So I went book shopping for some classics for my challenge......

I went to a Salvation Army outlet near my home today, on my way home from dropping my youngest son at school today.  It was bitterly cold, and his school bus was an hour late (according to the transportation schedule), which we checked after half an hour of waiting outside. So rather than wait in the cold for another half hour and get sick again, I took him in a taxi to school.  My excuse to get books treat was to stop into the Salvation Army outlet on the way home, and scope out their book section, which sometimes has interesting books.  I never know what I will find there.  I went in saying, "Ok, I need Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson so I can read his Mars trilogy for the Classics challenge.  Oh, and let's see what literary classics are in too."  This is what I came home with:                 

 The steal of the day, for me, the find that made me exclaim and get all excited?  The Dark Imaginings, A collection of Gothic Fantasy, edited by Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski.

                                               
                                           

 I have never seen this book before, and I love, love, love the cover.  There are 17 illustrations inside by James Cagle.  Some of the stories are ones I've never seen before:
Cross Purposes - George MacDonald
Darkness Box - Ursula K LeGuin
The Unholy Grail - Fritz Leiber
The Troll - T.H. White
Lila the Werewolf - Peter Beagle
The Crowd - Ray Bradbury
The Brown Hand - Arthur Conan Doyle

There are 17 stories in total in this collection.  They are the same editors of The Fantastic Imagination (1977), and The Fantastic Imagination 2 (1978), exhibiting the best of fantasy writing for 100 years, both of which I own and have only partially read.  Hmm, maybe I should add these to the fantasy challenge portion......
                    

Actually, I exclaimed over all the books I found today. Madame Bovary!  The Day of the Triffids!  Jack Kerouac!  The Count of Monte Cristo!  The Giant Squid book, which I am going to read while I read Moby Dick!  We, the classic Soviet science fiction novel!   And the Colin Dexter book The Way Through the Woods which Margaret at BooksPlease just reviewed and I don't own among my Morse mysteries. And it was half-price day too, so I can still hunt for Green Mars and feel virtuous in this first week of January.

Now to update my challenge list page......

I love finding books second-hand, especially the hard-to-find and out of print books.  

conversations with my various book selves

       Well, that didn't go well.  Or, it went really well.  It depends if you talk to my budget-conscious side, or my bookaholic side.  Budget side said, let's not buy books until April 1, along doing with C.B James' Double Dog Dare Challenge that says read only my own books until the same date, that I am trying for the first time this year.  Bookaholic me went into Chapters with  a gift certificate received at Christmas, and what did I seriously think the outcome of that was going to be?***Edited to add:  This is how it really happened:  I went into Chapters without the gift card , just to have a tea and browse.  I saw the book.  I left the store because I really didn't plan on  spending any money on books until April.  I kept thinking about the book, and that's when I knew I was going to come back with the gift card.  I went back the next day.  My book self seldom speaks, but when she does, it's like a commandment.*****
I  bought a brand-new book:      

A Year of Writing Dangerously, by Barbara Abercrombie.  Because, Day one opened with "when I'm stuck and scared to death of writing the first line"......and continues with: "Writing holds the possibility that I won't have anything to say, not another word. That perhaps my imagination has dried up and my brain is empty."  That pretty much describes me for the past 6 months, I hadn't been able to write anything but some poetry.  I then realized that I had been resisting one of my characters in the short story I was writing, and that had dammed up all my writing.  This not to put my poetry writing down, it's that writing stories comes harder for me, and I have a lot of anxiety about my writing.  The writer me said one word, 'yes.'

The budget me decided that since it was a gift-card, I wasn't spending any 'money', so it was allowed.

Outcome: my challenge self was really, really happy to see that The Double Dog Dare challenge did not say that I couldn't buy any books, it just said that I promised to only read books that I had on my shelves as of Jan 1/13, or had ordered already.  *whew*!  I would hate to fail a challenge less than two weeks into it!  The hard thing is, how difficult it is for me to not buy books. Period.  I'm definitely a book junkie.

