Good Book Hunting, May 29, 2019: Calvin’s Book’s, Branson, Missouri

This week we spent a couple of days at Big Cedar Lodge down in Ridgedale, Missouri. Of course, I hid that fact from you, gentle reader, by queuing up a week’s worth of posts so you wouldn’t know to come ransack the fabled libraries of Nogglestead in my absence. Clearly, you cannot trust me at all.

But since we were near Branson, of course we had to stop at Calvin’s Books.

As we had packed our SUV to the brim with cooking gear, food, and clothing, I exercised some discipline in my purchases.

I got:

• Sanibel Shell Shocked by Art Stevens, a collection of humor newspaper columns from the 1980s and very early 1990s. While in Branson, my beautiful wife started talking about booking our vacation next year. A beach vacation. She’s hoping for Sanibel Island. So this book was the first that I saw, and I picked it up.
• Herschend Family Values, a polemic about the Herschend family, who bought the Marvel Cave attraction, built Silver Dollar City around it, and turned it into a vast business empire.
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer about a guy who sells everything, hitches to Alaska, and walks into the woods only to be found dead shortly thereafter.
• Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich. In hardback. Which might prove damaging.
• The Coloring Book by Colin Quinn. A musing on race relations from that guy from the MTV game show Remote Control (no, the other guy) and the actor in A Night At The Roxbury.

Unfortunately, Calvin’s didn’t offer a good selection for my children, who failed to pack any books for the trip (also, toothbrushes, it was revealed on the last night there).

Since I only bought five books, I could conceivably read them all by the end of the year.

Ha! Just kidding.