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I have ventured to the booksale and returned with loot. It was very crowded but did have a lot of books, so I didn't get the feeling that it had already been thoroughly picked over. I wasn't the earliest, thanks to the time it took with public transport, which was easily an hour and a half to get there.
Like Fred Mouse has already said elsewhere in DW, the sf/fantasy table wasn't the greatest. A lot of older works. I ended up getting a couple of replacement books - my own is in bad condition or I got rid of something years ago and then wish I didn't - and now wish I had picked up a third, but was eventually discouraged by getting tired and not liking being in the crowd, even if it was a crowd of bibliophiles. It was too much work to get back up to the other side of that table. I did get a hardback fantasy - Mercedes Lackey/Rosemary Edgehill - called Dead Reckoning which looks to be a 'fantasy western' so we'll see. I've liked their stuff in the past, this book had a reasonable price tag for a very good looking copy so why not? I used to work on this premise when everything was just normally expensive, not insane. It's just now I can't do that with new books anymore.
Probably the nonfiction was the most valuable. I scored a copy of Jared Diamond's Collapse; a study of various civilisations that have collapsed in the past, as well as some more modern examples and research on reasons ours could be among them in the future. There's a study of Easter Island and Norse Greenland, which was a curious one. Vikings didn't make it through the winter. Yet the colony in Iceland, equally inhospitable, managed to make it and has survived for 1000 years. And one called The Lab Rat Chronicles which purports to be life lessons via the world's most successful mammal - the rat! I checked it to try to find out if it had any awful experiment stuff in it and it didn't seem to.
I also picked up a small book called We Have To Talk About Putin, which was interesting to me as a political/history student. Written in 2019 so I want to see if it's got any insights/predictions re the attack on Ukraine. Actually I read a bit of it over lunch - picnic hauled along because expense - and it did, a bit, concerning Putin's expertise is in martial arts, not chess. A martial artist sees a good opportunity right now, but does not see beyond that, as a chess player needs to. And he's a real expert in judo; began studying it before I was born! Unfortunately, Ukraine did not fall down and tap out.
My mum was interested in that one so I left it at her place. I had to go around there after the book looting, though I didn't much feel like it as I'd gotten a lot of sun. Almost amusing, after the overcast days and cold, to find myself too warm from all the exercise! I didn't stay too long, though, just tried to be clear on what's going on with M's appointments etc, then headed for home and may have taken a small nap on the bed. Tomorrow I'm not going anywhere, well, not beyond a trip to the shops to be sure I'm stocked for next week.
Like Fred Mouse has already said elsewhere in DW, the sf/fantasy table wasn't the greatest. A lot of older works. I ended up getting a couple of replacement books - my own is in bad condition or I got rid of something years ago and then wish I didn't - and now wish I had picked up a third, but was eventually discouraged by getting tired and not liking being in the crowd, even if it was a crowd of bibliophiles. It was too much work to get back up to the other side of that table. I did get a hardback fantasy - Mercedes Lackey/Rosemary Edgehill - called Dead Reckoning which looks to be a 'fantasy western' so we'll see. I've liked their stuff in the past, this book had a reasonable price tag for a very good looking copy so why not? I used to work on this premise when everything was just normally expensive, not insane. It's just now I can't do that with new books anymore.
Probably the nonfiction was the most valuable. I scored a copy of Jared Diamond's Collapse; a study of various civilisations that have collapsed in the past, as well as some more modern examples and research on reasons ours could be among them in the future. There's a study of Easter Island and Norse Greenland, which was a curious one. Vikings didn't make it through the winter. Yet the colony in Iceland, equally inhospitable, managed to make it and has survived for 1000 years. And one called The Lab Rat Chronicles which purports to be life lessons via the world's most successful mammal - the rat! I checked it to try to find out if it had any awful experiment stuff in it and it didn't seem to.
I also picked up a small book called We Have To Talk About Putin, which was interesting to me as a political/history student. Written in 2019 so I want to see if it's got any insights/predictions re the attack on Ukraine. Actually I read a bit of it over lunch - picnic hauled along because expense - and it did, a bit, concerning Putin's expertise is in martial arts, not chess. A martial artist sees a good opportunity right now, but does not see beyond that, as a chess player needs to. And he's a real expert in judo; began studying it before I was born! Unfortunately, Ukraine did not fall down and tap out.
My mum was interested in that one so I left it at her place. I had to go around there after the book looting, though I didn't much feel like it as I'd gotten a lot of sun. Almost amusing, after the overcast days and cold, to find myself too warm from all the exercise! I didn't stay too long, though, just tried to be clear on what's going on with M's appointments etc, then headed for home and may have taken a small nap on the bed. Tomorrow I'm not going anywhere, well, not beyond a trip to the shops to be sure I'm stocked for next week.