....the Friends of the Library have their used book sale. While we were homeschooling, especially in the beginning, we haunted these things with regularity, sniffing out the "old" books that no one else wanted. (We also regularly attended the AAUW's annual book sale.) You could always tell the homeschoolers--they were lugging around teetering piles of books, and sending random children out to the cars to deposit the treasures found "so far."
For the past several go rounds, I have stayed virtuously away from these sales--used books being like crack cocaine to me.
Well, I was just gonna look on Friday afternoon. I wasn't gonna actually buy anything. You know, just sniff around a bit, run my fingers down the spines of the books, heft a few. Then I was just gonna put 'em down. I promise I was.
But.
OK, I only spent $6.49, bringing home only six volumes. But the half price sale is tomorrow afternoon, and I could just run by (run buy?)....
Anyway, here's the damage so far:
1. An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden
2. Lost Horizon; Good-bye, Mr. Chips; Random Harvest by James Hilton
3. The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald
4. A volume containing five complete Agatha Christie novels: The Mirror Crack'd, A Caribbean Mystery, Nemesis, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! and The Body in the Library
5. A volume containing five complete Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man
6. At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Mathiessen
Like I need to try to find space for more books on my shelves! I thought I was trying to SIMPLIFY my life and not add more stuff! Yikes!
+JMJ+
So you were going to a book sale just to LOOK? You really weren't going to BUY anything?
Really, MamaT, you sound just about as convincing as I am when I say that I'm "just going to browse." ;)
I'd say you made some really great choices and came away with some real bargains.
[stern voice] Books are not "more stuff". They are the repository of civilization. If any of the more dystopic ideas of the end times come about (no, not the rapture, other stuff) your Grand-kids will be very grateful for the library.
The Egg and I is rather a remarkable book. It is the best example I've ever found of the very select genre I call Sublimated Hatred. It's only after you've read it once or twice that you realize that Betty's husband, after having been an admirer of her prettier sister, married Betty, instantly put her to work as a farm hand, effectively cut her off from her family, brought around friends who made her uncomfortable, and compelled her to live in a damp draughty house so cold and primitive that she ended up with tuberculosis. If I'd been Mr. MacDonald after the book came out, I'd have started to wonder if the coffee tasted funny: man, she really hated that sucker.
Somewhere, in an old family album, is a picture of my mother holding me in one arm and a copy of "The Egg and I" in the other.
Books are like crack cocaine? well, maybe in the addictive potential, but not it the overall benefit/harm ratio...(she says as she eyes her recent haul from the supermarket used book fund raiser.....)