Category: Books

Uh oh, it’s the annual Kirkwood Friends of the Library Book Fair. I hit the Automated Teller Machine Machine, entered my Personal Identification Number Number, and got out a pile of money, and oddly enough, it was just enough:

Click for full size

That’s $85 in books and $8 in audiocassettes; I bought most of the books, and my beautiful wife bought most of the cassettes, although our son apparently picked up two cassettes of his own while mommy was browsing and we bought them instead of wasting the time to put them back.

I got:

• A handout from a program in 1984 where local citizens put on a walking tour of their homes on a street that the county wanted to widen. 24 years later, the road is still only two lanes, but the county is chomping at the bit still to improve it. Recently, stop lights appeared on a cross street and last year, paint markings appeared showing where the current right of way extends so they can chop turn lanes out of people’s yards. Remember, when you fight city hall, you’re only fighting a holding action. Bureaugnarok is still coming.
• Democracy in America by de Tocqueville. Because I want to read about what that was.
• A couple of literary magazines from the late 1970s with Lyn Lifshin poetry in them. Because my wife collects them, so must I.
• An autobiography of Bob Gibson, because I’m watching a lot of baseball this year. And because they lowered the mound because of him.
• A book by the recently deceased Clarissa Start, a resident of this municipality for a while and the author of its official history and a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This will be the third book of hers I’ve read and the second I own.
• St. Louis 365, a trivia bit about St. Louis.
• Inter Ice Age 4, a science fiction bit. A collection, I think.
• Myst: The Book of Ti’ana, because I’m suddenly into books from video games, I think (see below). The pages are special paper with a background design in them. I think that will annoy me when I start reading it.
• Cell, the latest novel from Stephen King.
• 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Completes my collection. For some reason, I left behind the hardback copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What kind of collector am I?
• Lipstick Jungle by the woman who wrote Sex and the City. To get in touch with my feminine and kinda slutty side.
• Lovelock, an Orson Scott Card title. Because the other bloggers say he’s good, I’ve accumulated a couple. However, I haven’t delved into one yet because some bloggers encourage you to read Greg Bear, too.
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents a Month of Mystery because sometimes these collections hit the spot.
• The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. Earlier this year, I picked up a book club edition of this title; this is a fourth printing (not book club). I’m getting closer to the first printing, werd.
• Children of the End by Orson Scott Card. See above.
• Why Orwell Matters. I would have bought it on the title alone, but it’s Christopher Hitchens. Back in the last decade, I read No One Left To Lie To and I think it was okay, but this decade and the Internet have been good to him and my appreciation of him.
• Burnt Sienna by David Morrell. Bloody heck, aren’t two books (First Blood and Rambo: First Blood Part II) enough from this author this year? Maybe not.
• The Dark Tower V-VII by Stephen King. I read the first three when they came out. I guess I’ll have to pick up IV somewhere and probably re-read the first three if I’m to make a real run of it. However, I don’t think I really liked how III went, but it’s been a long time.
• Titan AE; I thought the book Forge of God reminded me of the trailer for the movie. I’ll have to see how the book compares to the trailer, since I’ve not seen the movie. I’ll probably like it better than Forge of God regardless.
• Cyrus the Great, a mass market paperback history of Cyrus of Persia. It might make me a better Civ IV player.
• The Age of Reason, a novel by Sartre. The book fair also had a copy of Nausea; the former is hard enough to find, and I’d never seen the former. But I own it now! It should brighten a day for me.
• Why Things Are by Joel A. I used to read his bits on WashingtonPost.com.
• A Catskill Eagle by Robert B. Parker. A first printing; I’ll have to see what my existing printing is.
• The Mahdi by A.J. Quinnell. I own Man on Fire (because it’s the novel upon which a movie is based, natch). In case I like it, I now own another book by the author. As you can see, at the Kirkwood Book Fair, it doesn’t take much of a rationalization for me to buy a book.
• The Case for Mars, a book arguing for space exploration and colonization. What’s not to like about that?
• One More Time, another collection by Mike Royko.
• Love, Poverty, and War, another Hitchens title that promises to cover three of my favorite things. Hopefully, there’s a sequel about guns, famine, and software quality assurance.
• Pearl by Tabitha King. I don’t remember seeing a book by Mrs. King before.
• Nobody Safe by Richard Steinberg. The title looked cool, the inside of the flap looked cool. How rarely I buy books based simply on that.
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens in the Reader’s Digest edition (unabridged). Whereas if you order it from Reader’s Digest, it’s $30 by the time it’s all said and done. Here at the Kirkwood Book Fair, random pricing for these editions was in effect. This book was $4.50 (probably because it’s so thick) and the other titles in the series were $2-3.
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving in Reader’s Digest edition.
• The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens in the Reader’s Digest edition.
• Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Reader’s Digest edition.

Whew, that’s quite a bit. Fortunately, our circumstances allowed us to go on a Friday. We spent a bit more than an hour before our toddler alarm went off, but that’s about as many books as I could carry anyhow.

