Some women love sales at the mall or department store. I hate shopping at those places. What I really love are book sales. And the great thing about chasing down book sales at out-of-the-way and little publicized places is that hardly anyone my age is doing this kind of stuff. I have the illusion that I'm doing something so cutting edge and cool that no one has caught on yet. Instead, they're all busy pushing buttons over at Amazon.
Or maybe I'm just a luddite.
Yesterday, I went to a senior center in Vermont. Normal college kiddies wouldn't be caught dead in a senior center. But for me, who the hell cares? They have books. Every single book was new, pristine, never before been read, just released. And you can't complain when all the hardbacks were four for ten bucks and the paperbacks three for a buck. Some books that I purchased: Collapse by Jared Diamond, Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman, and (I was surprised I found this) No Plot? No Problem! by Nanowrimo founder Chris Baty.
Most of the other patrons at the book sale were either senior citizens or mothers with small kids. The small kids thought the whole affair very tedious and boring and ignored the books in favor of horseplay. The mothers pretty much cleared out all the children's books the first fifteen minutes I was there. There was one teenage boy who remained at the sci-fi/fantasy section and basically added more of those books to his own towering pile. As for the senior citizens: the old ladies fought over the cookbooks and romance novels while their husbands just puttered around looking rather bewildered. And I got the rest of the non-fiction all to myself. (Bwahahaha!)
I still feel totally behind on my reading. One of these days, I'm going to finish everything I own before I attempt to acquire any new books. Or at least sincerely try to. The last time I posted about my reading queue, I had mentioned that I was going to finish Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand before the month is out. I'm finally making some headway into the novel, but I'm reminded of the reason why I put it down in the first place--the imagery is so rich and hallucinatory it's like eating expensive chocolate and then going into a seizure. There are just some things one can't breeze through without being completely overloaded.
I'm also in the middle of Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. Or maybe more accurately, just starting it. I have the revised and expanded edition so I had to slog through the rather lengthy "Introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition" which I think, would have been better if I had read it last instead of first.
On a lighter (heavier?) note, I had checked out The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker at the local library and I'm almost finished with it. The monster of a book probably weighs more than some kids. At least most of it is pictures.
