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nrogers_1030's review
informative
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
This collection was a great idea and I enjoyed looking at other's book recommendations.
regina_reads21's review
3.0
The concept is so interesting I just wish there was more explanations behind the choices and I wish I could have curated who gets to be in the book myself :)
gnomicsans's review
5.0
Such a cool concept! Very interesting to see what people choose and how they interpret the question.
helpfulsnowman's review
2.0
I thought it would be really interesting to see what a bunch of different people would put on their bookshelves. And it was. Sort of. Sometimes.
This book is a fun idea, but there were two big disappoints for me.
The first was that, as with any collection where multiple writers contribute, the writing was really uneven and the reading experience suffers.
Half way through this book, it hit me: Is this why people are always telling me that they don't get into short stories? Is part of the problem that most people are reading collections based around a theme or distinction (Best Southern Women with Yankee Husbands Written Exclusively in October Short Stories) as opposed to a collection by one author?
If you do that:
No. Bad! Bad reader!
I'm not one to say how one should read all that often, but trust me on this, almost every collection by different authors is going to delight and frustrate you in equal measure.
This book, having one page by all different people, was like reading one of these collections.
If you haven't done it, pick a collection by a short story author. One voice comes through, and you'll probably feel differently. I can highly recommend Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, and the Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard.
Okay, back to the bookshelves.
The biggest surprise? The part I probably enjoyed most?
James Patterson.
Yep, old Mr. Ampersand himself.
I know he gets a mound of shit because he writes what many of us consider garbage. When he even writes it himself. However, given one page and talking about books, the man was entertaining, made me laugh a little, and impressed me. If the assignment was, "Here's a couple hundred words. Use them to convince someone to pursue your work" he would have made the top of my list.
Now, I'm not going to go read any of his stuff because I'm confident that I wouldn't enjoy it much because thrillers don't do a lot for me, and I'm already reading Modelland by Tyra Banks. I can only read one book that I'm hating at a time. But if I hadn't heard of any of these people, I might have considered him near the top.
The other thing is, the other problem I had with the contributors to this book? They basically convinced me that anyone who considers him or herself a designer is kind of a shithead. Oh, and chefs.
Maybe Shitheads is a bit strong. What I mean to say is, their perspective on books is very boring.
What kind of books did most of the designers have? Books about design. What kind of books did the chefs have? Cookbooks. Instructional materials related to their trades.
Now, this sort of makes sense, but what did writers have on their shelves?
Novels. Books that exist as books as opposed to a means of communicating information.
For the most part, the writers didn't seem to feel that instructional, how-to books belonged on their ideal shelves. That made a lot of sense to me. You get good at writing books not by reading about books, but by reading books.
A fun game I played was to flip through this book and see, without looking at the author name, if you could determine whether the person was a writer or not. I went about 90% accuracy. A few editors threw me off, and a couple other creative types were also very impressive in their reading.
The designers were the worst. A lot of them would point out a book and then talk about what an inspiration this or that Swiss guy was. Boring. Then they would expound on their own design philosophy. Double Boring.
It was disappointing, really. To go the other way, me being a book person, if you asked me about my favorite design work, I don't think I would point to book covers right off just because that's the world I'm in. If you asked me about my favorite movies, they wouldn't be ones that are about books just because I deal in books all the time.
I would think that designers would want to draw inspiration from a variety of sources, but instead it seemed like they only wanted to talk about design.
And I'm sure that some of the designers in this book are highly respected and classy and all that horseshit. But I'd probably still take James Patterson's ideal bookshelf over most of theirs.
This book is a fun idea, but there were two big disappoints for me.
The first was that, as with any collection where multiple writers contribute, the writing was really uneven and the reading experience suffers.
Half way through this book, it hit me: Is this why people are always telling me that they don't get into short stories? Is part of the problem that most people are reading collections based around a theme or distinction (Best Southern Women with Yankee Husbands Written Exclusively in October Short Stories) as opposed to a collection by one author?
If you do that:
No. Bad! Bad reader!
I'm not one to say how one should read all that often, but trust me on this, almost every collection by different authors is going to delight and frustrate you in equal measure.
This book, having one page by all different people, was like reading one of these collections.
If you haven't done it, pick a collection by a short story author. One voice comes through, and you'll probably feel differently. I can highly recommend Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, and the Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard.
Okay, back to the bookshelves.
The biggest surprise? The part I probably enjoyed most?
James Patterson.
Yep, old Mr. Ampersand himself.
I know he gets a mound of shit because he writes what many of us consider garbage. When he even writes it himself. However, given one page and talking about books, the man was entertaining, made me laugh a little, and impressed me. If the assignment was, "Here's a couple hundred words. Use them to convince someone to pursue your work" he would have made the top of my list.
Now, I'm not going to go read any of his stuff because I'm confident that I wouldn't enjoy it much because thrillers don't do a lot for me, and I'm already reading Modelland by Tyra Banks. I can only read one book that I'm hating at a time. But if I hadn't heard of any of these people, I might have considered him near the top.
