The not-really-an-anarchist bookshelf

At the beginning of this month, Alex Bayley suggested the idea of writing an Annotated bibliography of the inside of my head:

You know those books that you can’t stop thinking about, won’t shut up about, and wish everyone around you would read? The ones that, if taken in aggregate, would tell people more about you than your resume? I decided I wanted to write a list of those. Then I told some friends, and they wanted to write their own lists too. So we’re going to do a little blog carnival, and I’d like to invite you (yes, you) to join us.

I'm a librarian with a blog, and my fellow library blogger Alissa egged me on: how could I possibly refuse? So here it is, my annotated bibliography of the inside of my head (for now). I hope it's not too alarming to my new bosses.

Fiction

The Empire Trilogy

The Empire trilogy was co-authored by Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts after Feist completed his Riftwar Saga, but I read the Empire Trilogy first. I quickly grew bored with Feist's increasingly derivative works, but the Empire Trilogy was a revelation to a teenage boy who loved Lord of the Rings but found the fantasy fiction range on offer at Kingston Public Library in the 1990s frustratingly beige. The books feature a strong woman as the lead character, political intrigue almost on par with Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire, and a series of political and moral questions that Mara of the Acoma solves more by cleverness than force. I suspect I'd find the books disappointing if I re-read them now, but they helped me to expect more from fantasy fiction at a formative time.

The lies of Locke Lamora

Alas, having ascertained my preferences in fiction ran primarily to 'alternative reality political intrigue with minimal-to-nill magic', I struggled to find much of it around (though that doesn't necessarily mean there's not a lot out there). Eventually I discovered the alternative-reality-Oliver-Twist-meets-swashbuckling-adventure The lies of Locke Lamora and follow-up Red seas under red skies. I don't read much fiction these days, for various reasons, but I'm constantly on the hunt for something like these Scott Lynch masterpieces.

The name of the wind

I actually can't remember whether I read The lies of Lock Lamora or The name of the wind first, but I found them both gripping. I was distraught when I got the end of Patrick Rothfuss's The name of the wind to discover the second book in the series (The wise man's fear) hadn't yet been published. I'm still waiting, impatiently, for the third book. The name of the wind is an extraordinary book: almost nothing actually happens, yet I was completely gripped from start to end.

Recipes

The Cranks bible

Nadine Abensur is a vegetarian chef who lives in the UK, and was born in Morocco to Jewish-French parents. When I was vegetarian for a couple of years I bought her The Cranks bible (Cranks being a restaurant group). This book completely changed how I thought about cooking. Abensur's background naturally led her to produce recipes that are based on traditional foods without being overly concerned about 'authenticity'. But more than that, she feels no compulsion to justify their vegetarian basis. The Cranks bible is a cookbook for delicous food that just happens to be vegetarian. It taught me to cook without apologies.

Javascript & JQuery

By the time I read Jon Duckett's brilliant Javascript & JQuery: interactive front-end web development, JQuery was on the way out, but it's the book I recommend to anyone who wants to learn JavaScript or coding generally (the companion HTML & CSS: design and build websites is just as good). I'd spent a few years dabbling with various programming languages, including JavaScript, before I found this book, but nothing had really stuck. I found the 'classic' O'Reilly books too abstract, and most tutorials unnecessarily maths-based. Duckett helped me to move past this by focussing on the whole point of JavaScript - interactive web pages - largely ignoring the other possibilities of JavaScript and thus helping me get over that initial learning curve. What really makes Duckett's book so effective for me, however, is Emma Stone's design. The book is not only clearly written, it's beautiful to look at, with Stone designing the physical pages for