I had my first slightly ridiculous bookstore trip of the year today, prompted by what amounts to a 40% off sale on in-stock hardcovers at my local megastore, and I thought some of you might be interested by what was in the basket.
First up were a couple of really heavy items:
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes – I’ve been a Holmes fan for a long time, although I must admit it was Jeremy Brett‘s performance that first got me interested, not Doyle’s writings. However, once I did read the actual stories I was hooked. This is the third set of the stories in my collection: I have a bargain B&N hardcover set, a gigantic edition made up of facsimilies of the actual Strand magazine pages, and now this fairly definitive edition. I wouldn’t have bought it for $110, but I paid less than $70, which was more agreeable.
The Complete Cartoons Of The New Yorker – A cartoon conveys a lot of information very quickly–not just the setup and the joke, but also a lot of information about the society and mores at the time. This collection was just too promising as a way to get a better handle on how the Northeastern intelligentsia have seen the world over the last century. Throw in the fact that lots of the cartoons are really quite funny, and the fact that the complete set of cartoons is included on CDROM as well, and you’ve got a sale. And, as with the previous entry, the 40% discount made the list price a lot easier to take.
And then a number of more reasonably sized items:
Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans – I have an abiding fascination with the idea of a demi-monde, as opposed to the more modern idea of a counterculture, and anything that relates to those notions compells me. Consequently, the notion of the courtesan obviously is very interesting to me. So, I’ve had my eye on this book for a while, and the big sale made today the day to buy it. I actually have a small shelf of courtesan books, with contents like The Courtesans: The Demi-Monde in 19th-Century France and The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Hell, I even have the DVD of the movie they made of The Honest Courtesan, but I would have had that anyway because of my mad Oliver Platt love. (You are all watching Huff right? Damn it’s good.)
The European Dream – I’ve read a lot of good reviews of this one, and I am desperately looking for any good news on the world political scene. And frankly, the more the US government disgusts me, the more desperately I am looking for something else for Canada to associate with (see my previous comments about how we should be biting the economic bullet now and looking to join the EU, and become less dependant on the US). Quite a lot of what I hear about the EU is kind of scary Eurocrat stuff, so I want to read something about the things the EU is getting right, especially as compared with the US. I’ve read a few other things that Rifkin has written and I find his ability to extrapolate to be sound, if driven by a slightly too optimistic outlook, which is actually exactly what I want from this book.
The Wizard – Despite all the incredible reviews of the earlier volume of this story (this volume concludes the story) I resisted reading it until this was out. Some night this week I will fail to sleep as Wolfe will doubtless suck me in. I could make an argument for Wolfe being the best living American writer–I’m not sure he is, but I’m sure the argument would be sound–and he rarely fails to reward a reader on many levels. Also, the couple of times I’ve met him he has struck me as the nicest Evil Grandfather you could imagine. (And indeed his wife might be the template of the Kindly Grandmother–I’m not sure I’ve met anyone else who radiated as much sheer benignity as she does). I would definitely have paid full price for this one, so the sale was just a bonus here.
On Literature – Essay books make excellent bathroom reading, and I have several other collections of Eco‘s essays, each of which has brought me at least a couple of “Wow, I never looked at it that way” moments. His fiction hasn’t thrilled me since Foucault’s Pendulum, but the essay collections have never disappointed. This was kind of an impulse purchase, since I hadn’t heard of it before I saw it at the store.
Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire – I expect this book to make me very angry, and also to teach me a lot. It, with its central notion that America as empire is nothing new, and in fact might be good for the world, will provide quite a counterpoint to the Rifkin book. I admit, I get a perverse pleasure from the idea of a European intellectual writing positively about American empire, too. Every time I read one of Fergusson‘s books I find that I am forced to respect his command of his research, and the power of his mind as he pulls it all together into cohesive wholes. The perspective he commands, that of financial history, is not one that I have a tremendous exposure to, so it always provides me with a very different view of events their motivations that I had previously encountered. At the same time, many of his conclusions are repugnant to me. Some of these repugnant conculsions I can discount, as he is working from a very different set of axioms than I am, but many of them are not ignorable, and force me to rework many of my own notions. This both pleases me greatly, and pisses me off immensely.
Madeleine Is Sleeping – I know precisely two things about this book: it was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Gwenda made it sound really good. That’s enough to get a sale.
No Room for Secrets – I don’t really understand why people read biographies. Almost every time I’ve read a biography it’s been because there was a connection to some other interest of mine–a whole big stack of Bertrand Russell biographies (and his autobiography) because of my mad passion for Russell, old Winston’s because I was following up some things from some WWII fiction I had read, Richard E. Grant’s because Withnail & I might be my favourite film, Bob Geldof‘s because Diamond Smiles is one of my favourite songs (and Vegetarians of Love one of my favourite albums), etc. However, there seem to be a whole class of people for whom a biography is itself the main thing, not part of an interest in something else–I suspect these people are behind that A&E show, or channel, or whatever it is now. I am not one of those people and I confess I bought this biography of Joanna Lumley primarily in the hope that I might get some Diana Rigg gossip. Those who know me know that 1969 Diana Rigg is one of the few things that could be a threat to my extremely happy marriage. I enjoyed Sapphire and Steel, and the first couple of years of Absolutely Fabulous were hilarious, but I am not-so-secretly hoping that Lumley being in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (who cares about Lazenby? Diana Rigg is in it!), or maybe the Avengers–New Avengers connection will result in some Rigg gossip being dropped. Of course, if there is any good AbFab dish, I know at least two people–one in Kentucky and one in Wisconsin, who will be interested. This is also one I wouldn’t have bought at full retail, but that squeaks under the wire at 60% of full price.