Fortunately, though, there was a smaller book fair that evening at church, so I got a chance to spend the last of the hundred bucks I’d gotten at the ATM machine after entering my PIN number and whatnot. A smaller haul, to be sure:

Click for full size

I got:

• Rebel Moon, another science fiction novel based on a video game.
• Barbarians at the Gate about the takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1988.
• Family Rooms, Dens, & Studios, a Sunset book. I think I might already have this one, actually, but its list price was fifty cents, so I had to get it just in case.

The boys made out like bandits, though.

Fortunately, the ATM machine was still there on Saturday morning for our weekend (proper) book hunting.

Total books acquired: 37 (and 2 literary magazines). Total spent (for family): $103.

Even more fortunately, these dangerous book fairs only come once a year, and only 3 or 4 are that tempting.

So this weekend marked the first really dangerous book fair of the season: The St. John’s United Church of Christ book fair. We went to this one last year, so I knew what to expect: I picked up a box right when I went through the door instead of pretending I was only going to buy one or two things and then picking up a box after I accumulated a dozen books.

In the end, I needed two boxes for my books, not including the books for the other residents here. The stacks:

Click for full size

To sum up my acquisitions:

• 19 volumes of the Time-Life Books series The Great Ages of Man. Okay, it’s apparently 18 volumes (1 duplicate) from the (I know see) 21 volume set. Still, a nice primer on some history stuff. Good idea books, I hope. As I get older, I’m acquiring more and more of these sets so that I or my children will have them to kind of page through in a way you really can’t with Wikipedia.
• A couple Dell Shannon mysteries. He wrote mysteries in the 1960s where the crimes are all fairly minor. They’re police procedurals, and sort of pastoral police procedurals now.
• A couple of Mike Shayne paperbacks. Good, short pulp bits that I cut my teeth on when I was a lad.
• The April Robin Murders, a paperback co-written by Ed McBain?
• Take the Money and Die, a paperback mystery I bought simply because it was that close to the others I picked up. Seriously. Collateral collectage.
• No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson, a writer from the next suburb whose work I have yet to read. I own one of his books in Swedish, so it’s nice to have something by him that I can read.
• A stack of gardening books because I’ve planted some things. Most of them are small, brochurish things from the 1940s and 1950s.
• Coping in the 80s because I want to see how I managed.
• Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries.
• A biography of Robert Burns because I don’t already have one.
• Dickens’s Hard Times and Steinbeck’s Cannery Row to pile onto my classical material.
• A couple of Rod McKuen books, Lonesome Cities and And to Each Season, so I can screw up the next childright from birth, too.
• On Flirtation, a psych book about flirting.
• A book by Bob Hope from the 1960s. You know, I’ve not read any book by him. He can’t be worse than Sinbad or Judy Tenuta.
• The Giant Book of Insults because I have a long list of people to insult.
• Literary St. Louis: A Guide. Ironic, isn’t it, that I’m actively catching up to William Gass (I hope) with one of his books?
• Godless by Ann Coulter. It’s worth a buck, and she’s not getting any portion of it.
• Gravity by Tess Gerritsen. At the checkout, my wife said she already owned a copy. However, she is not me. Now I own a copy and will read it, eventually.
• The World of George Orwell, a picture and sort of bio of Eric Blair. Because (say it with me), I didn’t own one already.

I also got two videocassettes, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and Pink Floyd at Pompeii. They were $2.00 each; had I known that, I would not have gotten the first. Had I seen it before I bought it, I wouldn’t have spent another dollar on it.

Total spent: $61.75. Total books for me: 48. Total for household: 61.

Looks like I’m going to have to forgo some heavy reading for a bit to clear some of the backlog.

And the Old Trees and Kirkwood library friends, not to mention the Carondolet Y book fair, are still to come this year.

I wouldn’t call it good book hunting. It was nominally the first garage sale weekend, so we hit a couple advertised in the Old Trees local papers. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago when the people decided to throw their sales, it was 70 degrees on the weekend. Yesterday morning, it was 38 with a wind. So not many people were out, and nobody was happy about it.

Here’s our take:

Click for full size

I got:

• Space Wars Worlds and Weapons, a book of space weapons art from 1979. No doubt designed to tap into Star Wars‘s new popularity.
• THX 1138, George Lucas dystopian first film on videocassette.
• Two Garth Brooks CDs, Garth Brooks and The Chase.
• The soundtrack for Dazed and Confused. Soundtracks for period nostalgia movies are better for collecting a number of period hits at cheap prices at garage sales. They’re often better than hit compilations, since so many hit compilations get “hits” you’ve never heard of because they’re cheaper than real hits. The movie guys, though, they spent the money and got the A-list stuff.
• Adore by Blind Melon because I have only heard one Blind Melon song, and $1 for the whole album is cheap.

The son(s) got a stack of Dr. Seuss big boy books. My beautiful wife came away empty, figuratively of course because she’s literally quite full these days.

