(no subject)

[oyceter]

I was in a very good mood earlier today, mostly because my entire thought process consisted of: "Oooo, look at me in my new jeans! I have new jeans! Ooo, they're so nicely flared!"

Then I got my coupons and went to the bookstore and ended up with a ton of loot (it was fifty percent off history books! And children's mass markets. And assorted oversized and a lot of other stuff).

I got:

Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan
Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan
William T. Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 and Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895
Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920
Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945
Marius B. Jansen, ed., Warrior Rule in Japan
Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (4th ed.)
Patricia MacLachlan, The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, because I don't think double_helix would take it too well if I kidnapped her copy, and I want one.
Rebecca Tingle, The Edge on the Sword
Margaret Mahy, Memory
Jane Yolen, The Wild Hunt

I find I am very snooty about picking up Asian (esp. Japanese) histories. I want blurbs on the back by authors I know or recognize, I want something from a university press in general, and I especially want good blurbs from the big Japan studies journals (Monumenta Nipponica, Journal of Japanese Studies and Journal of Asian Studies). I miss Gest Library.

Then we went home, and The Apprentice was playing in the background while I was LJ-ing, and watching that show just makes my blood rise. So I was complaining, and the boy was huffy because I highly dislike his show, and everything sort of went downhill from there. And I have an incredibly guilty feeling about dropping so much money this month -- additions to the work wardrobe, these books and the ones yesterday, and Lee's Comics is having a sale tomorrow. Perhaps I shall abstain all month for November and hit the library instead. Sigh. I buy way too many books.

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I adore the Morris. I hope it makes you as happy as it made me.

[oyceter]

I hope so too, but I don't know when I'm going to get around to it... I have a stack of to-be-read non-fiction that's about as tall as my desk ;).

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I have the Morris, but haven't read it yet. Someone on LJ (but I forget who) said it wasn't very historically accurate.

I like Memory a lot. Margaret Mahy is one of the few writers who writes mainstream and fantasy equally to my liking. Her "realistic" novels have such precise yet poetic descriptions, all coming from a point of view skewed slightly off what we think of as normal, that they read to me like the very best sort of magic realism, and I always have to stop to remember whether they actually have any fantasy content or not. To support this, she often has very dramatic and strange, yet possible (even plausible) events or situations in the realistic novels: kidnappings, murders, accidents, rescues, children who don't speak.

I think A Catalogue of the Universe is my favorite of her realistic novels, but I also like the little-known Underrunners and... I forget the title... the one about the very creative family, the girl who doesn't speak, and the weird woman next door.

Wild Hunt is very good, very strange, and somewhat postmodern, a sort of fairytale that unravels and reknits itself as it goes along. Yolen does this sort of meta-storytelling fairly often, but this is a particularly notable example of it.

[oyceter]

I have the Morris, but haven't read it yet. Someone on LJ (but I forget who) said it wasn't very historically accurate.

And sadly, I don't know nearly enough about Heian Japan to be able to tell. I want to learn more though (inspired by Kij Johnson).

I really love what I've read of Mahy so far (Changeover, Tricksters, Catalogue of the Universe). I was actually putting entries in my Memories yesterday, and I also had to stop and think if Tricksters was fantasy or not.

[leaina.livejournal.com]

the one about the very creative family, the girl who doesn't speak, and the weird woman next door

That would be The Other Side of Silence. I like that one a lot too.

[oyceter]

Doh. I think I actually saw that in the bookstore but passed on it because it was ex-library.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

I lust after these books, especially Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. There cannot be too many books (until you have to move to another city/coast/country)

[oyceter]

I'm still so happy about them (even though I spent a big chunk of money). I console myself by saying it was waaay less than I would have spent buying them new, because they're mostly university press books and as such, thirty some dollars normally.

There cannot be too many books (until you have to move to another city/coast/country)

Hee, or if you're starting to run out of shelf space in a very small apartment that won't fit more bookshelves ;). Perhaps I shall simply start building random walls of books in the apartment.