Books that will help: a start

 I don't do many 'book reviews' here. It's not because I don't read. I read at least fifty pages a day, sometimes well over a hundred. I read four hundred books every year, I finish a dozen. The 50-100 pages a day is rarely of the same book and my record of finishing all the books I start is pretty abysmal. Like every intellectual striver ruined by the internet, I'm much better with magazine-length essays and essay collections than with full-length books. Books can't be consumed in one sitting, they have to be remembered from day to day, and what interests you from one day has to be the same as what interests you the next. I've read many books with chapters out of order, I've read many books skipping the sections that bore me, I've read many books having come back at the place I put down twenty years ago.

I'm a reader, but I'm a terrible reader, and someone without that work ethic for reading shouldn't trust themself to remember everything they need to remember to talk about books properly.

So here are the books that I think will be of value to people, divided into the books I've, more or less, read, and the books I've, less or more, haven't read.

...come to think of it I don't have the nerve to do it yet