Monday, April 7, 2014

Book Brownies (the fae kind, not chocolates)

A couple of times in the past year, I've had a strange sort of book luck.

See, we have a book sale at the library, both for items the library itself has withdrawn and also for donated items. Books are a dollar, fifty cents if they're trade paperbacks. You might imagine I come home with more book sale books than I ought, though I do try to exercise a measure of control.

Two times in the past year, I've walked past the book sale and found the exact book I was looking for, for the low low bargain price of one George Washington.



The first was Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie Leduff in hardcover, though a paperback is existent now. It was first published in February 2013, and I wanted to read it for The Last Song research. It's a great read, perhaps more than I could have hoped for, and it gave me angles on Detroit I had no way of knowing about otherwise.

 

 The other book was by Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth Andrew Smith, first published in 2009, before my interest in space matters had been jumpstarted. I don't find Moondust to be quite a book I can blitz through like a novel; the narrative style is different, more "this is non fiction", but I am quite enjoying it.

 
Both have been the right book at the right time, just what I needed to round of my current novelling research. Hell, the Detroit book is a great one even if you aren't setting a novel there, as part of LeDuff's goal is exploring just what the hell happened there.

3 comments:

  1. I love a good book sale - I find it's also a great way to discover new books that you might not normally try out but when they're super cheap you can take the risk.

    On a couple of occasions I bought books from sales purely because of their covers and I got really lucky because I really liked them! My own version of book brownies I guess ;)

    Celine Jeanjean's Blog

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    1. It's always great finding a book you love based just on the cover! It doesn't happen to me very often.

      I do love the library book sale, and also rummage sale and the like, where everything is a couple of bucks, or even just a quarter.

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  2. I finally broke, after weeks of pining for "The Goldfinch." It was 40% off at Barnes & Noble, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and am hooked 10 pages in.

    I once went to a garage sale with my sister (not much of a reader at the time; dyslexia). I pulled out twenty Russian author books, not having read them. Sister asked "Which of those are you buying?" I looked at her, bemused, "All of them." HA

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