Books, books, books

I wrote over the summer about how I'd purged a bunch of books that I'd bought but never read. 
So, I've been fairly restrained since the summer, but I figured I would dissect the books I've bought since then, and what my attitude was at time-of-purchase.

Books are my "Gazingus Pin", as Nicole and Maggie put it the other day: "A gazingus pin is something that you just buy.  You may not have it in that color.  You may not have quite that flavor.  You tend to have a lot of them, far more than you really need, and sometimes you may even have more than you can use...They’re tiny pleasures, but if overdone, the pleasure can be diluted because it has become a habit more than a treat."

I've tried to become more selective about shopping for and buying books, but my book purchases haven't (and pretty assuredly won't) stopped completely.  So here are the books I've bought since the summer.

Baba Yaga's Daughter and Other Tales of the Old Races, by C.E. Murphy.  I dearly adore Catie's two big series: the Old Races and the Walker Papers.  A trilogy forms the main part of the Old Races series, but she's since written a bunch of short stories taking place in the same universe, usually related to secondary characters.  My favorite dragon and vampire feature heavily in these stories, particularly in the ones in this book.  I knew I was going to purchase this at least six months before I ordered it (in July), and a year before I received and read it (in November).  That didn't make Subterranean Press's price much easier to swallow, but since I planned for it, this was my singular book purchase for the summer.

The Avengers: Fury's Big Week.  Two words: impulse. buy.  I bought this the first week I was in NYC, I think.  Maybe the second.  It's the only book in that picture that I bought from Barnes & Noble.  It was enjoyable and fun to read.  But I totally could have gotten it from the library.

Walking the Hudson From the Battery to Bear Mountain, by Cy A. Adler.  I will admit that I haven't read it cover-to-cover, but that's because it's kind of a guide-book for this trail that runs 56 miles starting from Battery Park at the southern end of Manhattan.  His outlook on cars and city living is...interesting.  He definitely writes with passion.  This was an impulse buy, though - purchased when I was Christmas shopping at the indie bookstore near me.  I had a stack full of books I was going to give away, and I decided I needed one for me.  I like having it.  I'm not convinced I needed it yet, but I like it a lot.

Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat, by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle.  I read my library's copy between 12th grade and freshman year of college.  Moriyama's description of Japanese people's passion for freshness and movement stuck with me since that time, especially as I've been discovering those passions in my own life.  I stared at and debated buying this book the last 3 times I went to Kinokuniya in Union Square, and the first week in January I finally caved.  So...kind of planned. Also kind of regretted; I didn't remember how flowery and nostalgic her writing style is.  Part of me wishes I had checked it out from the library first.

The Fire of the Word: Meeting God on Holy Ground, by Chris Webb.  My church is reading this book for Lent.  This purchase wasn't planned, but wasn't really an impulse buy either.  We got a half-price deal though.  And it's a very good book.  A little touchy-feely for me, but it's meaning a lot.

There's one book not pictured because I don't have it yet, but it's on order at my local indie bookstore so I'll get it when it's released in a month: Mountain Echoes by C.E. Murphy.  It's the 8th book in Catie's Walker Paper series.  The Walker Papers are my favorite of her books, and I eagerly await each and every one as it comes out.  Books 1-7 are sitting happily on my shelf.  They aren't incredibly popular, so they aren't at the library, but I would want to own these anyway.

So that's 5 (6) books.  I am completely happy with 2 (3) of those purchases, one is a happy impulse buy and 2 are iffy.  Thankfully (I guess?) the expensive books aren't the ones I'm iffy on. 

Also, these are all new books.  For some, like Baba Yaga's Daughter and Mountain Echoes, used isn't really an option because they're from a limited-edition company or they're new.  But I've mostly stopped shopping at used bookstores because my impulse to buy is too strong there, and I wind up with more books than I have time to read.  So volume-wise, my purchasing has gone down.  Cost-wise, however...that's a different story.

Learn to Love Interlibrary Loan

Frugality blogs always encourage using your local library rather than buying books.  However, I'm continually surprised how many people don't realize that you aren't limited to the books housed in the library building closest to you.  There are 3 different forms of interlibrary loan, or ILL, services ready to help you out. 

Well, the first form isn't really ILL, and most people do know about it.  Usually, public libraries or university libraries don't exist in isolation.  Your local library is most likely a branch: one location of many that all share a catalog.  Public universities will be linked to the other libraries in the state system.  Certain holdings technically belong to each branch, but you can order books, CDs, and DVDs from anywhere in the system, through the library's website.  It's right in the catalog page - usually its the "Place a Hold" button.  Then you select what branch you want to pick the item up at.  And voila!  3-10 days later, you've got your book. 

Then there's the do-it-yourself version of ILL.  My college was networked with about 50 other colleges and universities in our state, and in Maryland all of the county libraries are linked.  Basically, there will be a separate system that you have to log into with your library card, and you can search all the network catalogs simultaneously.  If it finds the book, you can request it to be sent to your local library.  This can take anywhere from a week to a couple of months. 

Not every library is part of one of these systems, unfortunately - NYPL doesn't have one so far as I can tell, although they're a massive library to begin with.  And even when a library is in a network, patrons might not know about it.  My college promoted the service like crazy, but it was only a few years ago that I managed to access the Maryland one, called Marina.  It can be really great though - in the three years between discovering Marina and moving away, I ordered at least 30 books through it.

Finally, traditional Interlibrary Loan service is for those hard-to-find books that aren't available through the other two methods.  Find the form (here's the one for NYPL), log in, and give all the details about what you're looking for.  That form goes to a person (or office of people) whose job is to search all the libraries in the country for that thing you're looking for.  And it doesn't matter what you want, as long as it's been in print for at least 6-12 months (most libraries won't loan out recent releases because their duty is to their own patrons first).  I used to think you could only bother the ILL people for important research materials, but then I discovered that students at my college requested everything from class textbooks to romance novels.  These people want to find books for you!

