I'm late (as usual) but I've started my holiday reading.  This was my first book, a collection of O. Henry's short stories, starting with The Gift of the Magi which is actually the only Christmas story in the collection, but it's a great one.  

 

O. Henry loved a good twist didn't he?  All of these stories go in directions readers wouldn't expect.  I think the only one that left me flat was The Hiding of Black Bill anti was only really average in comparison to the rest.  The Purple Dress and One Thousand Dollars were the most poignant of the collection to me.

 

Overall, highly recommended, especially if you're new to O. Henry's work.  It's a great taste of his writing without being too big a commitment. 

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!

I enjoyed reading some of the lesser-known ironic stories of O. Henry in this book. My very favorite lesser-known story in this book is "The Green Door" in which a man receives a mysterious business card which simply says "The Green Door". The man is intrigued because he finds that everyone else has been handed a business card for a dentist office rather than for "the green door". So, of course, he has to go in search of this mysterious green door. I love the course of the story. I don't understand why this one isn't as famous as others like "Gifts of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief" because it certainly ranks up there.

Other stories I enjoyed from the book:
*"Springtime á la Carte" - an accidental second-chance at romance
*"After 20 Years" - what happens when old friends plan to meet each other at a certain spot in 20 years
*"While the Auto Waits" - is romance possible between the very rich and the very poor?
*"Makes the Whole World Kin" - a thief bonds with his victim

I have to say, though, that some of the language and cultural references in some of the stories didn't hold up to time and left me a bit confused. And there were some stories here that just weren't interesting. Thus, the 4 stars rather than 5.