Sunday, July 22, 2007

"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power"

NYTimes says:
Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.


Blake; Asian history, art and poetry; Aristotle; Climate Change;Machiavelli; Galileo; Omar Khayyam’s “Rubáiyát;" Shakespeare, Tennyson, and the poetry found in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and Camus’s “Stranger”; “The City of God” by E. L. Doctorow.