The weak dollar, competitive used book prices and still decent shipping rates compel my inner vulture to order far more books than I can read.
Alas, this time, BetterWorldBooks (via Abebooks, due to better indirect pricing) messed up and sent me the wrong order. As shipping costs are four to five times the book price, I don’t think they will want to recover them. Let’s see what books Secret Santa has chosen for me:
Claire Tomalin's
Samuel Pepys (LT rating 4.22) – excellent choice. When it came out, I read a competing biography but will be delighted to read this, always on my wishlist. To read. To bed.
Jonathan Spence's
The Search for modern China (4.26) – again, an excellent choice. I actually am reading this one. My bargain used copy has a cracked spine. This copy is heavily underlined (cursed upon all library book underliners! Double-cursed be trivia underliners and page colorists!). Not sure which copy I am going to keep.
Susan Sontag –
Illness as metaphor (3.96) – Sontag will not disappoint.
Joseph Brodsky's
Less than one Selected Essays (4). I have never read anything by Brodsky. Perhaps an essay is a good starting point. On Tyranny starts “Illness and death are, perhaps, the only things that a tyrant has in common with his subjects. In this sense alone a nation profits from being run by an old man.” Cuba is lucky indeed.
T.S. Eliot's
Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (4.06). The man behind Cats. The waste land is one of those book I am always not reading. The selection does not push my buttons. Perhaps his comments on Dante might be worthwile.
Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at noon (4.02). I usually prefer to read a book in its original language. Wikipedia informs me, however, that Koestler’s German original was lost and the German versions are actually re-translations of the English version.
John Updike
More matter essays and criticism (4). Updike sadly passed away earlier this year. I always loved his New Yorker essays and criticisms. His novels not so much. Good choice.
Jacob Burckhardt's
The Renaissance in Italy (4.08). A classic in a cheap and loveless edition. Already own this one, multiple times, actually.
Betrand Russell's
The history of Western philosophy (4.14). Abounds in many bargain bins. To read or not to read …
New York Times Book Review –
Books of the century (3.44). A book for non-readers. A disappointment among an otherwise tasty selection. The book highlights a number of rather petty NYT reviewers (overrated anyway, too much back-stroking).
In sum, two books I already own (Spence, Burckhardt), two bargain bin selections (Russell, NYT Review), one excellent biography (Tomalin) and a wide range of tasty essay collections. If there has been an order fulfilment switch, I am certain that the other customer will be less happy with my order of mostly urban sociology and US civil war books. At least, Peter Hessler’s
Oracle Bones will match the China interest.
