Wednesday, September 8, 2010

My Love of Books

Last week I suddenly realized that it has been a while since I have written anything of personal note as an entry. Keeping with my philosophy that public relations is a "personal" way of life, I would like to share one of the great facets into my very "interesting" brain.

I love books! I always have!

When I was in the fifth grade, my school participated in the Accelerated Reader program. Even at that age, reading intrigued me and inspired my imagination. Unfortunately the teachers then really didn't try to gage what each individual student's true reading potential was and decided we all should start at the fifth grade level.

By sheer fate, I didn't realize this proclamation and instead picked up an 8.5 grade reading level book, "The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle." My teacher was shocked when she discovered what book I had picked up, but she let me continue as I was already half-way through reading it at the time. She was even more surprised when I scored 95% on the book's exam. She readily adjusted my reading level.

At the end of sixth-grade I was ranked second in my class under the Accelerated Reader program, behind an old friend of mine, Katie Moss, who is now pursuing a master's in English Lit. Third in the rankings was Zack Ray, a football player in high school who most of my classmates don't realize is an incredibly intelligent guy. Who knows why I remember this statistic, but I do.

Random Fact: My parents once owned a bookstore in Brookhaven, Miss. called Mullen & Scott Booksellers.

I have also slowly collected my own personal library over the past few years. It is comprised of leather bound, hard back and autographed editions of classics and other books of my fancy. Most of them I've read. Others, are what I would like to jokingly call a "retirement investment."

As a living list to be periodically updated, I would like to share what I have collected so far...


The Personal Library of Andrew M. Scott

Daniel Defoe: Five Novels
Jules Verne: Seven Novels
H.G. Wells: Seven Novels
Herman Melville: Seven Novels
The Chronicles of Narnia (complete, one book)
The Looking Glass Wars, Seeing Redd and Arch Enemy
Charles Dickens: Four Complete Novels
Wicked and Son of a Witch (one book)
The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Gone with the Wind
To Kill a Mockingbird (40th Anniversary)
Lord of the Flies (50th Anniversary)
The Divine Comedy
Bulfinch's Mythology
The Iliad and the Odyssey
Gray's Anatomy
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide
The Art of War
The Art of the Kama Sutra
Teo Te Ching The Art of Harmony
Relativity - Einstein
Meditations - Aurelius
The Race Beat ~
Schulz and Peanuts (Biography)
The Wine Guide
Thomas Jefferson on Wine - John Hailman ~
Planet of the Apes
Arabian Knights
Jack London: Three Novels
Bikeman - Thomas Flynn ~
Mark Twain: Five Novels
Treasure Island
Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Dr. Zhivago
Citizen Hearst
The Lord of the Rings (one book, 50th Anniversary)
The Hobbit
Plato: The Republic and other works
The Audacity of Hope
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
The Poems of Abraham Lincoln

The Reagan Diaries
The Last of the Mohicans
Ben-Hur
The Max Lucado Christmas Collection
Stephen Colbert - I Am America And So Can You
The Complete Frank Miller Batman
One Nation - America Remembers September 11, 2001
New York Days - Willie Morris ~
Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius - Margaret Walker ~
Start Something that Matters – Blake Mycoskie ~
Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson ~
Onward – Howard Schultz
Don Quixote
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde: Short Stories
Jane Austen: Seven Novels
Earnest Hemmingway: Four Novels
Crime and Punishment
The Scarlet Letter
The Three Musketeers
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Martian Chronicles
Hans Christian Andersen
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
The Giant Book of Poetry
The Vampire Chronicles
Anna Karenina
The Star Wars Trilogy

Key:
BOLD (Leather bound) ~ (Signed by Author)
Last updated: Sept. 22, 2012

And I still have a couple of other books that are currently on my mind - Frankenstein, Dracula, H.P. Lovecraft Complete Novels.

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you found this random bit of information interesting in some way as a personal insight into who I am. If anything, "you stay classy!"