 | The Mabinogion (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Anonymous
Buy new: $15.00 / Used from: $1.40 Nice translation. Early Arthurian stuff as well as lots of other vaguely familiar folklore. Always meant to read this since I read LLoyd Alexander in elementary school. Took me a while to get to it
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 | Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) by Rudyard Kipling
Buy new: $18.48 / Used from: $12.92 Gripping tales spanning Kipling's life and ranging over a wide number of topics. Interesting to see the developments in style and mood as the empire was lost and WWI occurred.
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 | Captains Courageous (Signet Classics) by Rudyard Kipling
Buy used from: $0.01 Really a kid's book. A book that really feels more "American" than British with a strongly pointed moral end - rather different from many of his more adult works.
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 | Fishing for Amber: A Long Story by Ciaran Carson
Buy used from: $3.00 A treasure chest of random gems. This book lacks a plot but doesn't suffer much from it (or I'm to dense to catch the arc). It sparkles with witty tangential tales strung like dew on a spider's web.
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 | Upanisads (Oxford World's Classics)
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $0.35 Didn't read this translation. I thought I understood - at least slightly - Hinduism but now I have no clue. Highly inscrutable, these writings are. Need a guru to interpret them, they do.
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 | Florentine Histories: (New translation) Introduction by Harvey Mansfield, Jr. by Niccolo Machiavelli
Buy new: $28.63 / Used from: $7.00 Excellent history of renaissance italy. Chock full of facts. Might be useful to have some background in this area before reading it. Not nearly as analytical as The Prince.
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 | Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.01 Great read. I will never look at a tiger the same way again. Kind of post-modern ending. Cover says it will make you believe in God - I don't know why, but then I did before I read it so who knows?
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 | Vermeer: Colour Library (Phaidon Colour Library) by Martin Bailey
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $1.65 All of Vermeer's paintings. Nice, brief introduction. Short 1 page description of each plate. Good if you like looking at paintings but don't want someone to tell you what to think.
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 | The Pre-Raphaelites: Colour Library by Andrea Rose
Buy new: $9.95 / Used from: $0.74 An odd assortment of pre-Raphaelite paintings with emphasis on works of the founding members. The intro is rambling and confusing and picture writeups often fail to say much about anything.
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 | The Lord of the Rings (50th Anniversary Edition) by J.R.R. Tolkien
Buy new: $53.55 / Used from: $39.99 Still the best fantasy novel ever written. I wondered if my enjoyment of this book would suffer as I hadn't read it since childhood. It was still great.
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 | The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Buy new: $23.10 / Used from: $11.59 The Silmarillion is a mythology rather than a novel. Full of heroic acts, dark despair, and earth shattering events. The human touch is missing but deeds of gods, elves, and men fill the tale.
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 | The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates
Buy new: $26.10 / Used from: $14.98 An excellent book, although sadly mistitled since it deals with the development of science from ancient philosophy through religion and magic. A memory manual it is definitely not.
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 | In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk
Buy new: $13.00 / Used from: $1.24 A mesmerizing work which begins as a greek epic retold and ends as a troubling reminiscence of WWII. The nature of truth and it's remembrance is explored in a strange tale that changes in the telling.
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 | Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India by Roberto Calasso
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $4.12 A unique retelling and exposition of Indian religious writings. At some points illuminating and others inscrutable, this book is not an overview but an exploration of the ideas behind the stories.
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 | From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun
Buy new: $13.85 / Used from: $2.00 A review of practically everything in the last 500 years. Provides an excellent source for a "must read" list of books and sharp opinions on many historical developments. But fails re. the 20th C.
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 | The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Canto) by Steven Runciman
Buy new: $15.69 / Used from: $7.27 A quick history of Byzantium plus a detailed, moving narrative history of the fall of Constantinople. A real page-turner.
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 | The Cripple and His Talismans by Anosh Irani
Buy new: $22.95 / Used from: $0.01 A darkly humorous, magico-realist book about Bombay, a quest for a missing arm, suffering and self-discovery. Provides some very grotesque as well as beautiful moments along the way.
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 | The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
Buy new: $11.53 / Used from: $4.21 Painfully slow start to this book but ends with some interesting concepts. I felt there was a serious lack of substantiation for many of the ideas. The math must be there but not the observations.
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 | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) by J. K. Rowling
Buy new: $17.54 / Used from: $1.08 The series seems to be running out of steam. Nothing really new or unpredictable in this work. It appears to have been largely written by the editors.
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 | Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred & Other Contemporary Sources (Penguin Classics) by Anonymous
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $1.36 A rather scholarly, as opposed to readable work. Provides a tantalizing glimpse of life in the Viking era in Britain.
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 | Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Buy new: $14.28 / Used from: $9.73 I can't believe I haven't discovered Borges before this. Mystical tales, philosophical questions, Argentinian cowboy stories and a lot of knife fights. Curious but satisfying mixture.
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 | Tantra in Practice
Buy new: $31.04 / Used from: $6.97 If you're looking for tantric sex this is not the book - run away, run, run quickly. This book is full of heavy tantric philosophical material. It won't help your sex life and might even hurt it.
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 | The History of the Kings of Britain (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey of Monmouth
Buy new: $11.56 / Used from: $1.99 Historically inaccurate history but a good read. Source material for early Arthur and Merlin stories although not completely romanticized. Who would have thought the British were actuallly Greek.
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 | Caravaggio by Catherine Puglisi
Buy used from: $29.00 All the Caravaggio paintings in gorgeous colour, some attributed works plus period comparisons. Excellent text. Caravaggio had a very interesting life. Would make a good movie.
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 | Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $1.93 Great Sci-fi/fantasy - a sort of mix of Jack Vance, Tolkien, Borges and perhaps Kafka. Very dark initially and not for the squeamish but eventually redemptive. Original suffered from bad cover art.
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