The Great Haul

There is nothing else to call it. Nothing. Anything else would be a euphemism; as it stands, it may be.

Every year the local professional symphony does a sale of used books as a means of raising a few more funds. Every year I tell myself I won't attend. And yet, for the past five years, I religiously attend.

And spend money. On books that I don't need, but want to read because they are supposed to be phenomenal and because I want to have the experience of being flown away onto another plain of existence for a moment or two.

And I honestly don't need these books - I have far too many unopened treasures of gold sitting on my shelves already, just waiting to be given the opportunity to have their spine broken by my caressing hand.

And now they shall be joined by another collection of books - which will hopefully not sit and wait on my shelves to be opened (though, because of the size of the addition, some waiting will be necessary).

This is a new blog - it will detail my literary life, reading through the shelves upon shelves of novels and poetry and historical knowledge that I need to digest. It will include reviews, and frustrations, disappointments and, assuming I can overcome my obsession with myself, news of the latest literary events (particularly awards).

Below is a list of the books I bought today. For a grand total of $75.00.

Farley Mowat - Aftermath: Travels in a Post-War World
Vincent Lam - Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures
William Faulkner - Intruder in the Dust
Jennifer Johnston - Fool's Sanctuary
Jane Urquhart - Storm Glass
Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost
Jim Thompson - Savage Night
Timothy Findley - You Went Away
Robertson Davies - The Lyre of Orpheus
Robertson Davies - What's Bred in the Bone
Alistair MacLeod - The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
Robertson Davies - Fifth Business
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Last Tycoon
F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise
Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories
Jane Urquhart - The Stone Carvers
Alan Paton - Cry, the Beloved Country
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
D. H. Lawrence - Aaron's Rod
Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book
Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Annie Proulx - Close Range: Wyoming Stories
Farley Mowat - Sea of Slaughter
Linden MacIntyre - The Bishop's Man
Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind
Oscar Wilde - The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
Kathleen Winter - Annabel
Heinrich Boll - The Clown
Dave Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mordecai Richler - Solomon Gursky Was Here

and

An Anthology of Yeats' Poems

That, my friends, is The Great Haul.