Last weekend was the annual public library book sale. It’s pretty huge, and even tbough it was the third day when I got there, I scored a bunch of good stuff.
One of my goals with this blog is to read more classics, so I picked up copies of Middlemarch, My Antonia, and the Grapes of Wrath. I follow a lot of bloggers who are fans of Barbara Pym, an author I’ve never read. But I know last week was Pym Week in the blogging world and felt it was a message that I must read her when I found the copy of Civil to Strangers. The Gail Godwin will be a reread. I first read it on Koh Phi Phi back in the early 90s when A-man & I were loved up beach bums trekking around Thailand. Couldn’t have been a weirder contrast (I also read War and Peace on Phi Phi too–even odder!). Back then, books in English were recycled through pricey tourist bookstores usually on the mainland, so I would buy the longest, fattest books I could find to both economize and keep me in words until we passed through a port town again. Looking forward to seeing how it strikes me 20+ years later, landlocked, and much less fancy free.
I adore vintage illustrations and so have a hard time passing up gems like this:
Near the bottom of the big pile is a 1936 edition of Birds of America. It has great plates:
Also found The World Atlas of Food from 1974. I love its period-style illustrations as well (they are a tad blurry–just getting the hang of all this).
Lots of ambitious reading in this pile! And still many unread ones lying around from last year’s sale as well…
a murder of crows 