I’m sorry; when I am on vacation, time kind of loses its meaning. I mean, I know we went to the Bookmarkish Emporium on Saturday, June 24, but I am not clear on which day we went to the Fairfield Bay Library and got great bags of books for $5 each. Was it June 27? June 28? Does it matter?
What matters is that we somehow got the two bags of books into the cargo bay of the truck on the way home without impeding my vision or decapitating the boys when I braked hard.
And we did, somehow, along with a couple of bags of leftover groceries.
A note about our trip to the Bookish Emporium: I might have mentioned that I bought two books by a local author there. They are Elements of Deception and The Widow’s Ring by Mary Schaffer. However, the book stall also had a shelf dedicated to Laurell K. Hamilton. I commented on it, and the proprietrix said she (Laurell K. Hamilton) was, in fact from Heber Springs. “She’s a Klein,” someone in the salon portion of the room said (The Bookish Emporium being but a wall of books in a hair salon in Heber Springs), and when someone can identify someone else by kin name, you know it’s at least as true as Wikipedia. I did not buy any of the books, as I gave up on the Anita Blake series after, what, Burnt Offerings? Blue Moon? When the series turned from crime fiction to soap opera. Apparently, it later went to just sex, but I missed that. Or actually, I didn’t miss it.
At any rate, when we hit the library at Fairfield Bay and its books for sale at $5 a bag, well, I got two:
I was going to behave, but they had a full shelf of Alan Dean Foster books, mostly Pip and Flinx books. Of those, I got:
- Reunion
- Trouble Magnet
- Sliding Scales
- Greenthieves
- A Triumph of Souls
- Kingdoms of Light
- Running from the Deity
- Cat-A-Lyst
- Mid-Flinx
- The Dig (I know, I have a paperbook copy of the book which I read in 2004, but this is a hardcover first edition. Which I might have already bought elsewhere, which means I’m cornering the market on the book.)
- The Mocking Program
- Drowning World
- Flinx’s Folly
All of that: Less than $5.
As it stands, there was room in that bag and another, so I also got:
- Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
- Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against The Digital Generation by J.D. Lasica from 2005. Probably way, way out of date by now, and we’re probably two or three different wars from the concerns of that time.
- A Knights Bridge Christmas by Carla Neggers, a Christmas novel I will throw into the stacks and lose by the time it comes time to read my annual Christmas novel.
- Ellery Queen’s Wings of Mystery, a collection of short stories edited by “Ellery Queen”
- 32 Basic Programs for the TI-99/4A
- Deep Freeze by John Sandford. A Virgil Flowers novel. I know, I know; I said I was probably done with Shock Wave in 2012, but this one was basically free.
- Let’s Hear It For The Deaf Man by Ed McBain, an 87th Precinct novel. I probably already have it, but it’s basically free, so I had to pick it up to make sure.
- The Sword of the Lady by S.M. Stirling, whose Conquistadors I read earlier this year.
- Arkansas: Its Land and People, part of a series that I think I have other volumes of.
- The Night Crew also by John Sandford that I read in 2006; this copy is for my son who liked the film Nightcrawler which sounds a bit like it.
- Ozark Dogs by Eli Cranor.
Additionally, the library had a couple of free book bins, which I visited during and after our sojourn, and I picked up:
- My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life by Ted Williams as Told To John Underwood. Because I know who Ted Williams was, child.
- The Broken Sphere by Nigel Findley, a D&D Spelljammer book. I never really got into that campaign setting, but I understand it’s made its way through the editions to the Fifth Edition of the rules.
- Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck
- Three TI-99/4A cartridge guides: Adventure, Blackjack & Poker, and Household Budget Management.
I also bought four DVDs at $1 each:
- Glengarry GlenRoss
- The Ghost Rider Collection with both Nicholas Cage Ghost Rider films
- The Four Kingdoms with Jackie Chan and Jet Li
- Indiscreet with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman
Sweet Christmas, I left behind a Tommy Lasorda bio and… well, a lot. If I had more room on the ride back, the carnage would have been worse. I might have bought everything they had. It looked as though a couple of the local residents had donated these books/films and they were getting cashiered for newer works. Had I enough room in the truck, I might have bought everything.
Well, maybe not everything, but more. I did not look too closely at the DVDs as I have been on a spree lately already. And I completely bypassed DVDs in the Fairfield Bay Market that were twenty-five cents each.
As such, the total spend was about $34 dollars. $18 for the local author books at The Bookish Emporium and $14 for the books and DVDs at the library. Not bad, but now I want to do nothing but sit and read or watch movies. Which is to say nothing has changed.
Also, a bit of a problem: Where to put them all? The desk or office chair is a temporary solution at best.
