books and stuff.

9/2/07 3:36 PM

Today we went to a thrift store and a used book store called The Book Nook.
It's entirely possible that I am addicted to books.
The thrift store was benefitting a home for orphans and abused children. Being an orphan, I HAVE to support an orphanage. Today I bought:
Wilderness and the American Mind by R.F. Nash (this is for my grandma)
Seven Contemporary Short Novels - includes Roth, Porter, Bellow, McCullers, Triling, Steinbeck, and O'Connor. A textbooky anthology with discussion questions.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales translation by R.M. Lumiansky. (I later realized this was a prose translation, EWWWWW. I gave it away.)
Jennie Gerhardt by Dreiser. If you recall, I read An American Tragedy and The Genius and loved them, so this one should be good.
Darkness at Noon by Koestler. By an English author but it's a novel about the politics of Soviet Russia.
The Genius of the Early English Theater , an anthology of Medieval and Renaissance drama
The Cabala by Thornton Wilder
A Short History of England's and America's Literature , from 1906. I want to see what the historical bias is and it sounds very interesting. I do have a fetish for literature textbooks and anthologies, especially old ones. I keep a big stack of anthologies of all different sorts on my nightstand and read something when the mood strikes me.
Modern English Readings from 1951. It has biographies, short stories, poems, essays and plays, organized thematically and including stuff that isn't in most anthologies.
The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems - seems very in-depth on the math of fractals, I don't think I'll be able to understand it too well unless I study something simpler first. However it was only 50 cents, and this is supposed to be a classic of fractal geometry writing.
Total cost: $11. Of course I have to mail them home but HEY, don't use your facts and logic on ME!
(That's my catch-phrase, BTW FYI. Not JK LOL)

Today I started Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak after finishing The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. (I MUST read more Wilde, his work is fantabulous.) I'm still in the middle of Hixon's Coming Home , Golding's Rites of Passage , and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume I.

In a few weeks I'll post a list of all the books I bought on this trip. It's gonna be long! I'm gonna have to go on book-buying moratorium for a while, allowing myself to ONLY buy books from existing threads and not buy more books for the random books thread.

At thrift strores that have a small selection of random books, I'll get whatever random books I want.
But at bookstores I will only look for specific books from threads and specific subjects I want to explore.
Also, I think I will put my nonfiction books on LibraryThing, so people can see what my interests are.

Linda's husband was right, though I hate to admit it. I can't read everything in the world. If I lived in 1700 or maybe even 1800, it would be entirely possible to absorb the entire sum of Western thought in history, science, and literature in a 70-year lifespan, but now....*sob* I CAN'T. I HATE that fact but it must be faced.