Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. ISBN 0-316-76950-9. I enjoyed reading this book. It was easy to read. The stories contain a lot of conversation and smoking! Too bad all of his stories are not available in book form, maybe someday.

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Sallinger. ISBN 0316769495. This book contains two stories, actually two episodes of one story. There isn't much action, it is mostly just conversations.

Night In Funland And Other Stories From Literary Cavalcade, edited by Jerome Brondfield. TK1056. This is a collection of short stories published by Scholastic Book Services in 1968. I first read this book in high school sometime around 1970. The story Night In Funland is by William Peden. He also has a book of short stories called Night In Funland. I found this book in a used book store about 20 years ago. The stories are mostly written in the 1950's but there are a few from the 30's, 40's and 60's. Contains 13 easy to read stories, including Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes and One Ordinary Day with Peanuts by Shirley Jackson.

Behold A Pale Horse by William Cooper. ISBN 0-929385-22-5. This book purports a theory that there is a vast conspiracy of a group known as the Illuminati that has involved numerous other groups, including, the Masons, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, FEMA, etc. This conspiracy has been on going for hundreds of years and its purpose is to either 1) control the world (i.e., establish the New World Order), 2) protect the world from extraterrestrial beings (UFOs, etc.) or 3) deliver the world to extraterrestrial beings to be used as a slave planet. Also contains a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Cooper claims that the protocols are really the secret plans of the Illuminati.

Interpretation of the Meaning of The Noble Quran Translated into the English Language By Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali Ph.D. and Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan. This is a pocket sized edition of a popular translation of the Quran. According to the Wikipedia article, this translation of the Quran is disliked by Western Muslims (what is a Western Muslim? verse 3.149 and an associated Hadith by Samara bin Jundab indicate that Muslims shouldn't live in the land of al-shirk, i.e. western countries. See here number 2781.) because it is too blunt, contains grotesque misogyny, and is more like a supremacist Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian polemic than a rendition of the Islamic scripture. Harsh. The book has both Arabic and English, 975 pages for the Quran and about another 130 pages of preface and appendix. There are many notes attached to the Quran translation taken from Hadith, etc. Here is the text of the translation.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. ISBN 0-440-32497-1. This is the Twentieth Anniversary edition, printed 1984. Purchased at Powell's, 1992-08-14 for $2.95, used, regular sized paperback (the one I read, not the one pictured.) This book is credited by some as starting the second women's liberation movement. It is well written and full of information, even though it is now more than 45 years old (originally published in 1963.)

50 Physics Ideas You Really Need To Know by Joanne Baker. ISBN 978-1-84724-148-1. This book, like the other "50 Ideas" books, contains 50 short descriptions of physics related subjects. Each subject gets four pages. This also includes diagrams and boxes on special terms (for example, in the section on chaos theory there is a box on the "butterfly effect".) Other subjects include Mach's Principle, Newton's laws, Nuclear fission, Nuclear fusion, the Big Bang, etc. These descriptions are very high level and aimed at a general audience. There are no references to help pursue a subject further, however, one can easily look them up in Wikipedia. I got his book for $5.99 at Borders.

Dictionary of Islam by Thomas Patrick Hughes. ISBN 978-812060672-2. This book was originally published in 1885. It has been re-published in recent times by several companies. There is also a PDF version available for free.
I find it interesting to read, even though it is out of date in many areas.

Interlinear Chumash Bereishis. ISBN 978-1-4226-0202-7. This book is a part of an Artscroll series. Interlinear means that the original Hebrew text is shadowed by a word for word English translation. This can be a bit difficult to follow at times, but it gives you a sense of how the original text reads. These books are probably only for those who are seriously interested in the Hebrew religion. There is also a commentary drawn from various medieval Rabbis, such as Rashi, Ramban, etc. The commentary frequently refers to the Midrash. This is a beautiful book, very well typeset, etc. I wish that they would have provided more information about the source of the commentary.

Infinity and the Mind, by Rudy Rucker. ISBN 0-691-00172-3. This is an excellent introduction to some complex ideas. Probably the reader who has little or no exposure to these ideas will find this book very difficult. Chapter titles are Infinity, All the Numbers, The Unnameable, Robots and Souls, The One and the Many, The Transfinite Cardinals, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. I enjoyed this book (I have read it three times), but I find the Unnameable and the sections on Large Cardinals and Incompleteness difficult to understand.

