A church down the road from us had their annual book sale today.  It's the first time I'd ever been, and it was somewhat smaller than I expected, but still very fruitful.

 

 

The 3 books on the right were MT's finds and the picture doesn't include a small bag of children's books I picked up for a song to donate to one of the primary schools I work for (they're in the middle of a book drive for their classroom libraries).

 

Lots of good bargains and a few I bought because I felt like I should read them and at their bargain price, if I didn't like them, I wasn't committed to finishing them.  

 

 But the biggest find, I think, was when I was flipping through the fiction titles and came across an old clothbound copy of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens:  I've never read any Dickens (I know!) and when I flipped open the cover and saw the price I thought "what the hell?" and added it to the stack.  

 

When I got home, I started googling the older books (pre-isbn) to add to my home database and here on BookLikes, starting with the Dickens.  It's one volume of a 17 volume set from 1890.  I found one listing for it on eBay and the going price was 69.99 USD - the condition of that book was NOT good; from the pictures it was missing most of its spine - much worse shape than mine.  What did I pay for my pretty-good-for-a-125-year-old copy?  10 cents.  SCORE!!

 

I also paid 10 cents for Souls Belated by Edith Wharton - with everyone raving about her, while simultaneously talking about how anxious her stories make them, I've been WAY hesitant to dip my toe in - until I found this little 60 page gem.  I'm hoping not even Wharton's characters can scar me too badly in 60 pages.

 

The rest of the haul are all books I'd heard about here or elsewhere that sounded interesting - A Pelican at Blandings was bought solely on the strength of Wodehouse.  The The Children's Bible is the exact same copy I had as a kid and I had a sentimental moment when I saw it; for 2 bucks, it can sit on my shelf and remind me of a happy childhood, although I'm as unlikely to actually read it now as when I was a kid.

 

I've been moderately interested in owning a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary for sometime, so I snapped up this two volume set for $4 - even though MT thinks I'm bonkers.  I also have him seriously considering ripping out the wall my library shares with the hallway, and replacing it with a bookcase wall.  :D  Woot!

My sister-in-law thought that I might get a kick out of this one, given that it's an epistolary murder mystery set in England that uses science. She was right on all counts.

The epistolary format sometimes demands a little more from the reader, but it lends itself particularly well to this story. The novel opens with a man sending a series of documents to a nobleman and asking for his impressions of the "case." The reader is then led through the story based on letters, reports, and other documents reflecting multiple perspectives.

Readers will guess the identity of the murderer well before the end of the book, but the trick is in how it can be proved to the police. I won't spoil the method or how it comes to be used--suffice it to say it's both clever and accurate.

It had been a long time since I had read a good English mystery. Why is that, again?

Yet another book confirming my very high opinion of Dorothy Sayers. This is her take on an epistolary novel, although it's not composed of letters only. As the title suggests, the novel consists of a range of documents which together form a prosecution brief. As is so often the case with Sayers, the mystery is only a part of what the book is about. While there is a mystery, the point of it is the "how" rather than the "who". The novel is also a dissertation on creation and the origin of life. I will freely admit that the science largely went over my head, but it actually didn't matter. I understood enough to be impressed. And then there was the wit, the passion and that fierce intelligence which characterises Sayers. In short, I loved it.

First 50 pages were difficult to go through because of the letter based narrative. But after that the book has been awesome with physics and chemistry thrown in!

interesting, unusual entry in the dorothy sayers mystery cannon, one that surprisingly does not feature peter wimsey, harriet vane, or, alas, bunter. basically a series of letters, the mystery unfolds amongst much light satire and amusing character bits. it is intriguing to see how the various letters often contradict one another, rashoman-style.