Books at my elbow

Books at my elbow.

I’ve seen it done before, as a gesture of personality. People love lists. So, for the heck of it before I put them back on the shelf (Christmas break, you know), a list of the books that have come out recently for one reason or another:

• The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
• The Semiotic Challenge by Roland Barthes
• Writers [on Writing]: Collected Essays from the New York Times
• Cross-Talk in Comp Theory Victor Villanueva, ed.
• Samuel Johnson: The Major Works
• From the New Criticism to Deconstruction by Art Berman
• Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory
• Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology
• MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers
• Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction by Michael J. Toolan
• Liquid Modernity by Zigmunt Bauman
• The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
• English Romantic Writers by David Perkins
• History, Reflection and Narrative: The Professionalization of Composition 1963-1983
• Fictional Worlds by Thomas G. Pavel
• The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society by Jurgen Habermas
• The Oxford Annotated Bible
• Suburbia by Bill Owens
• Social Graces by Larry Fink
• Yeats by Harold Bloom

Does this make me a nerd or what? Nothing but theory, philosophy, poetry, and photography.

One of these days I’ll have to read a novel or comic strip again or a book on music, for that matter. Sometimes I think I’m too hung up on learning how things work, instead of creating things that work.