Category: Books

So I was saying something about not taking children to book fairs or something, and suddenly I read that the People for the Ethical Treatment of People or the St. Louis Ethical Society or whatever the secular humanists, the moral subgroup of the loft people, call themselves was having its book fair. Last year, it was a pretty small affair but fruitful according to my acquisitive nature. This year, it proved smaller, small enough to go through before the children got too many stroller sores, but fruitful enough:

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I got:

• Several volumes of the History of Philosophy paperback set. I already owned a number of them but couldn’t remember which ones I lacked, so I bought them all. Turns out I only added one to my collection and a large number of duplicates. Gimlet, if you want the dupes, they’re yours.
• Reflections of Friendship, kind of like Be Happy!, but with only landscapes and not 70s people to mock.
• Countdown to Super Bowl, a book about the time the Jets went to the Super Bowl with Joe Namath at the head. Uh oh, ultimately, this might be a heartbreaking harbinger.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings by Oscar Wilde.
• Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, the movie paperback. Because, well, you know me.
• The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, even though Mrs. Noggle has assured me that it’s included in the compendium of C.S. Lewis writing that she gave me which I’ve obviously not paid enough attention to.
• Thereby Hangs a Tale by Charles Earle Funk, a fun etymology book.
• The Outsider by Colin Wilson.
• My Cat Spit McGee, a book about a guy’s pet cat. Masculinity–.
• Love Poems by Anne Sexton.
• What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank.
• Piers Plowman.
• One Way to Reconstruct the Scene. A slender volume of poetry, if I recall correctly.
• Letters Volume I by Matthew Arnold. Brother, if you can buy a 100 year old book by a poet for a dollar, you just do it.
• The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. A second printing, it might replace another early printing if I can figure out which is older.
• Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov. I read this, probably in middle school. Still, the man wrote himself into one of his mysteries, but only as a minor character. Amusing.
• The Elric Saga Part I by Michael Moorcock. I think some people have said this is good. It has to be better than The Black Corridor or An Alien Heat. Doesn’t it?
• Invisible Prey by John Sandford.
• Dumbth by Steve Allen. A book about how America is dumbing down. By Steve Allen. So you know this isn’t a new concern.
• Looking Good in Print and Publication Design text books about designing for print.

Additionally, I got The Three Amigos and Fletch Lives! on videocassette. Mrs. Noggle scored 15 sets of records in the Beethoven Centennial series, some Cooking Light magazines, another record with trumpet music, and some cassettes.

A good trip again this year, and brief, but not brief enough, really, for J2, who thinks the car seat is a torture device.

I’ve been so down about not finding much at garage sales lately that I fell prey to the Six for the Price Of One Book of the Month Club offer. I got these:

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They include:

• The fourth Dean Koontz Odd Thomas book, Odd Hours. I haven’t read Brother Odd yet, but I’ll find that at a book fair soon. The new copy was only twenty cents plus $4.00 shipping and handling. Note that it’s in shrink wrap with a note. The note says, “We’re sorry, there’s a typo on the last page. It should say, ‘Stormy was there to greet me. “Don’t feel bad, Oddie,” she said, “You did the best you could and that’s all anyone could ask.”‘ We hope this doesn’t impede your enjoyment of the book. As if revealing the ending on the front cover would do such a thing.
• Bonk, a book about sex.
• Phantom Prey, a new Lucas Davenport novel by John Sandford and something I’ll read right away to wash out the taste of No Witnesses.
• Resolution, Robert B. Parker’s sequel to Appaloosa. Notice I’m not buying Robert B. Parker novels at full price the minute they come out these days?
• A Carl Hiaasen nonfiction book about golf.
• Duma Key, a new Stephen King novel.

Wait, you only count five instead of six? Well, I don’t remember what I ordered as the sixth book, but it certainly wasn’t the nutritional science outrage book they shipped. Fortunately, though, one of Heather’s reading interests is that sort of thing, so she wanted it. Keeps me from having to throw a pissy fit over getting shipped a random overstock book.

But, geez, the printing quality on these books has really diminished over the years. The paper is almost newsprint, word. I’m glad I didn’t get any chick lit because my tears would make the ink run. It’s hard to see me sticking with the club after my obligated One At Full Price escape clause.

