What books are you reading right now?

You got a brain scan?

 

In my thrift/resale store book searches I frequently find medical & nursing text books. At one time a local Goodwill store had at least 10, and a week later they were all gone. I don't know if they were newer editions, but it's safe to say they weren't cheap when new.

I usually don't look at them, but I did buy The Personality Puzzle by David C. Funder. His writing is pretty straightforward, not the usual dry academic writing filled with run on sentences and run on paragraphs.

 

EPPP study materials updated since the DSM - 5 change are a hot commodity. Seven of these cost me $233. The rest of the online study pkg was $549.
I used to love old psych textbooks. My mom got me one when I was 12. I read the whole thing in a few days and decided I'd be a psychologist. I love searching through old textbooks at used bookstores.

 

I find a wide variety of "general" textbooks--and cookbooks--at the thrift & resale shops, but will occasionally come across what I guess to be someones collection of very specific textbooks. Medical books such as Grey's Anatomy, The Human Body, Prescription Drugs A-Z, etc. are "relatively" common, but large collections on very specific subjects aren't. The same Goodwill store also had quite a few law books specific to Louisiana which eventually sold, but not as fast as the previously mentioned nursing books.

 

The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who died in 1942. It is an amazing autobiographical memoir of his youth and maturity, starting before World War One. Right now I am in an account of life in Paris before that war. The world has forgotten how delightful it was to be young in that city in those days, how easy and joyful and free young people were. The Kaiser and his successor took something away from humanity irrevocably.

 

Such A Long Journey, a novel by Rohinton Mistry. I'm looking forward to reading this, I thoroughly enjoyed Mistry's A Fine Balance even though it makes it India sound like a cesspool.

 

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. While I'm glad that I read it--because of the film Blade Runner--it's not an especially well written book. It is cool to see the differences between the novel and the later film; I'd say that the film was inspired by/loosely based on the novel.

 

The Buntline Special by Mike Resnick.

It's a steampunk western set in 1881 Tombstone with the Earps, Doc Holiday, and Bat Masterson trying to protect Edison against the Clanton gang.
It's been a lot of fun so far.

 

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

"A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of one of the world's most iconic superheroes hides within a fascinating family story -- and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism. "

 

That sounds really good. I'm going to have to look into it!

 

Just finished The Bell Witch - An American Haunting by Brent Monahan

Its a really, really well done horror story. You can see why so many people still half believe that there is a true story behind it. Spooky, yet the sense of justice that (to me) good horror has to have - that good people come out ok in the end and bad people are punished in the end.

 

Such A Long Journey did not disappoint. Mistry is very critical of Inira Ghandi; he left India in 1975 to live in Canada. Sadly his last novel was published in 2002.

 

1491 by Charles C. Mann - an account of society in pre-colombian america.

 

A really embarrassing typo--too late to edit--which should read Indira Gandhi.

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Some recent thrift store finds.

For reading:

SS-GB a novel by Len Deighton, which should be an interesting read. From the dust jacket flap, "1941, and England invaded---and defeated---by the Germans..."

For reading and because it includes an inscription signed by the author:
The Diamond Years Of Texas Photography by Ava Crofford.

For possible resale, two scripts in hardback binding:
Pulp Fiction, with a fake and mispelled (probably an intentional joke) John Trovolta signature.
The Godfather, with an inscription "signed" by Michael Corleone (a joke by the person who gave the book as a gift is my guess).

Just because it was dirt cheap and possibly very rare:
St. Louis Burnsians. Their Twentieth Anniversary And Some Other Burns Nights.
A literary club dedicated to the works of Robert Burns. From the title page, "Printed for Private Distribution to Lovers of Burns by The Burns Club of St. Louis 1924".