A Year at the Library

For the last year I've cut way back on buying books, and started reading books I've borrowed from the San Francisco Public Library. Mostly I use the excellent holds system, which allows me to have books sent to my local branch from anywhere in the system, as soon as they are available.

Here's an incomplete list of the books I've checked out from the library in the past year.:

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

The Merchants' War by Charlie Stross

Accelerando by Charles Stross (I'd already read this, I got it for Diane to read)

The Cornel West Reader by Cornel West (barely cracked it, waaay too much about philosophy)

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Crime by Irvine Welsh

Saturn's Children : a space opera By Charles Stross

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Y, the Last Man (series of ten short graphic novels) by Brian Vaughan (disappointing)

More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman

Street Gang by Michael Davis (a great history of the Sesame Street show)

Tokyo Suckerpunch by Isaac Adamson

Self-made Man: One Woman's Journey by Norah Vincent

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

The Sagan Diary by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Off The Books by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

The Wine of Violence by James Morrow

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas by Matt Miller (stopped reading after first chapter, was clearly a my-agenda-to-save-world book, not about how ideas hold us back in general)

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard

Sit Down and Shut Up by Brad Warner

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate by Brad Warner

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries by Noah Levine

The Revolution Business by Charles Stross

Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life by Michael Krasny

Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan

Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

and right now I'm reading Spook Country by William Gibson.

As you can see, I find the library handy to go through someone's backlist once I start to like an author. And I love not having these books filling up my house, and the price. Plus, I can try a book for free, and if I don't like it, so what?