Still, they’re relatively recent novels, a year before I could get them on the book fair tables for a buck. To make it worthwhile, I have to read them all within the next year I guess.

Terry Teachout on Raymond Chandler’s speaking voice:

Only one recording of Raymond Chandler’s speaking voice survives, a BBC interview conducted with Chandler in 1958 by none other than Ian Fleming. You can listen to it by going here. If you do so, you’ll be staggered to learn that the creator of Philip Marlowe sounds…well, wimpy.

Not if you’ve read any of his letters or his biography. Fellow was a total anglophile prone to wearing gloves and not shaking hands because he thought it was barbaric. That he sounds more Capote than Hemingway is not surprising at all.

Yesterday (yes, Wednesday), my beautiful wife and I sneaked off to a church rummage sale alone together, so we had some prime browse time and a chance to pick up some books. Here they are:

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Among my purchases, you’ll find:

• The Battle of Midway Island, a paperback history of the World War II battle.
• Nine To Five, the paperbackization of the movie. I saw that movie within the last two years, I think. Maybe three.
• A Russian/English/English/Russian dictionary. True story, in the middle 1980s, while in middle school, I tinkered with teaching myself Russian. Just in case they invaded, I wanted to have wisecracks they’d understand as I partook in the street to street fighting in my trailer park. This was before my physics class that would teach me that street to street fighting in a trailer park would not leave much time for the scrappy Wolverinesish middle schoolers to make cracks. Still, I got one now because I didn’t yet have one.
• Wisconsin: Off the Beaten Path just so I can see where I’ve been and where I should go.
• Cotswold Mistress a novel about something. It was a fifty cents, that’s my excuse. Also, I’ve been jonesing for some acquisitions, I guess.
• See, I Told You So, another copy of Rush Limbaugh’s second book, ca. the middle nineties. Funny that he hasn’t written more, but I guess book royalties might not be a good return on his investment vis-a-vis other things he can do.
• Buckley: The Right Word, a vocabulary builder, I think, based on the work of William F. Buckley, Jr.
• Complete Works by William Shakespeare in the Walter J. Black Classics Club edition. Note that I paid fifty cents for it. You Google searchers who inherited a pile from your predecessors and want me to tell you they’re worth a lot of money, take note that you can get them for fifty cents each or a dollar each at garage sales and book fairs and about five bucks at used book stores that bother to stock them. They’re not old, they’re not rare. Get a job.
• Excessive Joy Injures the Heart. I think it’s one of those chick novels. It had a cool title and it was a ha’buck.
• Bruges and Its Beauties, a guidebook to some city somewhere. I’d better set a bit from a suspense novel I write in it sometime, or I will have wasted this quarter.
• Several Sunset paperbacks about fixing up your home. I got something about decks, something about wiring, and something about painting and wallpapering.
• The Great Lakes and Florida, two photographic journey coffeetable books because I’ve been to both places and because I can probably browse them during baseball games.
• Five CDs of artwork, including 2 Renaissance collections, 1 Impressionism collection, and the Vatican’s collection. I think they might be art history things. They were like a buck each, so probably worth it.

So there I have them. A bunch more books to read when I’m done with 600 page academic history library books.

Well, the one church that ran its classified ad last week actually had its rummage sale (not the northern terminology) this week, and that was the centerpiece of our trip this week. This will probably be our last weekend excursion, friends, as the pickings are so slim and the stage management so onerous as to render the weekly scheduled trips less than pleasant. Worry not, though; from time to time, I’ll sneak into an estate sale and come up with some books, so I won’t starve. Also, my to-read shelves are several thousand volumes, and there’s always the library for historical nonfiction.

