Thursday, June 25, 2009

Bargain books

I’ve found a new book store with a ‘bargain bin’ section that took me more than an hour to wade through. I managed to walk away with only three. You can’t imagine the restraint I displayed to hold myself to this number.

Michael Chabon is a name I’d known for awhile but never looked into. The Yiddish Policmen’s Union is his newest and seems like an easy entry at less than five dollars. Here’s to hoping that the words on the page are less of an eye sore than the cover. One of the reasons I love hardback books is because you can take the cover off: you can’t judge a book by it’s cover if it doesn’t have one, and this one is headed for the trash.

Alex Haley’s genealogical wonder Roots has been on my ‘list of stuff to read’ since I was a teenager. The cost of entry for this Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award winner was three dollars and change for the thirtieth anniversary edition in a nice trade paperback. While I am very excited about this book, coming off the epic page count of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn I may hold off on these nine hundred pages and catch my breath with some shorter works.

I am hoping that The Dog Said Bow-Wow a collection of short stories by Michael Swanwick is the prize pick of this litter. I read his short story Urdumheim in a collection earlier this year and knew right away he was someone I needed to follow. This was an odd one to find in the bargain bin, but I’m not complaining.

I’m feeling pretty good about picking these three up for the less than twelve dollars.

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