The Mystery of the Aleph by Amir D. Aczel. ISBN 1-56858-105-X. The subtitle is Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity. This book is about the history of infinity. It is less technical than the David Foster Wallace book. Like that other book this one is mostly about Georg Cantor, but also covers Zeno (and other Greeks), Galileo, Gödel, Cohen and others. The book is well written and easy to read. The explanations of the more technical parts of the story are a bit over simplified, but still enjoyable for someone interested in this subject. This book plays up the idea that the study of infinity causes insanity.

National Sunday Law by A. Jan Marcussen. No ISBN. This booklet is being mail to people in the United States. This book purports to explain future events based on the Book of Revelation. The style is sensational, for example, on the cover it says "A Shocking Glimpse Behind the Scenes" and "Forces unite amid stupendous crisis...". The author is a Seventh-day Adventist. He is against the so called "National Sunday Law" (see here for example Lord's Day Act or here
Lord' Day Alliance.) His theory is that the Pope and the United States of America are two beasts from the Book of Revelation that are going to help Satan ruin the lives of millions by causing them to worship the Sun instead of G-D. The book can be obtained from websites like this.

Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞, By David Foster Wallace. ISBN 978-0-393-32629-1. This a really good book. A bit eccentric in style, but it works because the subject, infinity, is so complex. The story is mainly of Cantor's work in the modern theory of infinity, but it covers stuff from all periods of history, e.g., Zeno and other ancient Greeks to European mathematics of the 1600's and the discovery of Calculus (Leibniz and Newton.)
This book touches on many complex mathematical ideas, but doesn't get too bogged down with proofs, etc.

Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1964

By Lerone Bennett, Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Published by Penguin Books, 1966

ISBN 0140208569, 9780140208566

435 pages

This book was written as a series of magazine (Ebony) articles in the early 1960s when the word Negro was still accepted. Now, of course, one would say African-American. Very well written, it describes this history of Africans in the Americas, mostly in the USA.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Bantam S2807. I've had this book for years, but I never read it. Lots of people read it in school, but it was never assigned to me and so I never got around to reading it. It doesn't seem very realistic to me. New York in the 1940's must have been a crazy place.

The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner. ISBN 0-15-140934-X. I got my copy of this book at Powells at the same time that I got the Biography of Satan (they were in the same section.) This book was easier to read than the Satan one, a bit less academic, but still very well written. The book covers the concept of Hell mostly from the view point of Western Civ. She includes stuff at the beginning about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean sources (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish, etc.) but then mostly focuses in on the idea of Hell in Christian Europe, both in religious thought and in art and literature . The book contains many pictures of paintings of Hell done over the centuries. I learned a lot from this book and will be exploring some of the subjects she discusses in more detail. This book is not a religious book.

Anthem by Ayn Rand. Signet 451-W7846. My copy of this book is much older than the one I linked to. I am guessing that I bought it sometime in the late 80's, but it was probably used. It doesn't have an ISBN. Probably dates to the 60s. I have four other books by her, maybe I'll get around to reading them someday. The story in this book is not very believable. It is contrived to allow the author to make the point of how great is individualism. It was written at a time when the Soviet Union was considered a success by some people. Clearly, those days are gone. This book is a poor example of a genre (dystopian science-fiction) that I would say includes books like Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm. Read them before you read this.

Screwed, The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class, by Thom Hartman. ISBN 1-57675-414-6. I got this book at Powells for cheap. My copy is the first edition (2006.) There is a more recent second edition. The book is easy to read and well written. It appears to me to be well researched, many stated facts are sourced with notes/references. The book is a bit of a downer, because Hartmann paints a pretty bleak picture. He does end it with recommended actions that the reader can pursue.

Satan A Biography, by Henry Ansgar Kelly. ISBN 0-521-60402-8. This book provides a discussion of the character Satan as it occurs in (mainly) Christian literature. Jewish and Muslim ideas are considered only briefly. The main thrust is the "Old" vs. the "New" Satan. The Old Satan is found in the Old Testament and New Testament books while the New Satan is developed later by Christian writers like Justin Martyr. I found this book very interesting and was especially interested in the wide variety of books the author consulted to make his case concerning the Old vs. New Satan.