You may not know this about me, but I live in a building where a lot of older Jewish people live. I don’t have a problem with this. They are very quiet, the elevators are easy to get late at night, and they can be quite entertaining.
My building has a little library in the community room, which I have never been to. However, the library had a book sale last week to raise some money.
Given the key demographic in my building, I didn’t think there would be many books of interest to me but at a buck a book I figured I could take 15 minutes to check out the wares.
I’m glad I did because I ended up spending $5 on the following:
- Mr. Vertigo
: I like Auster a lot, so this was an easy choice.
- Third Class Superhero
: I enjoyed Yu’s second novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
so why not give his first work a go? - Bonk’s Bar
: This one is the wild card. I picked it up mostly because it is set in Philadelphia. - The Law of Nines
: Oh Terry Goodkind. I expect this book to be pretty bad, but I went through a Goodkind phase in high school and I thought I would give him a chance now. - Jpod
: I was an English major in college, which means most of my classes were discussions. As any of you who have met me in real life (or have listened to any of The Incomparable podcasts in which I appear) know I am a man of few words. I remained generally quiet in class except for two notable occasions: in a creative writing class discussion on Hemingway and the “Iceberg theory” (90% of an iceberg is underwater as a metaphor for how much is concealed in Hemingway’s spare prose) I suggested that he wrote so simply because he wasn’t a very good writer (the TA of the class didn’t agree with me). The other time, in a postmodern literature class, I argued reading Generation X, Coupland’s most well known work, was a waste of time because all the characters did was whine about nothing (the Prof. didn’t agree with me). Given that background it might seem odd to pick this up, but I did enjoy Microserfs
.
When I went to pay for my five books the little old lady looked at them and said, “Great! We don’t get many people with such esoteric taste.”
Not sure what she meant by that, but I’ll take it as a compliment.
4 responses to “Buying books from old jews”
She meant you are weird.
Interesting, Bonk’s Bar is in Port Richmond. Supposedly they have good crabs.
Huh. Sometimes when 95 is too much of a pain, I drive down Richmond Street to avoid it. Noticed Bonk’s Bar because of the goofy name, but never figured there was an interesting story behind it like this.
Hmm, when you’re done reading that one, I might be interested in borrowing it from you!
I too, don’t always get the hype about Hemingway.
But Faulkner is the b*st*rd I really can’t stand. Haven’t I suffered enough????