Fare thee well, Atlantic Books in the Mall of America. . .

. . . and thanks for the deals! I felt kind of guilty (or I would have, had I not given up feeling guilty for Lent) purchasing a large amount of books from a store whose closing was imminent, like the only reason I was buying books was that they were having a "going out of business sale." That may be true, actually, but, it just happened to coincide with my visit to the MoA. I may have purchased some books there otherwise, had I ever been there while they were in non-closing mode. (A similar thing happened when I was living in Ames, and a local record store was going out of business. Peeple's Music was the store's name. I would do any cd buying there, but definitely got more stuff there when they were having their store-closing sale. I don't think I could've single-handedly saved the store by buying more stuff before that time period, but I still felt somewhat responsible.)

Anyways, I thought I would use this blog as a chronicle and perhaps review some of the books that I bought at Atlantic Books. Here are the books that I bought

• You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers
• Housekeeping vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby
• The Infinite Book by John D. Barrow
• Boogers are My Beat by Dave Barry
• The Baseball Geek's Bible by Douglas B Lyons
• Fair Ball - A Fan's Case for Baseball by Bob Costas
• Baseball and Philosophy edited by Eric Bronson
• Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Sushi by Lulu Grimes
• Stargazing by Tom Van Holt

Sushi is a general book about sushi, with some photos and recipes, and Stargazing is a book with constellations and other information about astronomy. So those most likely won't be read straight through, but will be used as a reference or just some idle reading material. But the others all looked like books I would be interested in, some I had heard of, some I hadn't. I got the Nietzsche mainly because of the references in Little Miss Sunshine, and the baseball books because I love baseball. I had read another of Dave Eggers' books (A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius, which is excellent, I'd recommend it to everyone) and wanted to read this other one, so I was pleased to find it, especially since it was out of order and kind of a random find. And Nick Hornby is one of my favorite authors, so I picked up his book. And that book is basically giving me the idea of writing the reviews. Housekeeping vs. The Dirt is a collection of columns Hornby wrote for a magazine called Believer, in which he critiques the books he reads each month. He does so in a humorous way, relating it to life or football (soccer) or whatever. I've been compiling a list of books to read from it, so it looks like I'll be busy for a while now (however I'm still open for suggestions!!) The next book that I'm going to be reading is one that Haley let me borrow, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Hopefully I'll have some time to be reading in the next few weeks, and I'll try to get through maybe a book every week or two. We'll see how that goes. . .