My brother Parimal started this thing about meeting ourselves with our own bookshelves, because of the books we choose to keep. A selection from a mind-boggling plethora of other options. So he posted a snapshot of his bookshelf on his blog Reality Equation (check it out). And he invites others to do the same and share their bookshelves. Its a way to meet people through their books. I thought it was an amazing idea. Here goes mine:

And my collection of Wired Magazine. I’m a big fan of this magazine but I since I live in Sydney, Australia (and Wired is published in San Francisco, California) I have to either pay $18.70 and buy the same month’s issue (shipped via Airfreight) or pay $11.95 for the last month’s issue (shipped via snailmail). I usually choose the latter, and read Wired News (online version of the magazine) with I wait for it. My collection has grown quite a bit. This isn’t the complete collection, I have more scattered around the house, which I should consolidate soon.

The broad categories my books fall into are: Design, Music, Science/Technology, Biographies, History and Lifestyle. Some books fall under more than one category. Missing from here are: D-Day: From The Normandy Beaches to the Liberation of France which can’t keep in the shelf because its too big for it, it HUGE, Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill and Catcher In The Rye by JD Salinger. The latter three I forgot at home in Kathmandu when I went there in January 2009.

Meeting myself through my books, I have found out that my head functions in phases. And these phases dictate what kind of books I will read. However. unlike my brother who hasn’t yet decided on a major (or a self-designed concentration as they like to call it in Hampshire College) I know what I’m doing and will always be reading books areas of motion design and VFX. For everything else, I go through phases. I was in a biography phase once and kept reading biographies of people whom I admired, Ar the moment I was reading the Brief History if Time by Stephen Hawking, a book I wanted to read since grade 10 but didn’t for several reason. Having been reading that it got me very interested in reading about our universe, its origin, its fate and and its mechanics (superficially ofcourse, I do not plan to go into theoretic physics) and among other things I have been reading include a university paper written by a friend of mine (with other people) on several topics on the universe and cosmology which he wrote as a part of his assignments in the first year of his Aeronautical Engineering Degree at USyd. Anyway, so that’s me!