I have the first five Lensman books by E.E. "Doc" Smith - Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Grey Lensman and Second Stage Lensmen. I have read the first three, but have no intention of rereading them or of reading the other two. All five are therefore on offer to the first person who expresses an interest in them.

(Thanks to mizkit for stiffening my spine on this.)

My aunt and uncle on the early days of Bangladesh.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done - when I checked, I found most of them had a few more added to the total).

( list of books )

13) Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle

This only just about counts as a book, but I'll tally it anyway. It's a 19-page pamphlet produced jointly by the Royal Irish Academy and Belfast City Council, attached to a gorgeous multi-coloured map illustrating the developing historical streetscape, with today's map faintly visible in the background. The landscape we live in is a palimpsest; this little publication helps to establish what was there before.

What is most fascinating is that the defensive walls built in 1642 almost precisely map the security zone I remember well from my childhood. There are one or two shifts of a few metres, but on the whole the twentieth century security gates were placed pretty much on top of where the town's defences had been, a third of a millennium earlier. Extraordinary. (If you consider Dublin's history, by contrast, the commercial heart of the city has slipped about a kilometre downriver over the last thousand years.)

( the central bit of the map )

Anyway, I found it fascinating. Though it missed the charming detail from one of the very early maps of Belfast on display in the Ulster Museum, where the surveyors (presumably brought in by Lord Donegall from elsewhere) recorded the name or "Waring Street" as "Wern Street". Even back then, the locals were capable of baffling outsiders with their accents.