books & clothes (two of my great loves, oh yes)
While out spending dead presidents yesterday, I found one of the great bargains of my life.
Right outside the movie complex attached to the mall I go to most frequently, there's a storefront that has most frequently hosted various low-rent discount bookstores. The latest iteration of this is actually pretty awesome: it's a one-dollar bookstore that the owners seem to run as, more or less, an ongoing library sale. They take donations of people's old books, you have to dig due to general lack of order (which is part of the fun), and everything is genuinely one dollar -- with the occasional exception if it's something particularly big or fancy. It's that latter category that my score yesterday falls into.
I got The Complete New Yorker DVD-ROM set for five dollars. No, that's not a typo, and yes, it was brand-new and all sealed up. They had a dozen or so of them that I'm guessing they got as part of an overstock lot somewhere, and (unsurprisingly) it looked like they were going pretty fast.
I've wanted this for a couple of years, ever since it came out, but a hundred dollars is hard to drop all at once on one item, even though the price is completely reasonable for eighty years' worth of the magazine.
Again: five dollars. One of my co-workers and I figured it out at lunch, and it comes out to about six and a quarter cents per year.
I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker a couple of years ago because I never had time to read the damn thing, and the piled-up, unread copies were an ongoing source of guilt, but I still love the magazine. Having all of it available at my fingertips is going to be a wonderful thing. I've also had a long-standing interest in the magazine's history in general and its early years in particular, and I'm really looking forward to being able to pull up any article or story I want whenever the mood strikes.
I'm also reading Joe Hill's collection Twentieth Century Ghosts, which is really excellent. I picked up his novel Heart-Shaped Box on the bargain table at Borders a couple of weekends ago, and it has one of the best opening pages I've read in quite a while, but time and my concentration levels being what they are, I haven't been up to reading an entire novel just yet. Short stories are the way to go.
I first encountered Hill's work when The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (the Datlow and Grant-&-Link anthology) reprinted his story "My Father's Mask" the year before last, and I read it and immediately wanted to know who this guy was, because he was fabulous -- point being, I noticed his work before I found out the Big Secret.
I had the same reaction to reading "My Father's Mask" and the opening pages of Heart-Shaped Box that I've had on my first encounter with other writers like Kelly Link: that sudden happy realization that this person is the real deal, and that there's something new and striking in their voice that I haven't encountered before.
(I think someone on my flist mentioned Hill a while back, but I can't remember who, or even if I'm remembering that correctly.)
Final note for the day: I am wearing a color! Well, okay, the base of my blouse is black, but it also has little pink flowers all over it. And I like it. (I like my entire outfit, actually, but the rest of it falls well within my comfort zone.) I'm very proud of myself.
And stacked heels are much more difficult for me to walk in than stilettos. Who knew?
Right outside the movie complex attached to the mall I go to most frequently, there's a storefront that has most frequently hosted various low-rent discount bookstores. The latest iteration of this is actually pretty awesome: it's a one-dollar bookstore that the owners seem to run as, more or less, an ongoing library sale. They take donations of people's old books, you have to dig due to general lack of order (which is part of the fun), and everything is genuinely one dollar -- with the occasional exception if it's something particularly big or fancy. It's that latter category that my score yesterday falls into.
I got The Complete New Yorker DVD-ROM set for five dollars. No, that's not a typo, and yes, it was brand-new and all sealed up. They had a dozen or so of them that I'm guessing they got as part of an overstock lot somewhere, and (unsurprisingly) it looked like they were going pretty fast.
I've wanted this for a couple of years, ever since it came out, but a hundred dollars is hard to drop all at once on one item, even though the price is completely reasonable for eighty years' worth of the magazine.
Again: five dollars. One of my co-workers and I figured it out at lunch, and it comes out to about six and a quarter cents per year.
I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker a couple of years ago because I never had time to read the damn thing, and the piled-up, unread copies were an ongoing source of guilt, but I still love the magazine. Having all of it available at my fingertips is going to be a wonderful thing. I've also had a long-standing interest in the magazine's history in general and its early years in particular, and I'm really looking forward to being able to pull up any article or story I want whenever the mood strikes.
I'm also reading Joe Hill's collection Twentieth Century Ghosts, which is really excellent. I picked up his novel Heart-Shaped Box on the bargain table at Borders a couple of weekends ago, and it has one of the best opening pages I've read in quite a while, but time and my concentration levels being what they are, I haven't been up to reading an entire novel just yet. Short stories are the way to go.
I first encountered Hill's work when The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (the Datlow and Grant-&-Link anthology) reprinted his story "My Father's Mask" the year before last, and I read it and immediately wanted to know who this guy was, because he was fabulous -- point being, I noticed his work before I found out the Big Secret.
I had the same reaction to reading "My Father's Mask" and the opening pages of Heart-Shaped Box that I've had on my first encounter with other writers like Kelly Link: that sudden happy realization that this person is the real deal, and that there's something new and striking in their voice that I haven't encountered before.
(I think someone on my flist mentioned Hill a while back, but I can't remember who, or even if I'm remembering that correctly.)
Final note for the day: I am wearing a color! Well, okay, the base of my blouse is black, but it also has little pink flowers all over it. And I like it. (I like my entire outfit, actually, but the rest of it falls well within my comfort zone.) I'm very proud of myself.
And stacked heels are much more difficult for me to walk in than stilettos. Who knew?