I tend to read buy a lot of books, sometimes the same book in electronic form and subsequently analogue. This love of reading started for me early on, but really took hold during the long flights I took while traveling for college.

I'd usually pick one of Tom Clancy or John Grisham's books from the duty free (they were long, inexpensive, and had relatively complex "it-could-happen" plotlines that I enjoyed). Keep in mind, this is before the era of individual screens in airplanes. If you were lucky, you got a single screen where one movie played throughout the flight from an overhead display. For the really new airplanes it was a CRT, the older ones had a projector.

As I started working, I shifted into reading technical manuals and reference materials.

I didn't think anything of this, then one day I stumbled upon this beautiful word

Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. wikipedia

Ah, if ever there was a word that so sufficiently described something.

I've tried multiple fancy ways to catalog my books (notion, airtable, even a script to attempt synchronizing my purchase histories), but alas, the simple "write it all down in plain text" works best.

This table shows a random listing of 10 books from the current library. I've kept it here so that I avoid buying the same book again (which has happened), and to have a place that I can refer others to when I recommend a book to them. The cover images are from the excellent covers api from openlibrary.org_, if a cover is missing generally it means its an e-book. I'll attempt to fill in the gaps so that all book entries have a cover image.