The several books I own: 2001

If only books weren’t so heavy.

Yesterday I took 4 boxes full of books and one full of movies to half priced books, and sold them. It was sad, but I really can’t carry them around, especially since I’m planning on moving a third the way across the country via car in a month or two. And it doesn’t matter anyway, cause I have my kindle! All the books I could want, right in my pocket. [end advertisement]

Anyway, I got 140$ for all these books and movies, which is a bit more than I’d expected, even though they will probably sell it all for 5 or 10 times that. I did, however, keep a dozen or so books, enough to fit in a small box. These are the books that have had the most influence on me through my life, or that were just the best all around, or maybe they were just really nostalgic or sentimental.

So, I think it will be fun to make a post about each book I kept, and why. Here is the first:

2001:

This is the first book that got me into science fiction, and science in general. Before this book pretty much all I read was fantasy, so it was something completely new and fresh for me.

One of the characters in the novel mentioned Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, which caused me to look it up and sent me down a long trail of book after book of science and cosmology and biology and sociology… I think I didn’t read fiction again for a year or two after that.

Also, 2001 was the first book to put the thought in my head that maybe there was some other form of life after death, something non spiritual, non religious, but purely physical, material. Just the idea that our consciousness may be able to survive death in a way that was not magical was something that I’d never considered before, and it opened a lot of new avenues of thinking in my mind. When Dave woke up inside the monolith, it gave my young mind hope, however cheesy that sounds. Hope that there could be some logical, sensical way to continue on after death–something that followed the laws of the universe, something I wouldn’t have to discount out of hand.

Though it didn’t last long, it was a nice feeling to have for a while.

That’s it for now, I’ll post the next book in a few days!