Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Kelly's Really Big Score: Take It Out In Trade edition

Road-tripped up to Ojai and to Bart's Books. I must say that it was the perfect day for such a trip. Sunny day, mid-seventies, and the hills of Ojai were still spring-green and the wild mustard was in bloom.

I took a bunch of books in to trade, and with the store credit I was able to get:


  • Louis Bayard - The Black Tower
  • Kate Atkinson - Case Histories
  • Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
  • Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler - The Best, Worst, and Most Unusual
  • Colleen McCullough - The First Man in Rome
  • T. C. Boyle - The Road to Wellville
  • Marilyn French - The Women's Room
  • Tim O'Brien - The Things They Carried
  • Alexandra LaPierre - Artemisia
  • Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children
  • Joe R. Lansdale - Lost Echoes
  • Jose Saramago - Blindness
  • Thomas Tryon - The Other
  • Clive Barker - Cabal
  • Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers
  • Donald Hamilton - Murderers' Row
  • William Howard - "Gore Vidal's Caligula"


I am particularly happy with the Best, Worst, and Most Unusual and the Murderers' Row finds. The former is a trivia book that's from the late 1970s, and I still remember checking it out of the local library when I was a kid and learning about everything from how awful a durian is to some examples of really off-the-wall architecture. The latter is from Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, which are long out of print but which are great reading, and a heavy influence on my Ashes series.

I make no apologies for the last book on the list - it's a novelization of the terrible movie made from Gore Vidal's screenplay for Caligula. I'm sure it's no good but I must have it on my shelf and it was only $2. So there.

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