Library Thing has a fun feature — it’s called their “Legacy Libraries,” which are lists of the personal libraries of famous readers. It’s interesting to look at those lists and compare them to the books you have on your own Library Thing list. It’s really interesting to see which books you have read in common with those famous readers!

For example, I’ve read these 6 books out of the 68 books listed in Tupac Shakur’s library:

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
• The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

And I’ve read 25 books out of 1,759 (an incomplete listing) in Karen Blixen’s (Isak Dinesen) library:

• Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
• The Cocktail Party: A Comedy, by T.S. Eliot
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico
• Death Be Not Proud, by John Gunther
• The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Odyssey, by Homer
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
• Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
• Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton
• Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
• The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare
• Frankenstein, by Mary W. Shelley
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
• Venture to the Interior, by Laurens Van der Post
• Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
• Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

And I’ve read 17 books in common with Sylvia Path’s library, 100 books in common with Carl Sandburg’s library, and just 3 books in common with John Muir’s library.

photo by Andre Kertesz