These services are there for you as long as you're a member of your local library, and they're almost always free.  You can get any book you want, as long as you're willing to wait.  Intra-system requests take about as long as standard shipping from an online seller, and I'll admit to filling my online shopping fix by "shopping" the NYPL catalog ;-)  One word of caution though: you can typically only renew ILL books once, if at all, and the fines will be higher.  So don't take out too many at once. 

Book Pile Status II

I'm somewhat disappointed with myself in the last month and a half, my reading rate is not what I would have wished.  And I realized today that aside from the books listed in this post and my previous status update, I have only read two other books this year.  Two.  Both on spring break.  I suppose it's an indication of how busy I was but I can't help feeling disappointed in myself.  Ugh.  Anyway...

I finished The 4% Universe, which doesn't really count as coming from the pile because it was a graduation present.  Still, it was a fascinating read, telling the story of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating universe.  The book discusses the history of cosmology, and its title refers to the fact that "normal" (baryonic) matter only comprises 4% of the universe.  The rest is comprised of dark matter and dark energy.  I thought this book was quite well written, and some of the phrases were downright amusing and fun to read.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century by Tom Shippey took up most of my reading time this month.  I thought it was a biography, but it turned out to be literary criticism.  I still enjoyed reading it.  Shippey is a philologist, as Tolkien was (he even worked with Tolkien at one point) so he spent a lot of time digging into the linguistic and literary background for Middle Earth and its inhabitants. He also talked a lot about Tolkien's writing process and about the appeal of the books. My vocabulary for discussing literature isn't very strong, so I felt like Shippey articulated some of my love for Tolkien's writing that I didn't quite know how to explain.

Michael Kimmel, author of Guyland, visited my undergrad last fall to give a talk.  I was intrigued at the time, but the book was much better (during his talk, he seemed to focus on the more shocking stories he tells in the book, and less on the discussion and sociological explanation/implications).  I wish I had read it before I left college, because I would have loved to talk with some of the guys I knew while we were still in that environment.  It made me think a lot about the ways in which I react to situations involving guys and how I might have changed my interactions with the guys in my care when I was a residence assistant.  Kimmel also talks about the negative effect that Guyland has on women, and gives some brief ideas on the ways they can reject that culture.

I'm almost done with North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.  That one doesn't actually come from the book pile either; I'm reading a Project Gutenberg copy on my Nook and listening to some chapters on LibriVox.  I saw the BBC miniseries about a month ago, and started the book in response.  It's pretty decent, although I wish I had read it before watching the miniseries because my opinion is clouded now.  I can keep them separate when I read before I watch, but it's harder when I've watched the adaptation first.

Book Pile Status

(This is taking the place of a Small Success post for the week.)

I've already shown that I have too many books.  The pile pictured there has actually grown a little bit, as I've realized that my initial trip around the room only included the shelves where I knew there were many unread books.  I forgot that my poetry shelf included Beowulf or that Watership Downs was residing on my bookcase of kid's books, for example.

Anyway, I've read 4 books from the pile since I posted that picture.  They are Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card, The Girl Who Heard Dragons by Anne McCaffrey, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I greatly enjoyed all of them.   

In the past I've been asked, as a science fiction fan, whether I've read Brave New World, and I've had to ashamedly answer in the negative.  Finally, I've read it.  It's chilling in the way that the best futuristic works are - like Bradbury and Orwell, Huxley shows an extreme future in order to illustrate something about the present.  In this case, the importance of complex, critical thought and the power of societal pressure. 

The Memory of Earth is the beginning of Card's Homecoming series, the story of humankind's descendants on another planet.  The idea is that 30 million years prior to the story, the last remnants of Earth's residents settled new worlds.  To prevent the type of destructive wars that were apparently the end of civilization on Earth, a protective computer system called the Oversoul was set up over the planet Harmony.  The Oversoul prevents them from creating any type of technology that speeds travel (like wheeled carts) or that would be considered a large-scale weapon.  But the Oversoul is starting to fail... The book raises some interesting questions about belief and the practice of religion, since the Oversoul is the god of the people of Harmony.

The Girl Who Heard Dragons is actually a short story collection.  The first story, with the same name as the collection, takes place in the Dragonriders of Pern 'verse.  Most of the others take place in a space-faring universe that's probably related to McCaffrey's other books, but I've only read the Pern novels.  My favorite story was "The Greatest Love", a story written in 1956 about a fictional first attempt at human IVF.  Aside from getting to drive T crazy with my questions about the medical terminology (she's a pre-med student), I enjoyed the twists and turns and stumbling blocks encountered by the characters as they pushed forward with the procedure.  Since I started this book the day after I finished The Memory of Earth, I also enjoyed the juxtaposition of styles between Card, a Mormon, and McCaffrey, who seems quite to distrust the religious establishments of the world. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde shouldn't need an introduction, really.  I'm disappointed in myself for never reading it before now, since I've known the basic premise since early childhood.  The story, however, did not disappoint.  It chilled and horrified while at the same time examining the way one man dealt with his darker side.  Given the recent release of the Avengers (I haven't seen any of the individual Hulk films), I also saw the parallels between Drs. Jekyll and Banner and each man's success (or lack thereof) in controlling the beast within him.

In addition to those, I reread Neil Gaiman's American Gods back in May and I just finished rereading The Hobbit in preparation for the first film this December.  I'm also halfway through a book called The Four Percent Universe, which was a graduation gift.  It's a nonfiction book about cosmology, which is the study of the large scale universe: its structure, its origins, and what it's made of.