Well, this weekend I took the tour of state capitals, driving through three but really visiting none, on the way to CornCon in Davenport, Iowa, and then a quick stop in the Milwaukee area to drop in in family too briefly.
As I did last year, I stopped by the Source book shop on 3rd Street, and Ben Wolf had a table peddling books.
So I got a couple.
First, I stopped at the Source, and although I wanted to buy everything in their better poetry section upstairs, I only got:
- Vigils by Aline Kilmer (Mrs. Joyce Kilmer). I explained to the guy ringing me out who Joyce Kilmer was. I am not sure he was impressed.
- Departmental Ditties and Barrack-Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling, a handom 1899 omnibus edition.
- Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm during the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, which I got in the lower-priced basement local history section. The guy behind the counter said they had several copies, but this is the first they sold.
They had a couple illustrated editions of James Whitcomb Riley’s works a la Old School Day Romances and other old editions of Kipling. They’re not crazy expensive–under $20 or so or maybe $30 for some titles–but they’re not dollar or two dollar books, either, and it wasn’t half-price day. So I limited myself. Perhaps by the time I go back, should I do so, next year, I will have read more about the local history and I can tell conference attendees things they don’t care about.
I asked Ben Wolf what was new, and he asked me what I’d read (The Ghost Mine is all, although I bought a copy of his western and the start of one of his cyberpunk/fantasy series.
He convinced me to buy:
- The Ghost Pact and The Ghost Plague because when I picked up the second one, he assured me I would want both because the second ends on a cliffhanger. Did I say that I wouldn’t get the next two in the series? Well, that was last year, and I didn’t want to let the kid down.
- That The Frost?, the first in a Santa versus zombies series.
- Rickshaw Riot, which he co-wrote with another guy, about a developer who gets sucked into his video game, but others have, and because he came later, all the good classes were taken, so he has to be a rickshaw driver. This one actually was thrown in free because I was buying three other books.
Buying only seven books over a five day weekend is what counts as “austerity” for me, although I spent more than I would for a couple of boxes of books at a library book sale.
Which one will I read first? You know.
