And Another Book Sale

I made it back in time from by camping trip to go to "bag day" of my local library system's book sale, where a bag stuffed full of books costs you $5.00. Coming in on the last day of the sale pretty much guarantees that I missed most of the good books, the recently published books, but "bag day" means I can rationalize picking up books I might ignore if I had to pay more for them.

The trouble is that I have a hard time remembering what's in my own library anymore. There's a good chance that some of these books are already on my shelf. Here's what I brought home anyway:

Tomato Red - Daniel Woodrell
Situations - Jean-Paul Sartre
Rabbit Redux - John Updike
Rabbit at Rest - John Updike
The Road Home - Jim Harrison
Quarantine - Jim Crace
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital - Lorrie Moore
Transmission - Hari Kunzru
Lucky Girls - Nell Freudenberger
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
(1949 Bantam edition, on the back "Brutal...Terrific...Awesome...and Beautiful!")
Them - Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey
The Reivers - William Faulkner
Grendel - John Gardner
Falconer - John Cheever
First Light - Charles Baxter
Rising from the Plains - John McPhee
Waiting for the Barbarians - JM Coetzee
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Western Lands - William S. Burroughs
The Wild Boys - William S. Burroughs
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Best American Essays of the Century - Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
A Manual for Writers - Kate Turabian
South of No North - Charles Bukowski

On Summer Reading

"I'm sorry, sir, but Dostoyevsky is not considered summer reading. I'll have to ask you to come with me."

While everyone is out there pushing summer reading lists that are full of fluff, easy reads, I wonder why we don't use these free summer days to read harder books. The rest of the year is full of other obligations, impending holidays, taxes due, and the like, so why not settle into the book you've put off? Say... Ulysses?

It seems to me it's a good time to sit out on the porch until the sun goes down while reading something a little challenging. So, tell me, who's up the challenge? what are you going to read?

Some suggestions:

The Brothers Karamazov
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Middlemarch
A Tale of Two Cities
Anna Karenina
Underworld
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Remembrance of Things Past

Book Sale Haul Pt. 2

• Existentialism and Human Emotions - Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
• Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers
• Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
• Three Novels - Samuel Beckett
• Rabbit, Run - John Updike
• Intruder in the Dust - William Faulkner
• Absalom, Absalom - William Faulkner
• The Town - William Faulkner
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
• Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
• Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
• Faust Pt I - Goethe
• Faust Pt II - Goethe
• A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
• Islands in the Stream - Ernest Hemingway
• Charles Baudelaire - A.E. Carter
• Saul and Patsy - Charles Baxter
• The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (first printing)
• The Complete Stories - Franz Kafka
• The Inner Circle - T.C. Boyle
• The Ruins - Scott Smith
• Rock Springs - Richard Ford (first printing)

One could detect a couple of themes here. A certain leaning towards Southern literature as well as traditional classics. Never minding the outliers like "The Ruins." I've heard good things and thought the wife would like it.


I could have grabbed more, that's certain, but I had to bags with handles ready to break and as much as I could take. They do this again in October anyway.

Book Sale Haul Pt. 1

Day one of the library book sale while price are still (fire-sale) high. They sell 'em by the bag on Sunday, so there'll be more.

• Troubled Sleep - Jean-Paul Sartre (a first American edition that I probably already have)


• For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (a hardback reissue from 1968)


• The Death of Sweet Mister - Daniel Woodrell (after the beauty of Winter's Bone, it is time to dig back in his catalog)


• Black Swan Green - David Mitchell (I heard a short interview with him yesterday and it made me want to read this one)


• Color of Law - David Milofsky (Denver Post columnist and CSU workshop prof)


• Therapy - Steven Schwartz (another CSU teacher and my former advisor)


• Sanctuary - William Faulkner (I will get through all of Faulkner's works eventually)


• The Reivers - William Faulkner (this one has a nice early 70's cover--and back copy--from when a movie was made of it with Steve McQueen)


• Middlemarch - George Eliot (everyone in the world seems to cite this book, so I'd better get around to reading it)


• One Writer's Beginnings - Eudora Welty (of course)


• Existentialism & Alienation in American Literature - Sidney Finklestein (if I'd have gone for an MA in Lit, this would have been my thesis)

So, I guess my reading list just got longer.