For Valentine’s Day, I took my sweetie to a book fair in St. Peters. The library out there broke their book fair into three parts: paperbacks, hardbacks, and childrens books (presumably printed after 1985 and having no non-book components). This weekend was the hardbacks weekend, which apparently only included mystery/horror books, bodice rippers by Janet Dailey, two Tom Wolfe novels, and videocassettes.
No nonfiction and little, if all, general fiction. Bare slices of science fiction, and really only stuff that was near-future suspense stuff.
I got some books, many to replace Book Club editions in my library, and some videocassettes:
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This includes:
- Desperate Measures by Joe Clifford Faust. Back in 2004, I read one of his books (A Death of Honor), and he linked the book report on his blog, so I’ll read another of his books.
- Dark of the Moon, a Sandford book that features a minor character from the Davenport series.
- Calamity Town by Ellery Queen.
- Cujo by Stephen King, which will replace a BCE of the same in my library.
- Red Storm Rising by Clancy. This might replace a book on my to-read shelves or might just be a duplicate.
- Rose Madder by Stephen King. I didn’t already have it, honey, honest.
- Shadow Money by George Alec Effinger. I read one of his a long time ago and recognized the name. I hope I’m not repeating a mistake.
- A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett. Because I’ve read most of my Florida-themed crime books to this point (except for the McBain Hope novels which are building up).
- Sudden Prey by Sandford. I didn’t think I had this one (and I was right), but I was judging by plotlines. Hopefully there’s not another in the series which I don’t own which features grisly killings where the bodies were staged, gruesomely, to send a message. Because I saw a number of the Prey novels with something similar on the flap.
- Rainbow Six by Clancy. Might be a replacement or duplicate. But the Clancys were very, very evident at the book fair.
- Misery by Stephen King. Probable replacement for BCE.
Among video cassettes, I got:
- Three movies made from Clancy novels: The Hunt for Red October (timely!), A Clear and Present Danger (pretty timely!) and Patriot Games.
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which I was missing from my Star Trek VHS collection.
- The Sands of Iwo Jima because it was a John Wayne movie for a buck.
- Faith, a collection of music videos from the George Michael album. Sure, I could have gone to YouTube and seen any one of these videos at any time I wanted to, but there’s a difference between browsing and searching. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably own or want a Kindle.
- Hamburger: The Motion Picture. I already have the Kentucky Fried Movie and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This is some sort of hybrid, right?
- The Poseiden Adventure because I haven’t seen it, and Mrs. N wants desperately to go on a cruise, so I need to bone up on survival techniques.
- Cast a Giant Shadow, a movie glorifying the founding of Israel. They don’t make them like that any more.
And the most exasperating thing about this book fair? Although Koontz novels were prevalent, the tables had a large number of Forever Odd, the second book in the series (which I have read) and a couple copies of Odd Hours, the fourth book in the series which I own but won’t read until I read Brother Odd, the third book in the series–and the one that I could not find anywhere.
