Four weeks ago (as the crow flies) my big sister sent me an Amazon gift card for my birthday. I have a hard time spending gift cards. They always seem to be either too much or not enough...and I take them way too seriously, always asking, "Is this worthy of a Gift Card?" So I try to pick things that I really want but wouldn't buy for myself because they are exorbitantly priced. Which is how I came to choose Thy Kingdom Come: 19 Short Stories by 11 Hungarian Authors...a not very big (320 pages, 5-ish x 7-ish inches) paperback which sits at #2,476,300 in Best Sellers Rank: Books on Amazon's Best Sellers List. I've seen copies of this book listed as high as $978. No shit. In fact, the cheapest one on Amazon right now is $61.54. But this book had two László Krasznahorkai stories--"The Bogdanovich Story" and "The Last Boat"--which were available (at least as of this writing) nowhere else. And I found a copy for $32. So yes, Gift Card time.
I was also looking for a copy of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as translated by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (HERE). Which I found... but not at a price which would fit within my Gift Card's remaining budget. As I perused the listings, though, I found another book which looked interesting: Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey. (It made some mention or use of The Magic Mountain, hence the link up.) Well. You had me at Mobius. So I checked it out on the internets, found it more and more interesting, and ended up ordering it. It fit so nicely into my budget that I still had enough left over to order a Kindle copy of Whale Heart by Christoffer Petersen...the fifth book in his Greenland Noir series starring Constable David Maratse, currently one of my favorite characters.
I emailed my sister to tell her what I'd gotten on her dime, and she wrote back that she was interested in Mobius Dick because of her long-time interest in the Möbius strip. (She's a math genius who works for NASA, so....)
Okay?
Okay.
So this morning I was finishing up Laura Lippman's Dream Girl, a novel I'd procured on 7 day loan from the local branch of the public library because I'd heard a review of it on NPR. Which was odd, by the way, because (1) I rarely pursue things that I hear about on the radio, in part because I usually don't remember enough details about what I heard in order to find it, (2) the book is extremely popular right now, so finding a copy was a bit of a surprise, (3) I rarely check out 7 day loan books because I read so many books in the course of a day (at least 8) that it is highly unlikely that I can finish a book in a week, and (4) I was trying to read an advance copy of the aforementioned Christoffer Petersen's forthcoming YA book, so I really didn't need the distraction of another book. But for some reason I picked it up, and wonder of wonders I actually tore through it, finishing it in a few days. And close to the end of my reading, as in last night (full circle now), I read this:
Well.
That's kind of weird, ennit?
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