Disruptive Juxtaposition

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Atta Boyd!

This is great. I've been rereading the Constitution recently - a handy pocket version published, ironically enough, by the Boy Scouts of America. Also ironic is that the crucial inch of breathing room between church & state is here being kept wedged open by a pastor. An evangelical pastor. I'd send his church some money if I had any to spare.

Monday, July 24, 2006

My library is growing

Isaac Asimov, The Complete Robot
John Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & Other Poems
Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Prose
Martin Buber, I and Thou
George Eliot, Middlemarch
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Spaulding Gray, Impossible Vacation
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (a nice hardcover version)
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
James Joyce, Ulysses
Maxine Kumin, Nurture
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
Bernard Malamud, Magic Barrel
Bernard Malamud, A New Life
Guy de Maupassant, The Great Short Stories
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Ian McEwan, Saturday
Thomas Merton, Complete Poems
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Peter Pereira, Saying the World
Alexander Pope, Complete Poems
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus
Aleksandr Solsyneitzen, The Gulag Archipelago
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a New York Post Family Edition hardcover)
Mark Twain, Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons

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So, ahem, yes. These books account for a large part of my absence from the internets. I picked these up at either 1) the Skaneateles Memorial Library sale, where, at the stroke of the church's 6'o'clock, the gathered bibliophiles darted under the pink tape barrier and had at the beautiful, organized, and extensive collection; 2) the Hamilton Grange branch of the New York Public Library, where I found six books including the new Tom Wolfe in hardcover for $3.50; 3) the Book Cellar in Solvay, New York, which proffers vast rooms full of massmarket books with pink covers and bodices rent in twain, and smaller rooms toward the back with Malamud and Philip Roth; 4) Westsider Books in Manhattan, Broadway & 80th St., where the proprietor knows his Tom Waits.