October 2, 2006

At the Vic Book Sale

I went mad at Half-Price Monday and acquired the following:
Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson, because I love the other books by her I’ve read; Survival by Margaret Atwood just because; Atwood’s The Journals of Susannah Moodie for my ghost course; Babel Tower by AS Byatt because sometimes I really like her; FINDS OF THE DAY Goodbye Without Leaving, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, Another Marvelous Thing and A Big Storm Knocked it Over ie almost everything by Laurie Colwin; Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling, because I liked her Guardian Poetry workshop way back when; An American Childhood by Annie Dillard, because I used to own it and left it in Japan; Mavis Gallant’s Paris Notebooks, because I read it years ago and loved it; The Remains of the Day because I’ve never read it and Kim Dean said I should; Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri because Kim Dean picked it up and said “Read this” just as Amy Tan said she would on the book’s back cover; Heat Wave and Spiderweb by Penelope Lively because I LOVE her; Martin Sloane because it was a dollar; Moo because I’m in the mood for campus fiction; Park and Ride by Miranda Sawyer because I’ve read it and liked it, and I’m up for “adventures in suburbia”; and The Queen and I by Sue Townsend, which also used to belong to me but I had to leave it behind in England. All this for $27. Oh yes, it had been a fine fine day. It’s nice that I like authors that are so unfashionable I can pick them up in droves for pennies.