'Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.' Groucho Marx

Below are books from my collection that are currently being read, were read recently, are on deck, or that I use all of the time. (...but about half the books I read actually make the list given that I forget to write them down before I put them on the shelf)

• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
• Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
• The Renaissance by Jeannie Labno
• The Impressionists by Diana Newall
• The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross
• Last Night at the Lobster by Stuart O'nan
• Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 by Michael Beschloss
• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
• The October Country by Ray Bradbury
• Jerusalem 1913: the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
• Issac's Storm by Erik Larson
• Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
• The Illiad by Homer (Robert Fagles translation)
• Orson Welles volume 2 (Hello Americans) by Simon Callow
• The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories edited by Rober B. Strassler
• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War edited by Robert B. Strassler
• The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot by Bart D. Ehrman
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Musician's Toolbox by Nick and Diane Petrella
• 1776 by David McCullough
• 3001 by Arthur C. Clarke
• 2061 by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Foundation Series (6 books) by Isaac Asimov
• Hard Times by Charles Dickens
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall by Chrisopher Hibbert
• Teleportation : The Impossible Leap by David Darling
• Two-Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J. Sobol
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Six Easy Pieces: The Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher--Richard Feynman
• The Official Military Atlas of the Civil War by the U.S. War Department
• Plato: The Last Days of Socrates
• Stage to Studio, Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890-1950 by James P. Kraft
• The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Edgar Allan Poe, Sixty-Seven Tales
• The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower II) by Stephen King
• The Gunslinger (Dark Tower I) by Stephen King
• The Case of the Borrowed Brunette by Erle Stanley Gardner
• 100 Words Almost Everyone Confuses & Misuses from the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries
• The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
• Dictionary of Theories by Jennifer Bothamley
• Really Useful* *the origins of everyday things by Joel Levy
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
• Cooking Ingredients by Christine Ingram
• Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
• The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov
• The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
• Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Time Quake by Kurt Vonnegut
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Massacre at El Mozote by Mark Danner
• The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
• The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy
• After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
• Any book by F.Paul Wilson (especially in the Repairman Jack series)
• Ideas of the Great Philosophers by W.S. and M.L. Sahakian
• The Orchestra edited by Joan Peyser
• The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder
• Strategy by B.H. Liddell Hart
• The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan
• History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
• 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
• The Histories by Herodotus
• Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw
• The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (PBS Video)
• Works in the Perseus Digital Library (link to site, mine stays in background)
• The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand
• Enchiridion by Epictetus
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
• John Adams By David McCullough
• Cyano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
• Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
• Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
• The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Oliver ed.
• On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• Winston and Clementine, The Personal Letters of the Churchills
• Walking on Alligators by Susan Shaughnessy
• Historical Atlas of the 19th Century World by John Haywood
• Historical Atlas of the Early Modern World by John Haywood
• Historical Atlas of the 20th Century by John Haywood
• Historical Atlas of the Classical World by John Haywood
• Twelfth Night by Wm. Shakespeare
• The Merchant of Venice by Wm. Shakespeare
• Macbeth by Wm. Shakespeare
• Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
• To Boulez and Beyond by Joan Peyser
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes [Saavedra]
• The Federalist Papers by A. Hamilton, J. Madison, and J. Jay
• Simple Composition by Charles Wuorinen
• Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman
• Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, edited by John Rahn
• Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, Kostelanetz and Darby eds.
• The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey
• Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charlee Seife
• The Great Short Works of Herman Melville
• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
• Words You Should Know by David Olsen
• Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
• The Oxford English Dictionary [various versions]
• Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker
• The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
• The Chicago Manual of Style
• Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White
• The Use and Abuse of the English Language by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge
• The Harry Potter books [all] by J.K. Rowling
• Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
• DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web. 2nd Edition, by Jason Cranford Teague
• Chromosome 6 by Robin Cook
• Visual Tennis by John Yandell
• A Mind of Its Own by David Friedman
• JavaScript Bible, 4th Edition, by Danny Goodman
• Shakespeare by Harold Bloom
• My Lessons with Kumi by Michael Colgrass
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte