecca: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
WHITING, Charles: The Battle of the Bulge
WHITE, Margaret Burke: The Taste of War
WHITMAN, Walt: Leaves of Grass
WILDE, Oscar: A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband
WILLIAMS, Tennessee: The Glass Menagerie
WINCHESTER, Simon: Krakatoa
WOODWARD, Bob: All The President’s Men, Plan of Attack
WOOLF, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, The Common Reader
WRIGHT, Sam: Koviashurik

Z
ZHUKOV, Georgi: Marshall Zhukov’s Greatest Battles
ZOLA, Emile: Germinal, J’accuse
ZOSCHENKO, Mikhail: Before Sunrise