Sunday, April 06, 2008
 
Good Book Hunting: April 5, 2008
So this weekend marked the first really dangerous book fair of the season: The St. John's United Church of Christ book fair. We went to this one last year, so I knew what to expect: I picked up a box right when I went through the door instead of pretending I was only going to buy one or two things and then picking up a box after I accumulated a dozen books.

In the end, I needed two boxes for my books, not including the books for the other residents here. The stacks:
St. John's 2008 offerings to the Noggle Library
Click for full size


To sum up my acquisitions:
  • 19 volumes of the Time-Life Books series The Great Ages of Man. Okay, it's apparently 18 volumes (1 duplicate) from the (I know see) 21 volume set. Still, a nice primer on some history stuff. Good idea books, I hope. As I get older, I'm acquiring more and more of these sets so that I or my children will have them to kind of page through in a way you really can't with Wikipedia.

  • A couple Dell Shannon mysteries. He wrote mysteries in the 1960s where the crimes are all fairly minor. They're police procedurals, and sort of pastoral police procedurals now.

  • A couple of Mike Shayne paperbacks. Good, short pulp bits that I cut my teeth on when I was a lad.

  • The April Robin Murders, a paperback co-written by Ed McBain?

  • Take the Money and Die, a paperback mystery I bought simply because it was that close to the others I picked up. Seriously. Collateral collectage.

  • No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson, a writer from the next suburb whose work I have yet to read. I own one of his books in Swedish, so it's nice to have something by him that I can read.

  • A stack of gardening books because I've planted some things. Most of them are small, brochurish things from the 1940s and 1950s.

  • Coping in the 80s because I want to see how I managed.

  • Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries.
  • A biography of Robert Burns because I don't already have one.

  • Dickens's Hard Times and Steinbeck's Cannery Row to pile onto my classical material.

  • A couple of Rod McKuen books, Lonesome Cities and And to Each Season, so I can screw up the next childright from birth, too.

  • On Flirtation, a psych book about flirting.

  • A book by Bob Hope from the 1960s. You know, I've not read any book by him. He can't be worse than Sinbad or Judy Tenuta.

  • The Giant Book of Insults because I have a long list of people to insult.

  • Literary St. Louis: A Guide. Ironic, isn't it, that I'm actively catching up to William Gass (I hope) with one of his books?

  • Godless by Ann Coulter. It's worth a buck, and she's not getting any portion of it.

  • Gravity by Tess Gerritsen. At the checkout, my wife said she already owned a copy. However, she is not me. Now I own a copy and will read it, eventually.

  • The World of George Orwell, a picture and sort of bio of Eric Blair. Because (say it with me), I didn't own one already.
I also got two videocassettes, National Lampoon's Class Reunion and Pink Floyd at Pompeii. They were $2.00 each; had I known that, I would not have gotten the first. Had I seen it before I bought it, I wouldn't have spent another dollar on it.

Total spent: $61.75. Total books for me: 48. Total for household: 61.

Looks like I'm going to have to forgo some heavy reading for a bit to clear some of the backlog.

And the Old Trees and Kirkwood library friends, not to mention the Carondolet Y book fair, are still to come this year.


 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."