What sort of books do you read?

Every sort of book! I actually own thousands of volumes. My local library when I was a kid would allow people to come in with boxes during sale days and carry out as much as they wanted for five dollars. I had a refrigerator box. As the author Michael Blim wrote just a while ago:

A bag of books for two bucks, said the sign. Deflation has hit the little Connecticut country library used book sales I haunt each summer. Imagine what you can stuff into a big supermarket paper bag, and then cross-rough it with a run of terrific books – a book of Giotto’s frescoes, Graham Greene’s The Comedians, three P.D. James mysteries, George F. Kennan’s Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, a compilation of comic art propaganda that includes a study and pictures of Hansi: the Girl Who Loved the Swastika (the protagonist escapes Nazism by becoming a bride for Christ). All of these and A Guide to Thomas Aquinas.  

This sort of thing later served as inspiration for me to do some interesting things with extra books. I keep most of my library (disproportionately campy sci-fi novels) in deep storage at my old house, here is a list of the 200 books I own that I will most likely reference in this page. Many of the books are placeholders to symbolize my extreme affinity or disdain for an author, Stephenson's entire Baroque trilogy was included because the middle one is better than the others and I generally think of it as a single book.

I don't own ANY of the books I most commonly recommend I think, often because people just borrow them permanently or they are free online:

What We May Be is a great treatise discussing what is probably the most hated and misunderstood science in the world (after Evolutionary Developmental Biology and the Actuarial Sciences of course), although I disagree with several of the authors ideas near the end as a personal fan of "Panmixia", and other viewpoints. This book stirs up great discussion.

Becoming Batman speaks for itself really

Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions - Though this is mostly truisms wrapped in confirmational packaging, some people really need to read some truisms wrapped in confirmational packaging.

The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality  mmmmm delicious