Okay, so I freely admit it. I am bad, very, very bad. I really thought I would be able to limit myself when it came to making choices, but when faced with so many really good books I couldn't help myself. I will say that I went through my piles not once, but twice and put things back. I added everything up ahead of time to make sure I could fit them into my budget and decided it was for a good cause, so here I sit with three stacks of practically new books. When averaged out it comes to something like $1.89 a book, and how can you beat that? So, here's the run down. This is my general fiction, nonfiction, and classics stack.
Selected Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant
A Few Green Leaves, Barbara Pym -- her last novel
Amerika, Franz Kafka -- a new translation
The Bachelors, Muriel Spark
The Beet Queen, Louise Erdrich -- she's part of my reading American authors project - I've never read her and wasn't sure where to start
My Antonia, Willa Cather -- I have a mass market edition of this, but how could I pass up a lovely Virago edition?
Journal of Solitude, May Sarton -- one of her famous books I hear
Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald -- I have lots of her books now, must read one of them soon
The Blue Afternoon, William Boyd
Making It Up, Penelope Lively
The Essays of E.B. White, E.B. White
Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman--and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth Century America, Alan Pell Crawford
Mystery novels, the first stack:
Destination Unknown and Passenger to Frankfurt, Agatha Christie -- standalone novels
The Chalk Circle Man, Fred Vargas
Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis, Murder in Clichy and Murder in the Rue de Paradis, Cara Black
Winter in June and When Winter Returns, Kathryn Miller Haines
Someone obviously recycles their murder mysteries and crime novels--luckily for me, as there were so many to choose from. And most are in near perfect condition. I feel quite spoiled.
Vienna Secrets, Frank Tallis
Wolf in Man's Clothing, Mignon Eberhart -- Nebraska author
Death of a Nationalist, Rebecca Pawel
An Advancement of Learning, Reginald Hill - the second Dalziel & Pascoe novel
The Peking Man is Missing, Claire Taschdjian
Black Ice, Hans Werner Kettenbach
Crimini: The Bitter Lemon Book of Italian Crime Fiction, edited by Giancarlo de Cataldo
The Spoke, Friedrich Glauser
Flesh & Blood, John Harvey
Not too shabby, eh? I think I'm going to be reading a lot of mysteries and crime fiction this winter.