Collection

Welcome to my library! I have a lot of other books that I've chose to omit because I don't take pride in owning them (I liked Harry Potter when I was 12, okay?) but this should be a fairly comprehensive list!

Currently reading:

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

To be read:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Fiction

• 1984 by George Orwell
• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Cat's Cradle by Curt Vonnegut
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Feed by M.T. Anderson
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• Here Lies Daniel Tate by Cristin Terrill
• I Hope You Stay by Courtney Peppernell
• It Devours! by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
• Sherlock Holmes: Classic Stories (Barnes & Noble) by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories (Vol. 1) by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch (Vol. 1 & 2) by Daniel Kraus
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Comics

• Problem Sleuth (vols. 1-5) by Andrew Hussie
• The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in Tibet by Herge
• The Adventures of Tintin: The Shooting Star by Herge

Beatles

• The John Lennon Letters edited by Hunter Davies
• John by Cynthia Lennon
• Paul McCartney: The Lyrics edited by Paul Muldoon

Birds

• A Sky Full of Birds by Matt Merritt
• The A.O.C. Checklist of North American Birds: Seventh Edition (1998)
• The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Western Region by Miklos D. F. Udvardy (1977)
• Bird Guide: Land Birds East of the Rockies by Chester A. Reed (1951)
• Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore by Christopher W. Leahy
• Birds of Iowa by Stan Tekiela
• Birds of North America (Eastern Region) by Fred J. Alsop III (Smithsonian Handbook)
• Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer (Nat. Geo)

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - 4.5/5

Absolutely loved this book! I'd probably give it a 4.5/5. I'm really a sucker for anti-war books and Vonnegut, so this was immediately interesting to me. It can be ridiculous and hard to understand, but it's central to the thesis of the book: war is pointless and silly! Oftentimes you'll see anti-war books in a gritty "war never changes" type of format. No problem with that, but it's refreshing to see a different perspective. It really gave me a Dr. Strangelove sense of goofiness. I came up with one theory about how this book could be interpreted realistically based on the idea of Tralfamadore sounding like a prescription medication of some sort. Maybe somebody else online came up with this too, but I just thought of a cracked-out, aging, possibly dementia-riddled Billy Pilgrim high off of something, desperately trying to interpret the trauma of war. That's another strength of the book: it's open to a lot of interpretation. I would say that's why a lot of people don't enjoy reading it, because they don't want to have to look into anything subtextually or think outside the box about it. Either way, I really enjoyed it. It makes me want to re-read Galapagos, another silly one by Vonnegut.