What should I read, based on these 15 books I love? ⁂ Antilibraries Analects ⁂

Hello antilibrarians!

I’m a bit beat from packing this weekend (many shelves = many boxes) so this week I want to ask for your book recommendations. It was also my birthday last week so I will treasure any replies you’d like to gift me :)

First, here’s a (partial) list of books I love:

• Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino) — wonderful magical weird cosmic sci-fi stories
• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Keith Johnstone) — great insights on improvisation and teaching
• The Library at Night (Alberto Manguel) — collection of essays about the many forms and roles of the library
• Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Carol Dunlop and Julio Cortázar) — strange and lovely absurdist travelogue
• Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock) — fun introduction to the idea of earth as cybernetic superorganism
• bolo’bolo (P.M.) — proposal for a whole societal structure of radical autonomous communities (with a whole invented terminology to describe it)
• Le Ton Beau De Marot (Douglas Hofstadter) — exploring the art of translation through the lens of a specific 16th century French poem (and dozens of its translations)
• Moby Dick (Herman Melville) — so grandiose; such whales
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard) — phenomenally observant and lyrical nature writing
• Time and the Art of Living (Robert Grudin) — unique collection of multi-lens meditations on how we experience time
• Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (Hanif Abdurraqib) — amazing and personal hybrid of memoir and music criticism
• Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich) — classic and still relevant manifesto for radically restructuring educational institutions
• His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) — top notch inventive fantasy for all ages
• This Little Art (Kate Briggs) — a translator introspects on the art and craft of translation, to fascinating results
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs) — incisive classic on what makes great cities work

Here’s what I’d love from you, if you have a few minutes:

1. If you’re familiar with one of the above books (whether you’ve read it, or have it in your antilibrary) and any must-reads come to mind based on this book, please share (along with, optionally, a few words on why)
2. If you’d like to share a few of your own favorites, we can continue the game; I’ll see if any come to mind and can share both your recs and mine in a future newsletter

Please share your recommendations (+ any other comments) in this forum topic. If you’d rather share privately by email that works too, just hit reply. Thanks!

Brendan