Recently Acquired BooksRecently Acquired Books
This is all loot from the MLA (Modern Languages Association) convention in New Orleans. If you stick me in a book exhibit for three days with discounts galore, this is what happens.
My sweetheart has surprised me by bringing home the new Carl Hiaasen hardcover, Basket Case, of which I was completely unaware!
Came home with The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (2001) from Bakka Books. Saw a bunch more that I wanted, including the new Phillip Pullman in paperback.
Got Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass just in time, as I plan on finishing The Subtle Knife tonight or tomorrow. I also got The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (winner of the Pulitzer Prize, yadda), which I've wanted to read since I saw it in hardcover around Christmas 2000. The Chabon must wait until I'm on vacation (it wouldn't do to read all my vacation reading now). Gary also brought home the proof of Tracy Chevalier's new book, Falling Angels, which is great timing given that I finished Girl With A Pearl Earring earlier this month. Am very excited about upcoming reading. Yay!
Our friend Adam Logan brought me A Beautiful Mind as a house present when he came to stay for the weekend. He gave John chocolate, but I prefer the book.
Bought myself Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter to add to my vacation reading, along with a copy of E=MC2 for John for Valentine's Day. Coming up: two weeks of reading in Mexico. Hooray!
John bought me Searching for Paradise: A Grand Tour of the World's Unspoiled Islands for Valentine's Day. A good book, and one NOT on my list. Sometimes it's good to think off the list. :)
Went to Open Air Books, which is a lovely travel bookstore in downtown Toronto. The store is very old fashioned, which means that the books are piled up on every available surface, bookshelves are added onto each other haphazardly, and the owner never returns anything. It's a great place to discover books about just about everywhere. Today's find was Homelife in Tokyo by Juukichi Inouye. It's an account of everyday life in Tokyo in the 1920s written by a bilingual Japanese diplomat to present Japan to the rest of the world. Good find.
Balfour Books on College Street was having its annual half-price sale. Managed to make it out with only:
John bought a few things himself, and it's arguable whether or not The Caste War of Yucatan is for him or for me. How fortunate that we live together and share all material possessions...
Birthday loot, birthday loot...people bought me books for my birthday! I'm so happy!
These, combined with a reading chair, a lovely teapot and mugs with a bee on them, and other beautiful things, and I am a very spoiled (and happy) birthday girl. Thank you, everyone.
My friend Gary works in a book store, and will occasionally come home with an interesting assortment of advance proofs that no one has claimed at the store. Well, today he came around with a copy of Douglas Coupland's All Families are Psychotic, and I'm absolutely delighted. Thank you, Gary!
New York Decadence. Three days shopping in a city that has not one, not two, but four functional Japanese bookstores (look for a review of each soon, somewhere in these pages). It was my first time there, and I have to go back.
Finally, I picked up Lord of the Silent by Elizabeth Peters as a present for John a week or so ago, as well as buying a copy of Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and the first five volumes of Hikaru no Go for him in New York. His, mine, yadda yadda.
Ooops. It's not like I *haven't* been buying books. As a matter of fact, when I think I'm doing well at not buying them like crazy, I really am. Sigh.
The week after I was in New York, we went to Boston. I had the flu for most of the time, so I didn't have a chance to do too much damage. John and I went to Sasuga Books (naturally) where I picked up a copy of a preparatory text for the Japanese Proficiency Test 4th Grade (the lowest) from Unicom Inc and number two in a new series from Yuu Watase called Appare Jipangu. It's fun, it's silly. John did the real power shopping. We also went to Shoenhoff's, which is a wonderful multilingual bookstore about a twenty-minute walk south of Sasuga. I picked up Japanese versions of The Little Prince and Tintin in Tibet. We looked longingly at the very expensive Icelandic dictionaries, and may take advantage of whoever travels to Iceland. At a lovely little used bookstore in Manchester-by-the-Sea called Manchester-by-the-Book, I found a lovely copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam illustrated by Edmund Dulac. The Dulac images are just beautiful.
I went to Kalamazoo for the annual Medieval Bacchanal at the beginning of May. In Kalamazoo, I picked up The Witch in History by Diane Purkiss and Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages by David Rollo. I went the next week to Vancouver where the *real* debauchery occurred. I mainly bought manga: volumes 2 to 10 (less 9) of Kaze hikaru, and Fruitsu Basketo numbers 1 to 8. Hooray! I also picked up Whose Pharaohs>: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleaon to World War I by Donald Malcolm Reid, and Arabian Travellers: the early adventurers, the romantics, the opportunists, and the twentieth-century travellers drawn by a fascination for the Arabian Peninsula by Richard Trench.
The list following is of all the books that I have acquired in one way or another over the last month and a half. The list contains remainders, gifts, used books, and new. It's longer than I thought.