I'm in the Mood to Bring Home Some Books

Now that I've been fully vaccinated for a while, I've ventured back inside two different Barnes & Noble bookstores and one Half Price Books location. And, I've been pleased to find that the urge to buy physical books is as strong in me today as it ever was. In just the last three weeks, I've brought tree-book copies of these home with me:

I picked up a like-new hardcover of this one in Half Price Books for a whopping $4. This is book number six in Atkins's ten-book Quinn Colson series, a really good crime fiction series set in contemporary, small-town Mississippi. I started reading the series after snagging a review copy of the second series book back in 2012, but I've still only read the second, third, and fourth Quinn Colson books. Couldn't pass this one up at that price, and I'm looking forward to returning to that world soon. 

I bought this Tana French standalone after enjoying her latest book, The Searcher (which is the only other standalone French has published) so much. That one was my first exposure to French's writing, but I'm now such an enthusiastic convert to her books that I plan to snag the odd marked-down copy like this one whenever I run across them. I was happy to find a never-read copy for $10 at Half Price Books. 

About two weeks after purchasing The Witch Elm, I made another visit to Half Price Books and found a never-read copy of the second book in French's Murder Squad series. This one was published in 2008, so I was a little surprised to find a copy in such good condition for only $8. That gives me a little hope that, if my enthusiasm about the books holds up, I'll be able to put them all on my shelves at a fairly decent price...although I haven't priced the first book in the series yet, so that may not be true. 

As I've said many times, Library of America is my favorite publisher. I admire the job that this non-profit publisher is doing in printing high-quality editions of the best and/or most interesting writing this country has ever produced so much that I now have 118 of their books on my own shelves...and counting. LOA  have finally gotten around to Hemingway, and I found it on Amazon for $21.49. This is normally a $47 book, so there's no way I could have passed it up at the sale price.

At the same time as I was buying the Hemingway, I noticed that the LOA edition of Jean Stafford's novels was also on sale for $23.95. This one is a little slimmer than the Hemingway book, but it is regularly $40, so it seemed like the perfect time to add Stafford to my collection - and reading experience as well. The three novels were published between 1944 and 1952, and Stafford is one of those writers whose work is in danger of just dropping through the crack. One of LOA's mission is making sure that kind of thing doesn't happen. 

Reading Walter Mosley's fifteenth Easy Rawlins novels a few days ago made me want to read some of the earlier books in that series, and I spotted this one at one of the local Barnes & Noble's stores (the good one...more on that later). Devil in a Blue Dress is actually the first book in the series, and the edition I have is an oversized paperback that was on sale for $6 the day I was in the bookstore. 

As much as I have enjoyed each of the Easy Rawlins books I've read, I like some of Mosley's standalones even better than the Rawlins books. I found Down the River Unto the Sea on the same B&N visit I mentioned above. This one is about a New York cop who was framed and did prison time before becoming a private detective. I find it interesting that it is set on the East Coast, a country...and world...away from Easy's West Coast setting. This never-read hardcover was $7. 

The Guns of Last Light is part three of Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy," the author's World War II trilogy. It's almost 850 pages long, so I'm guessing that the trilogy must be close to 2,500 pages all told. This is a quality product; it's on heavy, paper and includes some nicely reproduced black and white photos from the European battlefields. My father was in almost all of the battles chronicled in the book, and I'm hoping that the book can give me a better understanding of what he went through during the war. I doubt I'll ever read the whole thing, but it's perfect for dipping into and out of as the mood strikes.

Now, back to that comment I made earlier about the "good" Barnes & Noble store. I am near-equidistant from two B&Ns, and the two could not be any more different if they purposely worked at it. One store has almost completely eliminated its marked-down fiction section; the other seems to have expanded it. One devotes more and more floor space to toys, games, stationary, greeting cards, and calendars all the time; the other seems to be holding the line on those items. One has eliminated so many bookshelves, that browsing the store is like walking through a forest after a brushfire has killed a third of the trees. The other has rearranged the front door area display, but not messed around with the other shelving at all. One will get my business from now on...one will not.