Friday, January 25, 2008

Book Shopping

When I hold my hands up to the light, I can see the light through gaps between my pressed-together fingers: the sure sign of a spendthrift!


Have money, will visit bookshops... I've bought lots of nice tomes, such as
Catholicism for Dummies; a copy of the [Novus] Ordo 2008; the three volumes of Alan Marshall's semi-autobiography (I Can Jump Puddles, This is the Grass, and In Mine Own Heart); the complete science fiction of Cordwainer Smith in two volumes (When the People Fell and We the Underpeople); Jared Diamond's Collapse, about whether societies change or die in response to environmental change; The Story of Tibet, drawing on interviews with the Dalai Lama; Manelli's Jesus Our Eucharistic Love; Give yourself to Christ, a collection of the first homilies of Pope Benedict; The Apostles, the same Pontiff's General Audiences on the Twelve and others of the first Christians; Sister Wendy's Meditations on the Mysteries of Our Faith, commenting on paintings of Duccio; and, last but not least, the full fifteen volume reprint set of Abbot Gueranger's The Liturgical Year, which I've wanted for ages but could never previously afford.


Deo gratias. Now, to read them all...


Oh, and I also bought the DVD boxed set of From the Earth to the Moon; and have ordered The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture. H/T to Fr Bernard, O.P., for alerting me to this Rhode Islander's oeuvre!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, "Cult of Alien Gods"? That book looks like a stretch to me, but I am always in favour of book-buying. So...when will you read Lovecraft?

Joshua said...

Will get onto it, my ghostly father! ;-)

I'm not a big reader of horror, but it makes a change.

At the moment I'm finishing off the first volume of Cordwainer Smith's collected sci-fi; it's good to read some again, and something cerebral and well-written too, in that curious style that he has.

A sample (from "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"):

"We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world."

Joshua said...

Update: have finished the first volume of Cordwainer Smith, and have just bought (for $19.90) two tomes of H.P. Lovecraft's wierd tales: "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Loved Dead", being volumes 1 and 2 of his collected stories. Of course, thanks to Fr Bernard, I've already read "The Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness".