Yesterday, my beautiful wife and I sneaked out to the Lutherans for Life rummage sale and a spot of lunch. It was hot in the gym, and they had no LPs (well, they had four, but that’s “no” in my enumeration), but they had a couple tables of books and videos. So amid the swelter of the church gym, I picked out a few:
I got some things I’m pretty excited about.
The take includes:
- One of the Dead End Job mysteries by Elaine Viets, Catnapped!. As you know, whenever I review a collection of Elaine Viets’ columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (like these), I express hope that I’d find her fiction some day. And now I have, albeit one of many.
- Unexplained Mysteries of World War II. This looks like it could be good writing fodder for when I get back to it.
- The Happiness Project (which my beautiful wife tells me we already own; however, “we” don’t own books in this house, property laws of the state of Missouri notwithstanding; I own books and she owns books, and they must not commingle on the bookshelves) and Lightposts for Living, a book on happiness badged by Thomas Kinkade. Because I am suddenly into self-help and happiness promotion books, I guess. I blame the Buddhism.
- On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m building up a complete collection of these slowly so that when I get into reading them, I can do them all in order.
- That Should Be A Word, a book about ideas that don’t have words (except they probably do in German).
- Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies. The cover says it’s a satire of Lovecraft and other writers. We’ll see.
- The Poetry of Events.
- Guide to the World’s Greatest Treasures, a Barnes and Noble book. Another collection of writing fodder, perhaps.
- Hemingway Colloquium: The Poet Goes to Cuba. Something with “Hemingway” in the title.
- Beijing, China, a travel/guide book.
Additionally, I got some videos I’m looking very forward to watching, including Young Frankenstein (which has been on my mind this week), Blazing Saddles, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, Xanadu (which I looked for on Netflix and Amazon a couple months ago but could not find it), Spaceballs, The Sons of Katie Elder, and a Charles Bronson movie in a thin dollar-pricing sleeve. So I my trips to the video store might abate here for a couple weeks.
The total, along with the beautiful wife’s books THAT WILL NOT GO ON MY BOOKSHELVES and a small planter was $19 somehow. But I pitched in a little extra for a good cause.
And now that I’m done with the recent Poe, I’m eager to delve into some other books, stat.
Xanadu, with Olivia Newton-John? It is painfully stupid. I couldn’t make it all the way through it. The sound track is really good though.
That’s the one. I remember seeing it a long, long time ago and thinking it wasn’t that good, but something triggered my memory of it recently, so I wanted to see it. It might have just been playing the soundtrack on my record player recently. I spun it yesterday to celebrate.
Want to know how it ends?