I believe I shared this picture on Social Media before, but never got to explain each of my purchases.
I'll go from top left to bottom right:
This was the book I wanted to get on my trip. Surprisingly I was never able to run into this book until the very last bookstore we went to (the famous Powell's in downtown Portland).
At the time I was very interested in literature[1], and specifically the works within "The Western Canon". Of course what works constitute the canon is heavily debated, but I was reading a lot of Harold Bloom's[2] critiques at the time as well, and I closely followed his considerations.
At a certain point, literature readers realize that they need to read the Bible - and be very familiar with it - in order to get the most out of their readings; everyone is inspired by the Bible. And if they are English writers, they are likely most familiar with the King James Version.
The Norton Critical Edition was very highly touted in public literature forums in terms of its extensive footnotes (which I can strongly confirm) and the supplimentary essays by influential thinkers (which sadly I have only made a small dent in at the moment).
I've been able to get through half of the Old Testament so far; I've stopped right before Ezra and Nehemiah, but did skip ahead to Ecclesiastes. Since my interests have drifted away from literature, I have not been actively reading this at the moment; though I am hoping to at least read Job and Isaiah very soon (for personal interest reasons).
An ecology book that was highly recommended in a literature/reading Discord server[3] that I am a part of.
I have actually yet to read this book, but after a series of recent ecology-related readings, this is very high on my queue.
One of the earliest renowned works of recorded history (alongside The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides), covering how the Greeks fended off the powerful Persian empire. With my recent interests in the Greek tradition and ancient history, as well as a heavy endorsement by BookTuber Steve Donoghue, whom I had much relied on for literature recommendations last year, I had to pick this up. I'm currently reading this and am loving it so far.
Beckett is my favorite author - Malone Dies being my favorite book.
Surprisingly it was difficult to learn Beckett's influences from Google searches alone[4]. The main name that came up was Dante, which compelled me to buy the complete books of The Divine Comedy, and also to buy this book, where one of Dante's characters, Belacqua, is the main protagonist.
Unfortunately I have yet to really read this book, nor the rest of the Comedy after Inferno (ironically stopping right before the canto in which Belacqua appears). Attemping to fully read this book necessitates reading the Comedy, and the Comedy's heavy Christian influences necessitate reading the New Testament, alongside early Christian thinkers like St. Augustine and Boethius. And to fully understand those thinkers would necessitate some familiarity with even earlier Christian thinkers: Philo, Pseudo-Dionysius, perhaps even Neoplatonists or Gnostics, in which case the hole gets even deeper...
So in an attempt to approach these works from the bottom-up, unfortunately this work by Beckett will most likely have to wait a while to be read.
I feel like this is pretty self-explanatory; a serious bookshelf must include these two works.
It costs an arm and a leg to buy these copies in Japan, so I wanted to buy them over there.
This was a book I had read before via an e-copy. (I had a nice Virgil phase in 2025.) I really enjoyed this translation and wanted to own a copy. Very glad I found this at Lamplight Books in Seattle.
Purchased due to the tremendous influence it had on literature and psychology at the time it was written.
This includes The Recognitions by Gaddis, which arguably may be the book that has changed my life the most.[5]
I read about 10% of the book via an e-copy prior to this purchase. Unfortunately I have been unable to progress much beyond that, again due to current focuses away from literature.
And that's the list!
Of the 8 books, 7 were purchased in Seattle, and of those 3 were purchased at Lamplight Books.
The bookstores I went to were based on a "Great Bookstores of the World" list from Orpheus' Patreon page. Please check that out if you are interested as well.
I wanted to emphasize this: my main motivation for reading the Bible was not religious. 90% of the people I told this to automatically assumed that I wanted to start practicing Christianity (in which case my family is Christian - albeit not devout - so it still wouldn't be completely out of the blue...). It's mildly annoying that the great literary influence of the Bible isn't widely known enough. But the general public doesn't care about literature to begin with, so that would be a tall task. ↩︎
Interestingly enough, the top praise for this book right on the back cover, was from Harold Bloom. Coincidence...? ↩︎
The Discord server is affiliated with a BookTuber named Orpheus who I have been following for a while and rely on for great book recommendations. ↩︎
Looking to reading his biography sometime soon... add that to the rest of the pile... ↩︎
I actually wrote about it in my past blog, but looking back it was so unbearably cringeworthy I'll have to write another post. ↩︎