LITERATURE: Acquisitions

On order, fifty books.  Most from Barnes & Noble, Powell, and a couple from Amazon.  Prices run anywhere from 65 cents to 10 dollars, but the average is under $5.00.

I do this after every Christmas (unless we’re hurtin’ a bit financially).  I tell Jim not to get me anything much, then when he follows directions, I either go nuts on computer parts or this year, books.

Just discovered Powell’s though I’ve been reading their blog for close to a year now.  Never realized they were right in CT and could have driven to the shoreline and spent a day–and a lot more money, I’m sure–browsing and buying right there. 

A good portion of my selections were directly from my "Books to Buy" list (right sidebar) but many were those I’ve read before and wished I’d saved, or those that just appealed at the time.  I went through 5,200-plus titles online at B&N, but at Powell’s, I went through about twenty pages of 1800 and since I’d already plopped about a dozen books in the cart, switched to my wanted list and selected from there.  I must say that Powell’s had some better deals as far as used books, and the site was much easier to maneuver.  B&N’s had no regular system for lit classics, and I ran across the same titles over and over again so that I often had the impulse to give up.  Their ordering system also was a pain–I’d lost the initial order after going through 1000 titles since they wouldn’t let me open a new account and wouldn’t let me reset my password after an e-mail reminder and instead, wiped out the order. 

So it’s going to be a year (or a few!) of reading. 

Writing’s just going to have to wait.