Waffle

The more books I remove from my collection, the more I enjoy it. It's almost as much fun as buying new books! For the first time in years, instead of having my bookshelves overflow and groan under the weight of the reading material accumulated on them, I have more shelf space than I need and one of my bookshelves is now home to some of my DVD's. That said, a lot of the books I've taken out are still in a large box, waiting for new owners, so do feel free to have another look at the previous installments of Books that are going.

Because I want to downsize further, much further, before moving out of my apartment, I have pulled some more books from my shelves. They are:

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics. McCloud's three scholarly works on comics, in comics form, that many people adore and as many people vehemently disagree with or tut-tut at. At this point in my life, someone else needs them more than I do. Update: These are taken.

Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bisette, Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics. Published in 1993, this is a collection of interviews with some of the people who shaped American comics in te 1990s: McCloud, Larry Marder, Jack Jackson, Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Colleen Doran, Todd McFarlane and others.

Mat Schifferstein, ed. and others, Stripjaar 1997, Stripjaar 1998, Stripjaar 1999-2000 (Dutch). These were yearbooks containing an overview of comics-related events during the past year, State-of-the-industry essays, some good interviews and a service guide containing contact info for cartoonists, comics stores, publishers and comics-related organisations. The service guide part of each of this book is now very outdated (though as late as 2005, organisations and individuals were still using the information from the last one to send press releases to me), but the interviews and other editorial content are still well worth reading.

Terry Jones, Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic. Novelization of the HHGTTG-based video game Update: this book is now taken.

Paul Krugman: The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century (Hardcover) Krugman is still one of the few economists worth paying any attention to at all, but I don't think I will ever re-read this collection of essays from the New York Times dating back to the late 1990s and the first few years of the 21st Century.

As before, all books are free of charge if you have an address in Groningen, the Netherlands, and/or can arrange a pick-up in that fine city; outside Groningen, they can be yours for the price of shipping them to you; count on costs up to € 25 for shipping multiple books to far-flung locations such as Australia, but usually much less than that.

Some more books that I am giving away. All of these can be yours for the price of postage if you live outside Groningen, the Netherlands, and for free if you live somewhere where I can deliver them or are willing to pick them up directly from me. No strings attached; just contact me (comments will do) if you want any of those:

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (hardback), Climbing Mount Improbable (hardback), The God Delusion (hardback) and A Devil's Chaplain. I'm keeping exactly one Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene.

Dave Sim, Cerebus, High Society, Church & State I; Dave Sim and Gerhard, Church & State II, Jaka's Story, Melmoth, Flight, Women, Reads, Minds, Guys, Latter Days, The Last Day. These comprise all but two of all the Cerebus the Aardvark storylines ever made. Latter Days has some water damage from a leak in my old studio. I have one of the other storylines, Rick's Story as separate issues and will throw those in to someone who wants to take over the entire collection. If no one wants to take the whole collection, I will start giving away individual volumes, but in that case I will be keeping High Society Also, normally it's first come first served, but for these I will prioritize takers in Groningen over takers from elsewhere, because of the sheer size of the collection and the likely cost of shipping and possibly taxes. Still, do let me know if you're living elsewhere and are interested. Anonymous (Michael Scheuer): Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin LAden, Radical Islam and the Future of America (hardback). See what I wrote about Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorin Books that are Going, Part 2. I still have that book as well.

Michael Moorcock: A Cure for Cancer. One of his Jerry Cornelius books I like me some Moorcock but I could never get into this one. Nevertheless, the paperback is well worn because I bought it used.

Mark O'Hare: D is for Dog. A Citizen Dog collection. I probably bought this on the strength of the Thanksgiving turkey gags.

Various Artists: Groningen bij Nacht: Beeldverhalen Uit Een Stad (Dutch). Two copies. This is an anthology of comics that I'm in with the story "Kobolden" which is the Dutch version of Roadworks Goblins. Other contributors include Barbara Stok, Eric Snelleman, Erik Wielaert and Fearless Cartooneer.

Here's the next batch of books readers of the blog can pick through before I sell them! The previous giveaway found new homes for the Stainless Steel Rat omnibus and the three Vlad Taltos collections, but the others are still available if you either live in Groningen or are willing to pay shipping.

The next batch is a bit more diverse and contains some non-fiction and some comics, but we'll start off with some more science fiction & fantasy:

Douglas A. Anderson, editor: Tales Before Narnia, an anthology of fantasy stories that inspired, or in some cases may have inspired, C.S. Lewis and includes stories and poems by Robert Louis Stephenson, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and others. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, editors: The Hard SF Renaissance. A range of hard SF stories by a wide range of older and younger writers. Few of the stories left any impression on me but I recall that "Bicycle Repairman" by David Brin delivered the goods. In any case, it's almost 1,000 pages so there should be something for everyone in there. Diana Wynne Jones: The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land. A classic guide to fantasy clichés that's well worth a read and won't suck up your time as much as TV Tropes will. Aloys Winterling: Caligula: Een Biografie, Dutch, translated from German. What it says on the tin: a somewhat contrarian biography of the Roman emperor, attempting to sort the truth from the accumulated legends and giving an overview of the kind of political landscape in which someone might want to appoint a horse as a senator. Anonymous (Michael Scheuer): Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. I bought this before I realized that Scheuer was nuts. At the time I thought the analysis, especially of Osama Bin Laden's motivations and of political and intelligence-related errors in the War on Terror was strong, but re-reading the preface now for a recap of what's in the rest of the book, it looks absolutely hysterical. Nevertheless, it was an important book in its day and still has some worthwhile analysis in it from a former CIA insider.