Regardless, here’s what we got:

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I got:

• The Middle Ages Volume III, a Books, Inc., publication about the Middle Ages, which in a couple thousand years will no longer be the middle. Hopefully.
• The Renaissance Volume IV, a Books, Inc., publication about the Renaissance. In Art, maybe. Perhaps I bought two parts of a series here. I don’t know.
• Aristotle’s Selections, a Books, Inc., publication. Selections of Aristotle, or a volume entitled Selections by Aristotle? Hey, they were a quarter each and matched, so I bought them without knowing.
• The Travels of Marco Polo, a Books, Inc., publication about the Marco Polo, I hope.
• Pure Drivel by Steve Martin. Comedy or a novella? I don’t yet have it, so I bought it.
• The Practical Handbook of Electrical Repairs and The Practical Handbook of Plumbing and Heating. A series of books detailing easy repairs from the 1960s. I haven’t actually finished the one about television repair in a time where you could replace the tubes yourself and run down to the drug store to test them if you didn’t know. So I won’t jump right into reading them probably.
• How Things Work In Your Home (and what to do when they don’t). I have the How Electronic Things Work book, which looks like a distant relation. I think I’ll run through this book for some basics so I can continue to impress my wife with my mad repair skillz. Actually, impress isn’t the word; she just assumes that I know or can do it. That assumption is more gratifying than her being impressed every time. Also, it’s more pressure. But I have these books!

Also, I got some cassettes of some easy listening stuff and a couple of, get this, design your garden computer program CDs. BECAUSE THEY WERE CHEAP! But you know what would be the killer app? Combining these design your level programs with a first person shooter where you can go in and execute, with a variety of weapons, those damn squirrels who have completely picked your tomato plants clean. Like a 21st century Centipede. I’d pay more than a quarter for that.

Oh, yeah, the wife got some books and cassettes and the Js got some books, but this is my blog, so no loving detail for those acquisitions.

We hit a couple of garage sales this weekend, in a stunning turn of events. We tried to hit a big church rummage sale, but it was in the paper a week early, so we had to settle for a string of smaller affairs. As I’m learning, the number of books available at these yard sales is growing slimmer and slimmer. Heck, even the estate sales offer fewer pickings, which probably indicates how few readers are left. Soon, we readers will actually have to fight and steal from each other to get secondhand books until one of us has all of them. And you know whom I am betting on.

At any rate, I got:

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I got:

• A three volume biography of George Washington because I didn’t have one.
• A copy of Mutiny on the Bounty in case I don’t already have one.
• Two taste-free comedies, Deuce Bigelow and BASEketball, because they were only fifty cents each for the VHS cassettes and I hadn’t seen them since they were in the theaters.
• A couple of cassettes because they were cheap.

As I said, slim pickings. But I like to think of this as resting up for the Carondolet Y book fair this year, which will not be at the Carondolet Y.

Well, there were a few garage sales around, so we did about six, and all I got was a book and a cassette:

I’d be making progress on my thousands-of-volumes reading backlog if I wasn’t spending weeks reading a book these days.

Today J1 and my sainted mother and I hit some garage sales and estate sales because she desperately needs an Elvis on Velvet in the next week. The whole thing took on the feel of a weird MMORPG side quest, with this strange character wandering around asking all of the villagers about a Velvet Elvis, even when the people only displayed baby clothes and toys in their shops, as though the parser hearing the words would trigger them to tell my mother what cave to go to or would offer a special deal of the Elvis directly from their wall for a sum of silver. The only way it could have been more so, I suppose, was if she was asking for Velvet Elves.

Amid all of that and a bit of a spat between an estate sale “professional” and an estate sale buying aficionado over a mispriced bit of shelving, I found like four books for me and one for the Js inclusive:

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That includes:

• Two books in the Isaac Asimov Foundation series, I think; as you know, I read a couple of these on my honeymoon, lo those many years ago. I’ve forgotten how far into the series I got, so I’m gathering a bunch on my to-read shelves because I’m afraid I’ll skip a book or read them out of order. Maybe when I have the whole set I can begin again.
• A biography of Ian Fleming.
• Old Possum’s Practical Book of Cats by T.S. Eliot. My wife informs me that she already owns a copy of that book. However, as you know, our books remain separate, so I don’t care what she owns. I own it now.

Additionally, for the youts, I got a book about the lesser evil of the Roosevelts.

Not a lot, but reading is at a slow pace these days (backed up books to report on disbursed rapidly could lead to a different impression).

Or maybe I am saving myself for the Carondolet Y book fair coming later this year.

No Velvet Elvis, though, so my mother is probably going to fail her quest. I think she ought to get some XP just for trying, though. Next week, the world will be lousy with them.

