A May Book-Haul!

The rest of the world may be unpredictable (earthquakes, tidal waves, polar ice-caps summarily melting, a snowstorm and a tornado on the same day in Colorado, 40-degree temperature drops in Boston in a 10-hour period, etc.), but one thing can always be counted on in a bookworm’s life: the need for acquiring more books.

I get books from many sources, of course. Not as many sources as I once did – Boston was once home to a vast number of used bookstores, scattered from Brookline to a wondrous place called Scollay Square, and I used to require an entire nine-to-five day simply to ‘hit’ them all (with my beagles along for the day, of course, since those were across-the-board more civilized times). Each shop had its own unique vibe and its own unique selection, and each was run by a Boston bookman of long standing.

Boston bookmen are virtually extinct today, and the number of venues has fallen precipitously. There’s my beloved Brattle Bookshop, of course (where gift certificates may always be phoned in, in any amount, hint-hint), but most of the pretenders currently occupying the Boston used-book scene are centers of NPR-echoing book-pretension rather than genuine used-book vitality; their stock is brutally over-priced, and it virtually never changes. They’re haunted by the two storm-crows of a bad used bookstore: students who can’t afford anything in the shop, and those loathsome dealer-creatures with their value-assessing phone-apps – but they have nothing at all to offer a real book-shopper (last year a friend took me into one such shop, on Newbury Street – I spent 20 minutes looking at $10 Horatio Hornblower paperbacks, and I left empty-handed).

But there’s always Goodwill, with its tidy little sections of affordable used books, and the hours I’ve spent watching BookTube have alerted me to another potential venue: The Book Depository, a wholly-owned but much more friendly-faced manifestation of Amazon.com. Like everybody else, I knew Book Depository mainly for its oddly mesmerizing live-buying page, where you can watch book-purchases being made in real time all over the world, 24 hours a day. But watching all the young BookTubers on YouTube, I was reminded of the fact that huge numbers of readers in the 21st century have no good physical bookstores anywhere near them – they do a big percentage of their book-buying online, and they seem to favor The Book Depository (probably for the free world-wide shipping? I admit, it’s nice not to have to factor that damn number in at the end of every purchase).

And they don’t just shop at Book Depository – oh no! Because it’s BookTube, they also do unboxings and book-haul videos about what they buy! It feels so bouncy and inclusive that I had to try it: I opened an account at Book Depository and promptly became one of those real-time world-wide shopping pings: “a customer in Boston just bought …”

So Book Depository items form a chunk of this May book-haul! For my first time shopping with them, I decided to limit my picks to fairly new Penguin Classics, and I justified these purchases (for which their is, I’m aware, no justification) by telling myself that if I ever saw these volumes at a Boston used bookstore, I’d probably snap them up regardless of their cost.

That certainly explains such seldom-seen gems as David Hume’s posthumous and quietly incendiary Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in which is fictional interlocutors use all the armament of the Enlightenment to dismantle religion and the very idea of a creator-god. Or another gem usually found only in schools: Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, which is here presented in a collection along with some of Burke’s great writings on the American colonies, the whole presided over by David Womersley, whose definitive three-volume edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will almost certainly be a future Book Depository purchase of mine (my own boxed set of those big fat trades has mysteriously vanished). And it wasn’t all centuries old! This time I also bought fiction: a gorgeous Penguin trade of Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington – because I’ve recently made the rather shocking realization that although I have the great Oxford World’s Classics Centennial Edition paperbacks of almost all of Trollope, I have almost no Penguin Classics of this most quintessentially English of authors – hardly an acceptable state of affairs for somebody who plans to write as much about Trollope in 2015 as I do!

(The other fiction purchase, a Penguin Modern Classics paperback of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, will strike some of you as far, far less comprehensible, and it strikes me that way too – it’s very close to be a sign of the Apocalypse to have the words “John Updike” and “Penguin Classics” in any kind of proximity. In my own defense I can only say that Adam Begley’s fantastic new biography of Updike provoked me to buy one of Updike’s crappy novels – until I remembered the riches of the Boston Public Library, but by then it was too late to cancel my Book Depository fling)

(And yes, I’m aware of the irony attending the fact that this purchase, the only one I’m ashamed of, is also the only one any of those young BookTubers I follow would actually read! I don’t fancy such people as the very talented Jamie Laurie, the adorable Morgan at House of Reads,  or the ambiguously-named BookMovieGuy tucking into Hume or Burke in their next spare hour)

But no Stevereads book-haul would be complete – indeed, no Stevereads book-haul would be possible – with some gleanings from the Brattle as well, and this one has a few finds: the old Science Fiction Book Club editions of sci-fi and fantasy classics can be extremely cheesy, but some of them are gold – foremost being their early volumes of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” books, since those early volumes feature not only covers by the great Frank Frazetta but also internal black-and-white Frazetta illustrations that are uniformly fun. This particular volume is the second one in the series and includes The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars, and it virtually guarantees some John Carter reading in my immediate future, especially since I’ve always most enjoyed reading these books in summertime, and Boston’s vicious, grueling 9-month-long summer is scheduled to begin on Wednesday (it’s freezing cold and snowing today).

Also in this Brattle segment of our haul: Steve Coll’s long and eloquent history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden, Ghost Wars, which I’ve recommended to many people and given to many people but never owned myself; a Penguin Classic of Trollope’s signature book, Barchester Towers, a Penguin Classic of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (a book that’s always disappointed me, as it were), and, in the day’s real discovery, a UK-only (this one came from a mysterious land known as “Canada”) mass market Penguin paperback of Cyril Connolly’s 1938 masterpiece of literary journalism, Enemies of Promise.

If the success of any book-haul lies in how much you want to dive in and start reading all the books immediately, then this one ranks pretty high for me. And who knows what the rest of May will hold? Other than freak sleet-storms and tsunamis, that is.