Amazon Wish Lists

I use my Amazon Wish List as a holding pen for any book I might want to read some day. Anytime I come across a mention of a book that I might find interesting, I look it up on Amazon and add it to my wishlist. Often I go through the list and see what I can find in my university library. We have a great library so I'm able to find many of them. Sometimes it is a book I'd rather read on my iPad and I look for it on iBooks (I do have the Kindle app but have yet to use it). When I go shopping at my favorite used bookstore, I pull my wishlist up on my phone and hunt down the books that might be there. And of course, each November I put a few on my Christmas list.

But some books can sit on the wishlist for a very long time. Every once in a while I go through and purge those that I have no intention of reading but I find it hard to give up on the possibility of a book. The list is long, so I won't reproduce it all, but here's a sampling of what's currently on there:

• Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm
• On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
• My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, The Real You, or Something Else Entirely, by Kate Bornstein
• How to Be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran
• The Principles of Uncertainty, by Maira Kalman
• A Thousand Mornings, by Mary Oliver
• White As Snow, by Tanith Lee
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg
• Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence, by Lisa Cron
• Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self, by Elly Teman
• The Wayfarer Redemption, by Sara Douglass
• Inside the Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons, by Ayelet Waldman

 Have you read any of these? Do any strike your fancy? What's on your wishlist?

Comments

[Casey]

I do a similar thing with my Wishlists. I do a silly rewards program that lets me earn Amazon giftcards, so I have a list for fiction & music, then a bunch of lists for more academic & scholarly stuff (there's still a list of dance videos that hasn't been touched, but I can't bring myself to delete the list even though I can't dance at the same level anymore).

Kate Bornstein's gender workbook is fantastic....tangentially, if you ever get a chance to hear her speak, she's really dynamic and entertaining. Her Twitter feed can be fun as well.