Friday, May 16, 2008

Why Timothy is a Bookspaz

I hit the mother load, y'all. Well, that might be an overstatement. But, I did get a few good books for really cheap yesterday on my used bookstore adventure with friend Becca. Here's the goods:

1. Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Sonnets (for .25!)
2. Peter Shaffer's Equus (horse porn! $1.50!)
3. Lee Smith's Cakewalk (great Southern short stories! $1.75)
4. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller (a 1960s double edition! .95)
5. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (Mary Ruth told me to read that so long ago, and now I will since it was only .95!)
6. Plato's The Symposium (for the 102 class I'm working up--"Inquiry into Friendship"--I need a theoretical base. .75!)
7. Joel Spring's The American School, 1642-1990 (a history text, but interesting and FREE from the discard bin)
8. The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (a 1950 edition, paperback. FREE!)

So what's that, folks? 8 books for around $6? All I did yesterday afternoon was read bits from all of them. I now can tell you that the first high school in the country was the Boston English Classical School established in 1821, and that Lee Smith's Joline from the short story "Between the Lines" sounds an awful lot like Eudora Welty's narrator in "Why I Live At the P.O." (which you should read immediately). I can tell you that Millay deviates from the English sonnet form from time to time while still restricting her sonnets to fourteen lines and that you, Abigail, need to read her. You will LOVE her, I swear.

I'm just so giddy I can hardly stop grinning. And I need to get back to my books. Let me know any of your recent or most memorable bargain shopping and/or reading adventures.

1 comment:

Monda said...

In high school I carried around four books everywhere I went:

1. The Collected Works of Carl Sandburg,
2. a collection of Slyvia Plath,
3. two blue volumes of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Speak no more, you all have lied
who told me time would ease me of my pain.
I want him in the weeping of the rain...

And my all-time favorite that ends,

Snow, drift deep and cover
Til the Spring, my murdered lover.

Oh God. I'm feeling all sixteen again.

You did hit the motherlode. Nothing beats cheap books by good writers.