Every summer Case Western University has the ACE Book Sale, and every summer that I’ve been in Ohio and haven’t been otherwise waylaid, I’ve gone. I even went the day before I moved to Boulder, and brought back a box of 20-some books, most of which stayed in Ohio and are still unread to this day.
The sale takes place in the Adelbert Gym, with the books laid out on folding tables is loosely-defined categories indicated by paper signs that look like they haven’t been changed since the 70s. Dimly lit, but with the doors open letting in sunlight, the sale can be crowded: with local brick-n-mortar or online booksellers going through the rows with their scanners, scooping up anything that could be resold later; old men with Vietnam ballcaps on but dressed otherwise as if for church, hovering noncommittally around the history section; youth church couples talking brightly at the back; a few kids with their parents; older people toting canvas bags tortured into polyhedrals by the paperbacks stuffed inside them…
Other than its scale, the defining characteristic of the ACE Book Sale is that almost everything is cheap, so you indulge in whimsical impulse purchases without feeling criminally frivolous. You’re expected to leave with a lot of books. There’s a gated ring in the middle where a volunteer just tapes cardboard boxes together so people can use them to hold all the stuff they’re taking home.
This year I ended up with 20 new books, plus one extra from another nearbyish bookstore.
I’m not intensely interested in the period or people this book covers – it’s a slim volume on the Louis XIV and his court – but the NYRB Classics edition is a pleasingly bold yellow and has a drawing of Louis on the front dressed in an Apollo costume, all gilt spurs and elaborate sunray appurtenances; he has an exalted vacant oracular look in his eyes and skin pale as Greek yogurt, like an extraterrestrial or the last functionary of an annihilated religion wandering dazed out of the ruins of a temple.
Green: well, I discovered him years ago in some article I only half-remember now, but I never read any of his stuff at that time. Not too long ago NYRB Classics reissued all of his novels in their usual attractive style. I get a good feeling from this book, like there’s a chance it could be my Next Big Connection, as happened recently with Denis Johnson.
Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson
Another NYRB, and a real beaut. Wilson I can take or leave at this point – maybe unfairly, I associate him with Nabokov, probably because of their friendship/feud. But I did at one time read and enjoy a pretty big chunk of Patriotic Gore so maybe someday I’ll pick this one up and like it.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Picked up Cholera because I’m currently in the middle of One Hundred Years of Solitude and liking/possibly loving it, and because none other than the Dad himself, Thomas Pynchon, wrote an incandescent review of the novel in the NY Times. I was happy to find an older copy that doesn’t have the blandly beautiful look of the current, available-in-book-stores edition; mine has a pretty sexy illustration by Cathleen Toelke on it.
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman
Wanted this book for a while. I love it when people who aren’t professional scholars – or, at least, not only professional scholars, or, at least, don’t write like professional scholars – write scholarly books, because they remember to bring fire to their . Analysis is easy but, unaccompanied by passion, it’s bloodless, unartistic; give me the idiosyncratic appreciations (like John Berryman’s essay on Matthew Monk Lewis) that shimmer with their own aesthetic qualities. Hoffman is a poet and so I feel like this book will be to my liking.
Incidentally it’s been years since I read any Poe; I remember going through a lot of his stories when my grandpa was sick, when I was in middle school; and then later I dated a girl who gave me her big Collected Works at some point; she embroidered one of Poe’s poems with ink pen illustrations around the text.
Raven: The Untold Story of Jim Jones and His People by Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs
Finding myself more and more gripped by the story of Jonestown, the dangerous allure of the story. Among much else, it is the story of an American Sickness. This is one of two big books on Jonestown and I was happy to find an immaculate copy at ACE.
An impulse purchase. Not deeply moved by Roman history, but Graves is a figure I want to know more about and this seems like a sensible entry point into his oeuvre.
