Book infusion.

After going to the office today for a bit, then the bank, I stopped at the annual book sale of a local library. Here’s what I picked up:

• The Second Tree from the Corner, E.B. White. Why The Library of America hasn’t collected all of his work yet is baffling and disappointing.
• Mythologies, Roland Barthes. I’ll probably start with this one.
• Grimms Fairy Tales – I picked this up chiefly because there’s no publisher information, date, anything – except that it says BOOKS INC. on the side. Mysterious! Hopefully not the sign of a bad book.
• Four Souls, Louise Erdrich. I hadn’t read anything of hers before last night, when I took the forthcoming Not Normal, Illinois collection to bed and read Erdrich’s story “Fuck with Kayla and You Die” which is so incredibly great that I’m going to have to hunt down all the Erdrich I can find. (The collection itself is also great.)
• Hush Little Baby – the Chronicle Books version.
• Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
• Still Life, A.S. Byatt
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
• The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
• The Castle of Llyr, Lloyd Alexander. I couldn’t remember which of the five Prydain books I was missing, so what the heck.
• Descriptive Stories, Burnham
• Light in August, William Faulkner.  Faulk yeah!
• Bulfinch’s Mythology
• … and a handful of books for the office.

Then I get home, and in the mail: Ben Ratliff’s The Jazz Ear, and The Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV. And in case that isn’t enough, I’m a click away from winning a $1,500 shopping spree at Powell’s Books, at which point I’m buying ALL OF YOU your own copies of Cloud Atlas and Remainder.