Christopher Hitchens: The Trial of Henry Kissinger. An overview of the case that might be made against Henry Kissinger if he was ever charged before the International Criminal Court.

Thomas von der Dunk: De Vader, de Zoon en de Geest van Pim: Nederland in het Rampjaar 2002 (Dutch, obviously). A collection of newspaper columns by von der Dunk, written in what was really quite a turbulent year for the Netherlands.

Eric S. Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. It must have seemed interesting at the time... I expect in another ten years, it will be again as a piece of social history of the geek movement. Kamagurka: Bezige Bert, De Zanger is Ziek Vandaag: two latter-day collections from the Belgian absurdist cartoonist, in Dutch. Jakob Nielsen: Functioneel Webdesign (Dutch, translated from the English). I used this in a previous iteration of the ROCR.net site. Unfortunately, web design and development bore me to tears and designing for usability is no exception, so it hasn't helped me all that much; the big takeaway I got from this was that for someone like me, following the herd works, especially when combined with simplicity. I still try to keep the number of design elements low and use labels that people recognise from other webcomics, but beyond that, I simply don't spend enough time on design to benefit from this book. Still, Nielsen's insights usually hold up well over a long period and if you are interested in usability design, this is still good despite its age. Steve Krug: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. See above, mostly. Ian McEwan: The Child In Time. Egads, I read this for school before I went to University. Honestly, I don't remember if this is any good or not.

Bernard Malamud: The Assistant. Egads, I read this for University. Bored me to tears, it did!

Momir Stosic Moki, editor: Signed By War. International benefit anthology for independent comics artists in the then-war-torn republics of the Former Yugoslavia. Black and White. Contributions by Enki Bilal, Marcel Ruijters, Lian Ong, Zoran Janjetov, Sasa Rakezic, Edmond Baudoin, Peter Kuper, Lorenzo Mattotti and others.

Scott Adams: Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless. A collection of Dilbert strips featuring Dogbert. Breathed, Berkeley: Tales too Ticklish To Tell. A Bloom County collection. Breathed, Berkeley: Politically, Fashionably and Aerodynamically Incorrect, His Kisses Are Dreamy... But Those Hairballs Down My Cleavage...!. Two Outland collections. I liked those at the time but they now leave me cold. If you want any of those books, drop me a line in the next few weeks. If you live outside of Groningen, the Netherlands, I'll need you to pay shipping; if you live in Groningen, I can hand them over in person or just drop them in your mailbox.

In the next few months before I go back to Tennessee to get married, I expect to be using my media collection as my ATM a couple of times - it's a way to declutter and get back some of the money I spent on DVD's, CD's, vinyl records and books over a quarter-century. None of it is going to make me rich but there is a lot of volume to get rid of.

Today I've been sorting out some of the books that I no longer want to keep. Into the "to sell" box went:

Four Glenn Cook "Adjective Metal Noun" PI Garrett novels, the latest of which I got only last Christmas. When I first read Petty Pewter Gods in the late 1990s, I loved it, but the concept and style have lost their appeal to me, so out it goes, along with Angry Lead Skies, Cold Copper Teads and Cruel Zinc Melodies.

Four Christopher Moore novels: Fluke, A Dirty Job, Lamb and The Stupidest Angel. Another writer I used to love in the 1990s, I now find time and time that his novels are fun to read once, but then I don't want to read them again (unlike with, say, Terry Pratchett, whose novels I re-read regularly).

Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat omnibus. I still like the Stainless Steel Rat, but this recent, newly typeset reprint duplicates two novels that I already had and was riddled with punctuation errors, making me wonder if perhaps I had misremembered the style of the originals. Steven Brust, The Book of Jherek, The Book of Taltos, The Book of Athyra. A lot of people whose opinions I respect love themselves some Steven Brust, but after three omnibus collections I can safely say that I'm just not that into him. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, a book that I've read several times. Stephenson was at one time one of my favorite writers, but this was the last one that I really liked (I gave copies to several people including my brother) and he is another writer who has lost his sheen for me - the ever increasing bloat of his work put me off it if I remember correctly, he said somewhere that his novels are supposed to end like they do, which just doesn't make sense to me. In any case, I don't want to take this big heavy trade paperback edition with me to the States; if I change my mind again, I can always re-buy it in an edition that is less of a doorstop.

That's the first batch of books I want to get rid of, but: if you are a reader of this blog and you're willing to pay shipping (or if you live in Groningen and I can just meet you to hand over one or more books), I'll happily send any one or more of them to you for free. Just let me know sometime in the next week or so, because once they're gone, they're gone.