I am horribly afraid that this is becoming a habit. You all keep telling me I’m showing restraint, but spending $50 on books twice in a week really is a rare thing for me, and not something that I can sustain in the long run. At any rate, the sale was a total of 70%, and this time I fully intended to do damages. I drove 30 minutes each direction to a more rural Borders that was going out of business.
They had a much greater selection to choose from. Within 30 seconds of walking in to the fiction section, I found the volume of Adichie short stories and I felt my heart skip a beat I was so excited. Some sections of books were practically full: African-American literature, for example, had nearly a full set of Toni Morrison in paperback that I some how walk away from. How I wanted them all! So pretty!
I had at least 15 books in my arms at one point, and then I put some back so my total would not go above $50. My thought was to focus on the books I cannot get in the public domain and/or that I’ve already read and loved. So, back went the Theodore Drieser and Winesburg, Ohio. Back went All the Kings Men, which I’ve never read yet. Among other things.
Here’s what I ended up with in the end.
- The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt (I loved Possession, even more on retrospect than I did when I first read it)
- The Chosen by Chaim Potak (I loved My Name is Asher Lev, and I can’t remember if I’ve read this one)
- A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (inspired by Elena’s recent posts on post-colonialism)
- Kindred by Octavia Butler (I don’t love this particular cover, but I did love the book! Now I have it forever.)
- The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamamnda Ngozi Adichie (Oh my heart stopped.)
- The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
- Ghost Stories (from Everyman’s Pocket Classics Library)
- Sylvia Plath poetry (Everyman’s Pocket Poets)
The only one I have buyer’s remorse on is the Achebe. It’s essays and now I’m afraid I just won’t get in to it. Has anyone read it? It has high marks on LibraryThing, but I’m not sure how well I’ll do on political essays.
And then, I wanted to show my pretty bookshelves. I’ve been busy culling books I don’t want to read and frantically buying (ok, on a set budget schedule) the books that I do want. I realized after I finished taking the pictures and annotating them in Flickr that I had forgotten to shelve the books I had just bought. So after I took the pictures, I ended up shuffling books so they’d fit. Sigh. I love my books. I love organizing them, too.
See my flickr set for my bookshelves. I annotate them and you can zoom in to see the titles. If you are as geeky as me and you want to, that is.