Today’s treble T is ten random picks from bookcases. Well, alrighty then. But first, a Tuesday Tease!

“I do think of it as a person,” Gurathin said. “An angry, heavily armed person who has no reason to trust us.”
“Then stop being mean to it,” Ratthi told him. “That might help.” – ALL SYSTEMS RED: THE MURDERBOT DIARIES, Martha Wells

Random books? They’re coming, they’re coming….but first, prompt 3 from the SF Month Challenge: discoveries from past SF months! Last year I introduced myself to Becky Chambers’ writing, and found I enjoyed both her “Wayfarers” series and her more contemplative solarpunk Monk and Tea novels. Those were easily the highlight. And now, random books from my shelf. To mitigate bias, I enlisted silicon assistance. There is some semblance of order in most of my collection: I have shelves of Asimov, two shelves of European history that also have German/Spanish/French language learning materials in it, three rows of pop science, several rows (and columns) of Star Trek novels, and so on. There are also shelves where it’s absolutely random.

And now, some random books. Now………it is hard to be truly random, so I divided my bookcases into 10 (later, 14) zones and asked chatgpt to roll the dice.

Zone 1
Enough Already, Scott Horton, a history of the war in Afghanistan and an exhortation to get out.

Zone 2:
The Voice of the Master, Khalil Gibran. …huh. Don’t think I’ve read this one.

Zone 3:
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Johnathan Haidt.

Zone 4:
The Boy Scout Handbook. If that does not work for you, The Brave Cowboy, Ed Abbey, is right next to it.

Zone 5:
Straphanger: Saving Ourselves and Our Cities from the Automobile, Taras Gresco

Zone 6:
The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler

Zone 7:
City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction, David Macaulay. This is a children’s nonfiction title that was discarded; I rescued it and shoved it in immediately in front of my Harry Potter shelf, right after The Houses We Live In: An Identification Guide to the History and Style of American Domestic Architecture.

Zone 8: The Sun’s Heartbeat, Bob Berman

Zone 9: The Intelligent Man’s Guide to the Physical Sciences, Isaac Asimov

Zone 10:
Greenlights, Mattthew McConaughey. I haven’t read this one. Be a lot cooler if I did.

Zone 11:
Star Trek Deep Space Nine #22: Vengeance, Dayfdd ab Hugh. Klingons try to take over DS9 while Sisko, Kira, and Dax are all traipsing around the Gamma Qaudrant. I have mentioned this one a few times on the blog; perhaps I should re-read it. I am fairly sure my copy is old enough to run for president at this point.

Zone 12:
A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, Wilhelm Roepke. The German title of this translates to Beyond Supply and Demand, and the book as a whole argues for a ‘social market economy’ in which the virtues of capitalism are balanced by communitarian values or needs.

Zone 13:
Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World

Zone 14
Oh, this is part of my Star Trek DVD collection. ST DS9 season 5 if you’re desperately curious. I didn’t realize how many stray DVDs had snuck inside my bookcases.

My physical holdings are OVERWHELMINGLY nonfiction with the exception of Star Trek. Over time I intend to replace my ebook Wendell Berry books with physical copies, but that will have to wait until I have more room for such indulgences. If I had included my Ottoman that’s full of books, or the trunk of books in my bedroom closet, more fiction would have appeared… though mostly YA titles!