Saturday: The St. Charles Book Fair

Saturday represented our third year in a row at the St. Charles Book Fair and our first attempt at a book fair with two strollers of children. This particular trip was disappointing because the combination of the crowd and keeping a grabby nigh-two-year-old from the books left me unable to effectively browse. Unless I’m in the right mood, I don’t go wild, and the factors didn’t put me in that gluttonous mood. As a result, the book purchases were far lower than I expected:

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I got:

• LA Secret Police, some sort of nonfiction bit that will fit right into my paranoia.
• The Frumionous Bandersnatch by Ed McBain, a later 87th precinct book that I might not have already.
• Shadows over Baker Street, a collection premised on a combination of Sherlock Holmes with H.P. Lovecraft. How could that go wrong?
• 50 Great Horror Stories, a collection, obviously, of horror, obviously.
• Arson Detection and Investigation, a nonfiction book about police techniques regarding arson. The typeface indicates this manual might be out of date, so I expect it includes pyromancy or something.
• K-Pax, the book that inspired the movie. Because I get those books, as you know.
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. Now that I am looking for Reader’s Digest editions of these books, they’re unavailable at book sales. The only other volume they had was Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which I almost finished at the time. Now that I have actually finished it, you’ll get the book report.
• Homecoming by Bob Greene, which I probably already own.
• The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh. First thing when I hit the first table, a volunteer asks me what I like. When I said McBain, he asked me if I’d read Wambaugh. Of course, the only Wambaugh I’d read was The New Centurions when I was in high school, and I said as much, so the volunteer pushed this book onto me. I don’t know what it was about this trip and the gabby volunteers or if a small child overcomes my normal prickly look, but I got into a lot of conversations (2) with the volunteers. The other started when I told my charge on wheels that the Romanian-English dictionary was almost tempting because I don’t own one; the volunteer stepped in to tell me about the languages her kids were taking for fun, and she not only tried to get me to buy the dictionary, but encouraged me to take on a couple of language on tape courses available with the audio goods. I declined both, but I got the Wambaugh. It was the first book I picked up, but it didn’t trigger the normal frenzy.
• Something by John Stossel, which will be worth the read.
• Great Books. I think I already have this one, too.

The other stack of books and the crazy number of cassettes (and 2 albums) were Mrs. Noggle’s purchases. Not depicted: the three board books I picked up to distract J1 while we browsed. One he ripped at the fair and another is one of his favorites today.

Sunday: Antiquarian inheritance from my aunt

On Sunday, I lamented about not buying many books, and my sainted mother took pity on me and gave me a stack of antiquarian books from my aunt, whose inheritance to me includes a number of titles already reviewed upon this blog.

My aunt bought these books, like so many of the others, at garage sales and was going to sell them online. Ergo, she bought them because they were old, not because of their subject matter.

Here they are:

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They include:

• Abridged Treasury of Prayers (unknown), which includes a postcard, a photograph, and a letter within as well as an inscription.
• William Zorach: American Artists Group Monograph Number 15 (1945). Signed by the artist. Includes a newspaper clipping on the artist’s death in 1966.
• The Science of Human Life or Eugenics (1920). The original textbook on it. As I said, my aunt bought this book because it is old, and I have this book because it was my aunt’s. So if you come to see it on my shelves, please understand why it’s there.
• Gainsborough Masterpieces in Colour (unknown). A collection of works by the artist.
• The Lilac Lady by Ruth Alberta Brown (1914).
• We Came In Peace: The Story of Man In Space (1969).

Will I read them? Most of them, probably, maybe. They’re going on the to-read shelves anyway.

Last weekend, we hit a couple more garage sales and got a couple more books. Color you shocked, I say (if I can mix metaphors and allusions).

Here, we have:

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• Instant Replay and Distant Replay by Jerry Kramer. I’ve read the first, but the copy I read didn’t have a dust jacket. So one of these books is a replacement. The other: To Read.
• A field guide to Missouri Wildflowers.
• A couple of books by Eric Flint and Harry Turtledove, faves of the cool kids.
• The Better Homes and Gardens New Garden Book, sort of like the red checkered cookbook, I hope.
• Confessions of a Hooker, a book I’d bought the week before in softcover, but this is hardback, you see.

I also got a couple of pictures for a quarter each, as you can see. They’re almost like Renoir.

Actually, this was the Concordia Lutheran Church sale, not last week. Sorry, in the immediate post-event period, time gets a little confusing.