Novelish

I took the bus downtown for an unrelated reason, and - being early - decided to stop at the public library’s main branch to get a few books. I already had plenty to read, but I hoped to find a few good ones. On entering the area, a banner for a spring book sale greeted me. (Hmm, I thought. Interesting.)

The library’s doors didn’t open for another ten minutes, but around a dozen people were already waiting - and rather more were in line for the book sale, which started at the same time and was through a nearby door. I decided to have a look.

And, guess what? Fictional books were among the cheapest items on the price list, at around $0.48 (USD). That includes the 900-page hardcover ones.

I could tell I was going to like this place.

To cut a long story short, I came away with more books than were altogether comfortable to carry. I hadn’t prepared to carry anything at all.

Specifically:

Five novels

From left to right, we’ve got:

• The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber - On my “To Read” list for a while, partially due to interest in the time period it’s set in. Happily, I’ll be saved the trouble of ordering it from the library and rushing to finish before the due date.
• Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon - The fourth book in the Outlander series. I’m currently reading the sixth book, A Breath of Snow and Ashes; I didn’t feel like going through such a massive series at the time, so I jumped in with the latest. So, I figure I might as well read the others out of order as well. (This one’s 400,293 words according to Amazon’s Text Stats.)
• Gentlemen & Players by Joanne Harris - On my list to get from the library (and I’ve heard the author praised a lot). In good condition, so I bought it.
• Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens - I’m slowly going through the classics, so it’ll be nice to have this on hand.
• Skipping Christmas by John Grisham - I think I remembered the name from a Publisher’s Weekly article; I don’t know much about the author except that he’s somewhat popular, but I thought I’d try it.

Four books of poetry

From top to bottom:

• An Anthology of Modern Verse - The woman who took my money said she had a copy herself - which is a bit of a coincidence, since it’s obviously old and presumably out of print - and that she liked to let guests flip through it.
• Poems, Chiefly Narrative - Another old, small book.
• Book of English Verse - Newer, and paperback. I chose it (as with the previous two) by reading a few poems at random and seeing how I liked them.
• The Complete Poems of John Milton (The Harvard Classics) - I bought this mainly for Paradise Lost, which I’ve wanted to read for a while, but I think I might have had to buy it no matter what the contents. It’s a beautiful volume. It’s bound in leather with gold lettering and gold on the page edges, and it isn’t damaged at all. There’s even a yellow ribbon for marking pages.

So…

My list of books that I want to read “at some point in the future” is starting to get frighteningly long.

And I’m still amazed at how cheap everything was. The total cost of all books bought today: $4.34.

When you think about it, that’s half the list price of most mass market paperbacks. I think I may have to go to the next one of these sales, well, on purpose.