Beware the Ides of March, indeed. Not only did we attend two very disappointing school-based rummage sales, but it’s also the annual Eliot Unitarian Chapel book fair. This little affair takes place in the library of a little church in the next suburb over, but its hardbacks are $3.00 and other books are also priced over what I tend to spend. Unfortunately, I had cash in the wallet, a mostly entertained toddler, and the pent-up urge to acquire. So I got a couple books.

Also, since I fancy myself a history writer now with my recent publication in a magazine of that genre, I was looking for idea books or reference material. So I bought some historical biographies that I normally would not have.

I got:

• Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein in paperback because I fear my shelves are low on the Heinlein, high on the Greg Bear.
• Roadside America, a collection of old highway and small town tourist trapica. An idea book.
• The Explainer, another Slate compendium.
• The Life of Emerson, a biography of that transcendentalist.
• Son of the Wilderness, John Muir, another historical biography. I read something about Muir not too long ago in a history magazine. Also, I have been to Muir Woods and wear the hat while walking said toddler.
• Catherine the Great. Because I don’t have many Russian history books, I guess. I don’t know. I was pretty profligate at picking things up at this point.
• Back to Basics, a Reader’s Digest compendium of basic skills. Not the Foxfire series by any stretch, but will prove useful if civilization collapses. Or if I get into the Renaissance festival lifestyle, I suppose. I don’t know which chance is greater.
• The Dark Ages, which also might be helpful if civilization collapses, but mostly this is an idea book.
• Journey to Cubeville, a Dilbert book to remind me of what it was like when I was a straight.
• The Great Works of Mankind, a rather seasoned picture book of great buildings and whatnot. Also an idea book.
• Son in Law, a movie with Paulie Shore. Which I have already seen. Take that for what it’s worth.
• The Eiger Sanction, a Clint Eastwood movie I have not seen. Still, it’s only a buck, less than the DVD I would probably have bought eventually.

You can see Heather’s single book to the right and the boy’s book, Piglet’s Night Light. One of the workers at the book fair played me by asking if the lad might like to look at a book while we browsed. She gave him this one, which he flipped through while we pushed him through the tables. As if I was going to take it away from him where we ended. As a side note, he’s pretty good with the older children books, but we’ve begun the transition from board books by letting him flip through magazines so he could get the feel of the lighter paper pages and learn not to rip them or fold them. Helpful tip if you’ve got kids or books, I suppose.

So we spent like $25 dollars today, and I got 10 new books. As long as I only go to a book fair once every 2 months and stay away from the long science fiction novels or historical biographies, I’ll keep even with my purchases. On the other hand, look what I’m purchasing.

Someone gave my son a book, a book that that particular someone thought might have been a nice story about sharing or merely about fish. If that someone had cracked the cover of the book and had perused the book at all, I’d have to assume that someone wanted to co-opt my son into a world where all the altruistic bogeymen of Ayn Rand fiction are true. That book is The Rainbow Fish, and its author’s name might as well be Marx Pfister.

You see, the Rainbow Fish has colorful, reflective scales made of foil embedded within the sheets of the book. That differentiates the Rainbow Fish from the other fish in this fictive undersea world, too, making it more beautiful and, according to the value system espoused by the book, better somehow as the other fish value and covet those scales for themselves. Are they the villians? Of course not. The fish endowed by its creator is the villain because it recognizes the value in its scales and is unrepentant for having them:

Okay, perhaps the Rainbow Fish is a bit impetuous. Perhaps a bit of a, erm, jerk. However, note the fish’s demand: Give me one of your scales. Part of your actual body that I find attractive. In the real world, if you ask a woman with pretty hair for a lock to keep and wear, she’ll pepper spray you, get a restraining order, and you’re the one ostracised, or so I have heard. In the Rainbow Fish universe, if you refuse, you are ostracised.

Brothers and sisters, I know something of sharing. Sharing occurs when someone with something says, “Hey, I have something, and someone has less or nothing. I shall give that person some of my something.” Instances that begin with someone having something and someone else demanding it are called “Robbery.” This book, then, seriously tries to inculcate urchins with the worst ad absurdums of Rand’s villainous thoughts: altruism, to give of yourself because other want you to give it up or because self-denial is a value. I mean, even Marx said From each according to his ability, which implied that ritual self-dismemberment or self-flaying was not required.

Unfortunately, the Rainbow Fish is weak and consults with a many-tentacled consultant who then tells him that he needs to give in, compromise, and everyone will love him. So the Rainbow Fish does:

Now that they’re all equal in the ugly, asymmetrical single shiny scale, everyone loves him. Or at least Diana Moon Glampers would be. You see, in the Rainbow Fish undersea soviet, people love you for what you give them, not for what you are. And what you give them is the power to demean and diminish you for their own benefit.

Call it whatever you want, but it’s not a lesson in sharing. It’s a lesson in self-destruction for the pleasure of the masses.

You know, when the boy brings me this book to read to him, he gets a different story than the words tell him, and by the time he can read himself, Daddy might lose this book. Because, jeez, this is not what I want to teach my son, and it’s not what I want him to absorb from professionals because I’m not paying attention.

Sort of related thoughts from Rachel Lucas here, but she’s not a breeder like me, so it’s all theoretical on her part.