So, having succumbed once, the lure of the second-hand bookstore was pretty well a done deal when I said I would meet my husband there one day  last week when I had two appointments ,so I was off work, and needed to use some time waiting for his lunch hour.  I didn't succumb badly, I tried to make it books I really wanted to read sometime soon.  Don't you like how I can rationalize any book buying? I must be the champion at it.   I came home with the following books, saying to my challenge self that I wouldn't read any until April 1.

The Moche Warrier -Lyn Hamilton
Now May You Weep - Deborah Crombie
Probability Moon - Nancy Kress
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poems) - Margaret Atwood
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Galileo's Daughter - Dava Sobel

The best?  They were on super sale, so I got the lot for $5.00  And some good book finds!   The Atwood poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie are hard to find - Amazon doesn't list any for sale at this time.  And a lovely copy of Silas Marner that I have wanted to read  since seeing the movie last year (a rental from the library).

Outcome:  
bookaholic me: 7 all together,   contented
budget me: 2 (Chapters card, book sale)
challenge me: still in the challenge! win
writer me: joyous and writing again

2 weeks into the new year: Jan 15, was when I bought the books at the sale.   *sigh*  exactly how long can I go without buying books? 

So how are you doing with buying books, my Gentle Readers, in this new year?  and do you have conversations with your various selves when staring at books longingly on the shelf?

I lasted 18 days before I bought a book.....

I thought I could get through the month......but I couldn't, after all! Tonight I went to Collected Works, just to pop in and see if they had Susan Hill's first book in her mystery series. They didn't, but they had other ones, lots of other books! I had to put The Book Thief back, mostly because I am not quite in the mood for what reading the book will do to me - I know it will affect me like Diary of Anne Frank does. So it went back on the shelf, as did Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. I can get that next time. What I did buy was
-La Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky - my mother was raving about it after I gave it to her for Christmas, saying it was such a well-written book using grammar and words, writing that she hasn't seen for a long time, so she was slowing down her reading of it so she could enjoy it more;
- The Fair Folk ed by Marvin Kaye - an impulse buy! but I am into fairies and dragons right now, so might as well buy it while it's still in print (it was paperback anyway)
And then when I went up to the cash, I discovered I had two books on hold that I'd ordered before Christmas! somehow how my LSS forgot to pass on two messages left earlier this month:
-A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park - first in a trilogy - getting raves in the fantasy world, and it does look really good
-St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, by Karen Russell. How could I resist that title?? And it was on several Best Book of the Year lists, looks like magic realism, maybe.....interesting, anyway, a collection of short stories. See? I am trying something new, already!!
So, I happily bought some books! I am so delighted by them. All of them I will read this year, they look so good that I have to read them! and La Suite Francaise was already in one of my challenges.
H-m-m, do I admit that I ordered two more books, too? The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, and Susan Hill's first mystery series book.
So, now that the kids are in bed, I can start reading.....it's Friday night, and except for grocery shopping, I don't have to go out tomorrow or for the rest of the weekend because our evening out at our friends' house down the street, watching a masterful dragon/lizard/giant snake-with-guns-and-missiles movie was put off while my friend recovers from bronchitis (our recent colds wouldn't help with this.....). So, I have lots of reading time ahead of me! And cold temperatures loom at the end of the week, which is when I hibernate because I hate being cold! so, The Remains of an Altar it is - and so far enjoying it very much, as usual. Ghostly things, evil people, faith and prayer, characters I would love to know - Merrily and her daughter Jane and new boyfriend Lol.....I'll review it when I'm done, it's book 7 in the series, and I have really enjoyed them all so far. A few have creeped me out too, which is the whole point of ghostly stories, but these are mysteries too, and very well done. Scary and mysterious, slightly haunting, you will have to try one, Gentle Reader!!
Happy Reading, and let me know when you broke down and bought your first book this year :-)