Last week, I wrote about the title wave of books that I’ve bought while in Anchorage (which went against my pledge to buy NO books while in Anchorage). I also mentioned how Dawn and I were trading a bunch of them in so we wouldn’t have to ship them back to Vermont. Well, we went to trade them in, but the deal was that we could get $6 in cash for them or $14 in trade credit. And since we’re leaving town this week, taking the $14 in trade credit meant that we would have to walk out of the bookstore with new books. Since we went there to get rid of books, it would make more sense to take the $6 in cash, right? Of course I’m right.

So the new books we walked out of the store with were:

• Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe
  I started reading this late last night. It’s a collection of shorter pieces by Wolfe (who, as you know, also wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, etc.). The first essay is a look at life in America at the millenium. It is very much the opinions of a 65-plus-year-old-man who is trying to educate his peers about those crazy kids. There’s also an interesting piece about the founding of Silicon Valley. But the best piece (best as in most fun) is titled “My Three Stooges,” and is where he takes on John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving for their ultra-negative responses to his bestseliing novel A Man in Full. I have a lot to say about this essay, so I’m putting it in a post of its own over on Much Too Much.

• The Tender Shoot, by Collete
  Dawn bought this one. She says she bought it because “she likes her.” I couldn’t find it on Amazon to give you a link, but I found this review over at the New York Times if you’re interested. Here’s a quick quote:
  

  These eleven stories are all late Colette, drawn from four collections she published between 1937 and 1944. They vary in length and intensity, but even the slightest is perfect, and the one called “The Kepi” could probably be called the truest love story ever written.

  Sounds interesting to me. I’ll have to check it out.

• Picture This, by Joseph Heller
  If you remember, last week I mentioned that I’d read (and was moved by) Heller’s A portrait of an artist as an old man, which pretty much convinced me that I absolutely need to read Catch-22. I had it in my hand; I did, I swear. But that book snob in me still recoils at picking up those books that everyone says is great, so I put it down and kept looking. I picked up Picture This and the blurb on the back said that, “Picture This does for the universe of art and museums what Catch-22 did for war.” Then I convinced myself that I wasn’t in the mood for a war book anyhow, and decided to buy this instead. It makes no sense, I know. I’ll get to Catch-22, I will, but it looks like I’m going to back into it by reading the rest of Heller’s oeuvre before I get there.
• The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby
  If you have any interest in what you’re reading right now, click on the link above and buy this book immediately. The Polysyllabic Spree is 14 months worth of columns by the author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, etc., and all of these columns are about Hornby’s book-buying and -reading habits for each of those months. He lists what he bought and what he’s read, and then tries to explain himself a little bit. Since it’s a collection of magazine columns, you can read the whole thing in like two hours (or put it in your bathroom and be all set for the next 14 trips to the shitter). If you are a reader, this book is a must buy.

Oh, and on Thursday last week, we took a daytrip up to Talkeetna to get some good views of Denali (it was too cloudy, so we couldn’t see the peek), and in this cute little town, we found a nice used bookstore called Tales Told Twice. Well, we had to buy some books in a store with such a great name, right?

So the new books we walked out of the store with were:

• Giles Goat-Boy, by John Barth
  I was sitting under a tree reading this book when the love of my life came over a hill and introduced herself. Now, she might tell you it’s because I looked such a damn stud in my shorts, white socks, and dress shoes (my Tevas were extra stinky that day), but I swear that the only reason she decided to light up my life is because I was reading an ~800 page book and she’s a sucker for a man with a big, fat book.

  Anyway, that copy was from the school library, which meant that I did not own a copy of the book that literally changed my life. In Tales Told Twice, I found a copy for a $1.50. I figured I could spend that much on something with such a great emotional value.

• The Argentina Reader, edited by Gabriel Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo
  Dawn’s doing an independent study next semester in South American literature, so this purchase was a no brainer.

• Eugene Onegin, by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated by Vladimir Nabokov
  The story behind this purchase is very weird, and with the way I write, very long. So I’ll just keep it short and say that I bought this one because “Onegin” has held a serendipitous place in my life for the last two and a half weeks. When I saw it in Twice Told Tales, I held it up for Dawn, and she said, “You simply have to buy it. There’s no discussion.” I agreed. I had to.
• The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris
  This book, which Dawn bought for a friend of ours, is a zoologist’s look at the human animal. I haven’t read most of it, but the first chapter makes me want to. Here’s a link to the first page. Read it, and imagine it in relation to the topic of the book, and you can see why this will make for very intriguing reading.

We have two more days left in Anchorage. What are the odds that we can get out of here without buying any new books? Since we’re car-less (without car), the odds are pretty good. Of course, the airport bookstore could be dangerous, but that’s usually a magazine purchasing place.

Pray for us.