26.Sep.2010 Book Fairy Struck Again!
I haven’t done Book Acquisition post for about 4 months, and now I wonder why I didn’t. Perhaps I subconsciously tried to pretend that not that many books have come into my house. Really, how bad can it be right?
Well it’s time to face reality and do a head-count. Even though I had it coming I still had the shock of my life. 50 books! Yes, 50! All I have NOT read, apart from a couple! (not all pictured below as I couldn’t bother to keep taking photos of the forgotten ones)
But first, I’d love to show you a couple of highlights. I got The Changeling by Nobel Laurette Kenzaburo Oe in gorgeous hardcover complete with what looks like semi-transparent Japanese rice paper for dust jacket from my book fairy Jess of friendly Allen and Unwin. It is so pretty it literally took my breath away. Gasp!
Moreover it came with The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I have wanted to read since… forever. Jess described it as “pitch-perfect”. Mmm.. delicious!
To top it off, she sent me this spectacular looking graphic novel, also in hardcover, which is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Nicki Greenberg. It came close to my birthday, after I came back from my holiday. A nice coincidence! :)
There’s just something about hardcover that excites me so much, because we rarely have hardcovers in Australia. Most books are published in trade-paperback format. Nicki Greenberg first graphic novel was a retelling of The Great Gatsby, which I’ve seen several times at our library, but I never pick up, because I’m not fond of Gatsby (school read and all). But I’ve never read Hamlet, and in all honesty I don’t think I’ll ever read Shakespeare, so I so look forward to dip into this one!
It’s fully colored too!
So here are the 50 books in no particular order:
Books received from Publishers:
1 Hamlet by Nicki Greenberg
2 The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
3 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
4 Room by Emma Donoghue
Books bought from Basement Books (all new):
5 Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry ($2.95)
6 When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne ($4.95)
7 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ($4.95)
8 Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris ($5.95)
9 Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss ($2.00)
Books bought from book depo:
10 Hunger by Knut Hamsun
11 Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
12 The Complete Polysillabic Spree by Nick Hornby
13 The Arrival by Shaun Tan (I’ve read this but would like to own it!)
14 The Red Tree by Shaun Tan (I’m on Shaun Tan’s spree since I met him a couple of weeks ago)
15 The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan (Spree!)
16 Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
17 American Gods by Neil Gaiman (bought because he visited us in Sydney a couple of weeks ago too)
18 Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
Books bought from charity shop:
19 Echoes of an Autobiography by Naguib Mahfouz ($1) (would like to read Palace Walk first)
Books bought from the library sale ($1 each):
20 Middlemarch by George Eliot
21 The Thousand Nights and One Night Volume I (translated from French of Mardrus by Mathers)
22 The Thousand Nights and One Night Volume II
23 The Thousand Nights and One Night Volume III
24 The Thousand Nights and One Night Volume IV
(I’m quite excited to find these four volumes of The Thousand Nights and One Night. I remember devouring it hungrily as a kid, though it was the simplified possibly watered down version of 1001 Nights. But then I found out these series are not exactly the translation that’s recommended by the people of Arab Lit Challenge. What to do? Should I go ahead and read these ones?)
25 No Shitting in the Toilet by Peter Moore
Books received FREE from the library:
26 The World is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey
27 Animation: From Script to Screen by Shamus Culhane
28 Tales from the Perilous Realm by J.R.R. Tolkien
29 Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide
30 Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl
Books received FREE from the Japanese Foundation Library:
30 San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo by Edward Fowler
31 The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction, edited by Makoto Ueda
32 And Then (Sore Kara) by Natsume Soseki
33 The Incident at Sakai and Other Stories: Volume I of the Historical Literature of Mori Ogai
34 Love and Other Stories of Yokomitsu Riichi
(I had never heard of all these books here, apart from Natsume Soseki. From flipping through the introductions, they seem to be quite popular and influential in Japan, probably just not overseas.)
Books brought back from Indonesia: (most of these I bought when I was in Singapore a couple of years ago)
35 The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
36 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
37 Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich
38 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
39 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
40 Brick Lane by Monica Ali
41 A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
42 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
43 Losing my Virginity: The Autobiography by Richard Branson
44 The Cave of the Yellow Dog by Byambasuren Davaa & Lisa Reisch
45 When Madeline was Young by Jane Hamilton
46 First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung
47 Sex Slaves: The Trafficking of Women in Asia by Louise Brown
(The two books above I bought when I visited Cambodia. Being quite cheap I took the chance. After browsing around, the first one should be good as it gets lots of praise, but the second one seems to be very flawed.)
48 Laskar Pelangi by Andrea Hirata (In Indonesian. This is a bestseller in the country!)
Bookcrossing books from lovely azuki (who I met once in Hong Kong):
49 Golden Boy (also known as Gweilo) by Martin Booth (very fitting as this is a book set in Hong Kong)
50 After Quake by Haruki Murakami
If you’re still reading, is there any book that caught your eyes? Any that I need to bump up my to-be-read-immediately pile?
mee 
yuliana 