The other thing is, the other problem I had with the contributors to this book? They basically convinced me that anyone who considers him or herself a designer is kind of a shithead. Oh, and chefs.
Maybe Shitheads is a bit strong. What I mean to say is, their perspective on books is very boring.
What kind of books did most of the designers have? Books about design. What kind of books did the chefs have? Cookbooks. Instructional materials related to their trades.
Now, this sort of makes sense, but what did writers have on their shelves?
Novels. Books that exist as books as opposed to a means of communicating information.
For the most part, the writers didn't seem to feel that instructional, how-to books belonged on their ideal shelves. That made a lot of sense to me. You get good at writing books not by reading about books, but by reading books.
A fun game I played was to flip through this book and see, without looking at the author name, if you could determine whether the person was a writer or not. I went about 90% accuracy. A few editors threw me off, and a couple other creative types were also very impressive in their reading.
The designers were the worst. A lot of them would point out a book and then talk about what an inspiration this or that Swiss guy was. Boring. Then they would expound on their own design philosophy. Double Boring.
It was disappointing, really. To go the other way, me being a book person, if you asked me about my favorite design work, I don't think I would point to book covers right off just because that's the world I'm in. If you asked me about my favorite movies, they wouldn't be ones that are about books just because I deal in books all the time.
I would think that designers would want to draw inspiration from a variety of sources, but instead it seemed like they only wanted to talk about design.
And I'm sure that some of the designers in this book are highly respected and classy and all that horseshit. But I'd probably still take James Patterson's ideal bookshelf over most of theirs.
penandpencil's review
4.0
Great idea for a project, would have liked to have seen more diversity among the choices though.
theoglibrarianmom's review
4.0
Some of these vignettes were powerful and amazing to read. They made me want to get back to my writing. Others though were stale and boring. Long before I read this book I had a "desert island book shelf" of all my favorite books and reading this book made me think about what those books say about me.
spiffysarahruby's review
4.0
This is definitely more of a coffee table book, rather than a read-through book, but I'm glad I went ahead and read this one through. Even though I don't know who half of the people are who got to be apart of this anthology, I still enjoyed reading every one of their spiels about their bookshelves. I tried to dogear pages of the contributors who had bookshelves that were similar to my own tastes. Looks like I only managed to save those of Lev Grossman and Gina Trapani (there were a few others, but maybe I had decided temporarily that dogearing the pages was bad so I stopped. *shrug*). I saved Rosanne Cash's pages too but I think I did that more because I liked her spiel. I really liked reading everyone's spiels. People didn't always talk directly about the books on their shelf. Some talked about how the books influenced their lives, their reading habits, and their work. Some people just told stories about how they came to read the books they put on their shelves. There was a lot of diversity in this book--I think that's what enabled me to read it through.
I like the idea of picking a few books to represent a your ultimate book collection. Before my last move my boyfriend and I decided that packing and unpacking books really, really sucks, especially because we have lots of them (he has WAY MORE than me, but I have a lot of hardback books and those can be fatally heavy, lol!). So we decided that since the place we were moving to would be small (so small there wouldn't be room for ANY bookshelves...), we'd just keep our books packed up, that way the next time we moved, it wouldn't be a pain to pack and unpack them again. I have to say, after living without our books for a year, now that we're a month away from moving out of this little hell-hole, we're both looking forward to a larger place where we can have our books out on display again. I miss my books! Sure, I've brought a ton home from work (the library) and so has he, and those are out all over the place. But all of my Tolkien books, all Harry Potter, all my George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, etc. all those are MISSING from my life now and I can feel their absence. If I were to make my own bookshelf, I'd have to have those authors on it for sure, just because I can feel how much they mean to me now. As far as the rest... I suppose I'd have to pick and choose between the books that are on my Favorites shelf here on Goodreads.
I like the idea of picking a few books to represent a your ultimate book collection. Before my last move my boyfriend and I decided that packing and unpacking books really, really sucks, especially because we have lots of them (he has WAY MORE than me, but I have a lot of hardback books and those can be fatally heavy, lol!). So we decided that since the place we were moving to would be small (so small there wouldn't be room for ANY bookshelves...), we'd just keep our books packed up, that way the next time we moved, it wouldn't be a pain to pack and unpack them again. I have to say, after living without our books for a year, now that we're a month away from moving out of this little hell-hole, we're both looking forward to a larger place where we can have our books out on display again. I miss my books! Sure, I've brought a ton home from work (the library) and so has he, and those are out all over the place. But all of my Tolkien books, all Harry Potter, all my George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, etc. all those are MISSING from my life now and I can feel their absence. If I were to make my own bookshelf, I'd have to have those authors on it for sure, just because I can feel how much they mean to me now. As far as the rest... I suppose I'd have to pick and choose between the books that are on my Favorites shelf here on Goodreads.
banana83854's review
3.0
Call me a bookshelf stalker, cause that's who this book is for. Didn't read most of it, just looked thru the shelf art.
raechsreads's review
3.0
My Ideal Bookshelf is an interesting collection of many people's stories of what books have inspired or just plain enjoyed. It's a good place to find new books that a reader may enjoy.