As we start to travel more frequently, the boyfriend and I make a point to visit a (hopefully used) bookstore at least once per trip. So let’s have a look-see where we’ve been and what we found!
Raven Used Bookstore – Boston – February 2016
Here I found Shame by Salman Rushdie, Theogony/Works & Days by Hesiod, and Viewpoints by Marc Frantz and Annalisa Crannell for the boy.
192 Books – NYC – April 2016
The boy bought The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.
And Sanctuary by William Faulkner for me.
Carpe Librum – Washington D.C. – May 2016
I mentioned what I bought at Capre Librum in this post!
Philly AIDS Thrift – Philadelphia – June 2016
Of course my BEST HAUL was right here in my hometown!
- All My Sons by Arthur Miller
- Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Franz Kafka
- The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
- The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
- Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
- The Wasteland and Other Writings by T. S. Eliot
- Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style by Kathy Peiss
All these I got for the low, low price of $23.64 last Sunday. They even gave me a reusable bag for the purchase! Go, Philly!
Besides visiting brick and mortar bookstores, I also mooched (bookmooch is an online book exchange platform) Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan and The War Prayer by Mark Twain so far this year. (I gave away The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan).
As much as I try to support indie, local, secondhand booksellers, sometimes I just can’t deny the convenience of Amazon! In March, for Women’s History Month, I bought The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans, Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis, and Is Everybody Hanging out without Me? by Mindy Kaling.
The boy bought me The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, presumably because two things happened after I read The Book of Salt by Monique Truong: 1) I couldn’t stop talking about Stein and Toklas, and 2) I couldn’t stop talking about wanting to read more Vietnamese writers.
Lastly, I bought DWM The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo for her birthday. It’s funny, in my post on the search for a birthday present for the boy, I had mentioned that I wasn’t going to get DWM anything since I have no idea what she’s into nowadays. Yet, fast forward a few weeks, I still haven’t found the right shoes for him, and, just by virtue of being such a nerd, I accidentally found a great book for her!
Anyway, that’s enough about books, happy reading! I gotta go find some good looking men’s shoes.
What’s the saying, “Poor people have big TV’s. Rich people have big libraries.”
100% agreed!
yes, let’s not become the consuming poor. money and materials can not bring us happiness.
happiness comes from within us when we have meaningful experiences such as serving, loving, and caring for others.
This is how I feel at the grocery store…..
Haha yes that’s why I had to specify books as a “nonessential” that I splurge on… Food is definitely the number one splurge without exception!
i agree, i do see you raining dollar bills!!! lol
Haha it’s all relative in the end. I spend way less on books than most other things just because the per item cost is much lower than for most other things. But books are probably the only non-necessity I don’t have a mental-block against paying full price for. Priorities.
Even so, I still love digging around a thrift shop/used bookstore for hidden gems for cheap 🙂