Okay, this is why I think I could be considered a legitimate bibliomaniac. In the last week, I have combed a local book sale twice and if I didn’t have a to-the-penny tally on our checking account, I’d probably go back. We bought so much the first time the girls recognized us when we walked in. Anyway, I thought I’d share the books I have purchased over the last week, selected purely on impulse though I did manage to score a few items from my Amazon wish list. I also am often conflicted about buying remaindered books because the writer gets no proceeds from the sale but a good majority of these books are out of print. The rest are titles I would never have read unless the price was so amenable. In a couple of cases, a new copy of the book was 10 times more than the price in front of me and when you are a crazy book person, sometimes you just have to buy a book on sale and be glad your principles stand firm 90% of the time.
Anyway, I like seeing books other people have bought and figure there must be others like me. Enjoy! (Also, this does not include the titles Mr. Oddbooks purchased, mostly books on how to build stuff and piracy on the high seas…)
1. Girl Trouble: The True Saga of Superstar Gloria Trevi and the Secret Teenage Sex Cult That Stunned the World by Christopher McDougall
2. How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Ween
3. Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano
4. Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence by Willard Gaylin, M.D.
5. I, Goldstein: My Screwed Life by Al Goldstein and Josh Alan Friedman
6. Jesus Land: A Memoir by Julia Scheeres
7. Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke
8. Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander
9. The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonanthan Franzen
10. Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World by Ana Siljak
11. The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions
by Randall Sullivan
12. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England
by Venetia Murray
13. Living at the Movies by Jim Carroll
14. All For Love: The Scandalous Life and Times of Royal Mistress Mary Robinson by Amanda Elyot
15. Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business by Danny Goldberg
16. Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America by Alicia Rebensdorf
17. A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy by Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D
18. Simone Weil by Francine Du Plessix Gray
19. Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality by Mike Sager
20. When the Husband is the Suspect by F. Lee Bailey and Jean Rabe
21. Outside the Gates of Science: Why It’s Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold by Damien Broderick
22. Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer
23. Rumpole and the Reign of Terror by John Mortimer
24. The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World’s Most Baffling Crimes by Colin Evans
25. The Forger: An Extraordinary Story of Survival in Wartime Berlin by Cioma Schonhaus
26. Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg
27. Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson
28. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
by Jeanette Winterson
29. The Politics of Psychopharmacology by Timothy Leary
30. The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn
31. Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, et al
32. Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus by Gregory Gibson
33. Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn’t? by Christopher Dawes
34. Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston
35. The Mammoth Book of Celebrity Murder: Murder Played Out in the Spotlight of Maximum Publicity by Chris and Julie Ellis
36. Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell
37. The Bone Lady: Life as a Forensic Anthropologist by Mary H. Manheim
38. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath–A Marriage
by Diane Middlebrook
39. Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel by Neal Pollack
40. The Templars by Piers Paul Read
41. Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural
by Jim Steinmeyer
42. Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel B. Smith
43. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen
44. Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo
45. Hoax: Why Americans are Suckered by White House Lies
by Nicholas Von Hoffman
46. Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life
by Allen Shawn
47. Cosmopolis: A Novel by Don DeLillo
48. Transmission by Hari Kunzru
49. Paula Spencer Roddy Doyle
50. Oh, Play That Thing (Volume 2 of The Last Roundup)
by Roddy Doyle
51. The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer
52. All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen
53. After the Plague: Stories by T.C. Boyle
54. The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll
edited by Jim Driver
55. Consequences by Penelope Lively
56. Rumpole Misbehaves: A Novel by John Mortimer
57. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a by David Cesarani
Well played, madam. It’s clear none of these books actually exist. I admire your talent for inventing titles that sound plausible, however.
Oh man, my cunning ruse has been revealed. It was bound to happen sooner or later, I guess. š