Good Book Hunting, April 26, 2014: Friends of the Clever Library Book Sale

After a rigorous martial arts class, we hustled to the fire station in Clever, Missouri, for the semi-annual Friends of the Clever Library Book Sale. As we got there within an hour of the two-day sale’s end, the books were a dollar a bag. And bag day means that if I think I might want to read a book on the subject some day, I’ll buy that book just in case on bag day. As a result:

Friends of the Clever Library Book Sale purchases in April 2014

Highlights include:

  • A collection of books about (South) Korea, including a couple touristy guides to attractions, two books on speaking Korean, a Korean dictionary, and a couple books about the art of Korea. Someone in Clever cleaned out their parent’s bookshelves, and one or more parents had been in Korea for a while, I wager.
     
  • Three Brad Thor novels, Foreign Influence, The Apostle, and Full Black. I know he’s a darling of the right, and my beautiful wife enjoys his books (but borrows them from the library).
     
  • A couple of short novelty books about cats, cats being better than men, women who love cats too much, and books being better than men in bed. I need to pump up my read book count this year, you know if you’ve been reading the blog. These will help.
     
  • A couple of Steinbeck paperbacks, including The Pastures of Heaven and The Log from The Sea of Cortez. Minor works, which explains why I had not seen them before. Some years back I went on a Steinbeck kick and read four of his books in a row. Just in case something like that happens again, I have these two, East of Eden and Travels with Charley. And probably more.
     
  • The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell. I really ought to get into a Cornwell kick again, as I have a number in the Sharpe’s series yet.
     
  • Four books in the Western series The Gunsmith. I’m prepping for a time when I run out of the hundreds of Mack Bolan titles I’ve got on the shelf.
     
  • An entry in the Rogue Angel series, Forbidden City. The protagonist of these men’s adventure novels is a Lara Croft knock-off.
     
  • The Destruction of Dresden. Something to read since I just finished Slaughterhouse Five just three years ago. And in case I go on a Vonnegut kick, I have three or four in the stacks.
     
  • Random Acts of Factness and Espionage’s Most Wanted, summary and trivia roll-ups that I like to read from time to time for ideas to list on my white board for when I go on a writing short history articles kick. This happens about as frequently as individual reading kicks. Or less often.
     
  • Robert Frost: A Tribute to the Source, a coffee table book that includes poems by Frost, light biographical text, and photos of New England.
     
  • Norman Rockwell: A Fifty Year Retrospective, a coffee table book of Rockwell’s work that will probably read like the obligatory article in every current issue of Saturday Evening Post amid the Government Is The Answer commentary.
     
  • A book of dulcimer music. Not because I play dulcimer music, mind you, but because I am using old photos from my eBay selling days for test data in the application I’m testing, and I have a number of images of dulcimer books that I sold. I stuffed this in a bag, thinking maybe I’d try to sell it on eBay. Who knows? Maybe I’m ready for a return to The Lifestyle. Or at least for a couple weeks after the three bag days.
     
  • Rough Weather by Robert B. Parker. Although I stopped buying them new a while back, I’ve kind of been watching to find them in the wild (and, strangely, for best sellers, I don’t). I picked this up in case I didn’t have it, but as it turns out, I do: I have a copy I bought previously and a copy my friend Roberta sent me (which, of course, I can’t depart with because it was a gift from a dear friend). But this copy is already in the growing stack of duplicates I’m going to have to part with sometime soon.
     
  • A book by Dr. Laura, Bad Childhood, Good Life. Because I, like all of us, had a bad childhood. Undoubtedly, this will be something to pass onto my children, who are also having bad childhoods. Because we’re not, and we don’t know any better.
     
  • &c.

Additionally, last night, we stopped by a resale shop, and I got the three first editions you see in front: Cinnamon Skin and Free Fall in Crimson by John D. MacDonald and Firefox, the source material for the Clint Eastwood movie. In Clever, I got a John D. MacDonald paperback, Cry Hard, Cry Fast.

I also got a couple movies: Lawrence of Arabia, Dune, and Dracula on VHS and Omega Cop and Sucker Punch on DVD. I don’t know when I’ll watch these. Probably when I have the last physical media players on Earth.

My beautiful wife’s stack of paperbacks to amuse her in upcoming travel is to the left. I’ve also given her the Diane Mott Davidson hardback, since it would be no Mother’s Day surprise if she reads this post.

Not depicted: The books my children bought in their bag. The five-year-old got a dollar bill in an Easter egg and has been carrying it with him ever since, looking for something to spend it on. So he got a bag, and they put some children’s books in it as well as a Simpsons X-Mas book that he insisted was for me (since he’d seen my collections of The Simpsons on DVDs and thought I’d like the book, too). When he got to the payment table, the man said it was a dollar for the bag, and the boy said, “How much for the books?”

So our expenditure, all told, was $21. $1 for his books, $5 for our books, $5 for our annual membership renewal in the Friends of the Clever Library, and $10 because.

So we’re through the meat of the sales now. Strangely enough, the largest sale in the area, the Friends of the Springfield/Greene County Library Book Sale is next week. But because it’s so large, I tend to stick to the LPs lately. Unless it’s bag day.

That’s a cliffhanger, ainna?

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3 thoughts on “Good Book Hunting, April 26, 2014: Friends of the Clever Library Book Sale

  1. I picked up a stack of the Sharpe novels about six years ago and a couple of his other works since then. I’ve enjoyed the Sharpe novels, but I was not impressed with Stonehenge. Hopefully, this book is more like the former than the latter.

    I also have a box set of three of the Sharpe films, but I’ve only watched one so far. Pretty good, but it did not compel me to watch them all quickly.

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