Found an pristine copy at the sale – which I just learned has a cover painting done by Walcott himself. I am deeply, embarrassingly, terminally under read in poetry, and I’d like to remedy that; novel-like epic poems are a more amenable entry point for my prosy novelbrain than ‘regular’ books of poems are.
The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
Another impulse purchase. For man years, and based on virtually nothing concrete – I haven’t read a single one of his books – I’ve held the belief that Rushdie is very clever but maybe not a great writer. I could be very wrong, and he wrote one of the best reviews of Vineland when it came out, so there’s little basis for my opinion, and so maybe someday I’ll give this one a try.
Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto
My occasional dives into Japanese literature have always produced some of the best reading experiences in recent years. Now that I’ve wandered among some of the classics – Genji, Botchan, Silence – I want to dip into popular Japanese fiction. Until just now I thought this was a collection of stories but I’m happy to discover it’s actual a novel, which I prefer. It’s also one that I, at some point in the past, researched and wanted, although I didn’t make the connection when I picked this copy up on impulse at ACE.
Liebling Abroad by A.J. Liebling
Last year I read Liebling’s The Earl of Louisianna before going to New Orleans and liked it a lot. Liebling seems like one of those prolific writers whose main merit is in his general style and craft across an entire career, rather than any specific culminations in individual works. I feel like you could pick a page at random from any book of his and read it with delectation. This omnibus brings together four of Liebling’s books in full.
Books 3 – 6 of The Lymond Chronicles: The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle, and Checkmate, by Dorothy Dunnett
Read the first Lymond book, A Game of Kings, a few years ago. The first copy I had had some kind of dust attached to its pages that gave me the most vicious sinus headaches I ever had, so I had to buy a new, clean copy to finish the book, which I did in basically one long marathon session. It easily established itself in the same lofty Historical Fiction As Huge Entertainment But Also Fully Functioning Art category as the Aubrey-Maturin books. It has been written about elsewhere but Kings really truly does have the best swordfight scene I have ever read in it.
Another Biblioklept recommendation. It looks cool, with weird indie press dimensions that I find pleasing. No plans to read it at this time.
Mishima: A Vision of the Void by Marguerite Yourcenar
I had no clue that Yourcenar wrote an analysis of Mishima, but when I saw that she had I had to have it. I’d really like to get around to Mishima himself, sooner rather than later; maybe I need to add Spring Snow to the reading list this year…
My Silent War by Kim Philby
The autobiography of the 20th century’s most notorious spy appeals on its own, but really I bought this in case I wanted to bulk up on my Philby knowledge before reading Tim Powers’s Declare.
I’m suddenly very painfully attuned to Johnson; Jesus’ Son gets better and better the more I think about it, and I recently read Train Dreams in one enraptured session. I get weird pangs lately where I want to go and reread “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” I’m almost certain Tree of Smoke will be the next book I read. Basically, any and all Johnson material I spot is an insta-buy for me at this point. So I scooped this up without a second thought. I like the cover, and the way the book feels; it makes me imagine a world where I am wealthy and live in an unugly state where the sun is often out, and I can go to the big box book stores and buy new books when they come out and read them over the course of several simple uncluttered pleasant afternoons.
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
I didn’t like Wind-Up Bird Chronicle very much. I wonder – I worry – that Murakami just isn’t all that good. I hope I’m wrong because literally everything about him should be right up my alley. He just somehow fails to quite be what he should. Anyway, I’m deliberating what will be my second Murakami book and Kafka seems like a likely choice.
This was not acquired at ACE. I got it from Mac’s Backs on Coventry, after the draining the ACE sale of all possible juice. Couldn’t resist this big, ugly edition of this book. I have hopes this could be a sleeper hit for me. I want to find a book that deliver the sadness of smalltown life, of dust-covered rodeos and carnivals under evening lights, and all the other faded American pastelerie. Maybe McMurtry could deliver. He’s a capable if efficient-to-the-point-of-being-almost-colorless writer, and I’ve heard that this book won him a lot of fans back in the day.
Demilecteur 