A July Book-Haul!

The dog days of summer have settled into place (although it’s resolutely refusing to feel that way in the entire eastern half of North America), and all my young friends over on BookTube are happily ensconced in making their July book-videos – very much including the book “hauls” they somehow manage to take in despite lacking, most of them, anything resembling a vigorous bookstore culture where they happen to live (they’re devotees of The Book Depository and The Book Warehouse, these young BookTubers). As I’ve mentioned before, it gives one a yen to join the fun.

On a warm day in Boston recently, I took in a book-haul of my own – hardly surprising in its own right, since I do that practically every day when visiting my favorite orifice in the whole world, the sainted Open Letters Monthly Post Office box. But this book-haul wasn’t the latest crop of forthcoming books sent from publishers – and it also wasn’t, mirabile dictu, the latest harvest from my beloved Brattle Bookshop. No, since Boston and I go back a very, very long time, I know every single nook and cranny where books can be found – including discarded books that would otherwise be boxed up and sent to the incinerator.

I recently snagged a full tote bag of such books, and they’ll constitute my Stevereads book-haul for July, starting off with that fixture of used bookstores, the fat little red mass market paperback of the collected short stories of John Cheever. This is an author who’s been growing on me for a decade now, and I’ve found myself re-reading especially this collection with a great deal of enjoyment. I have it, of course – this copy’s a double, because it’s a neat thing to give away.

Also in little mass market paperbacks are two stellar romances, A Courtesan’s Scandal by Julia London and Temptation and Surrender by Stephanie Laurens, two lavish modern Regencies that I remember liking very much the first time I read them – and that are both helped out considerably by the presence of a certain someone on their covers …

Next is Michelle Moran’s 2009 novel Cleopatra’s Daughter, about one of the children Cleopatra had with Marc Antony. I read it when it first came out and remember considering it a fairly solid Roman historical novel, ripe for re-reading, especially since the price, as it were, was right.

Then there’s Gordon Grice’s The Red Hourglass, a baleful, horrifying classic of natural history writing the like of which you’ll never have read in your life. It’s all about the apocalyptic havoc animal-venom can wreak on the human body, and the long chapter on the Brown Recluse spider will be one of the most freezingly terrifying pieces of nonfiction you ever read. This one too is a double, of course, intended as a gift – provided the recipient is made of some fairly sturdy stuff.

Along the same lines as the Grice is Stephen Herrero’s classic Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, which is effectively a natural history of North American bears rather than something specifically danger-oriented. This heavily-illustrated volume covers just about everything – mating, life cycles, tracking, behavior, etc. – but it keeps coming back to its central subject: what happens when bears and humans interact, and how to stop those interactions from turning deadly. I owned a copy of the original edition of this book and found it fascinating, although I’ve also had my fair share of bear encounters in the wild and can counter-balance the book’s hopeful, ecological outlook with the simple observation that when it comes to frothing, ferocious engines of pure hate and destruction, the North American bear is second only to the North American moose. So a book like this can induce shivers.

Shivers of a very different kind with the next book, the mighty Helen Gardner edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, which is (with all due apologies to Rumpole of the Bailey!) the best edition of this timeless classic. Gardner couldn’t equal the sturdy Victorian beauty of the prose of her predecessor, Arthur Quiller-Couch, but she’s ten times the editor he is and very nearly ten times the scholar, and those are the qualities for this job. The edition I found the other day has a dreadful Giorgione cover illustration (that was dramatically fixed in the following edition), but it hardly matters: there’s an undeniable thrill to finding a volume like this – one of the English languages tiny handful of true ‘desert island books’ – in perfect condition, in a pile of discards nobody had the sense to want anymore.

The same certainly holds true for the next book in our haul, Wilton Barnhardt’s great, sudsy 2013 Southern novel Lookaway, Lookaway, in which a magnificently dysfunctional North Carolina family falls apart before the delighted reader’s eyes. I loved the book as soon as I read it, in an advance copy long before publication, and I loved it even more when I re-read it once I got the finished hardcover. I considered it one of the best novels of 2013, so it was a treat to find a free copy. I know exactly who’s getting it, and that’s a nice feeling too.

One of the features of a random haul like this is that it’ll almost always feature at least one book that you always meant to get around to and never did. For me, this time around, that book was Kevin Phillips’s Wealth and Democracy from 2002, but I confess, having been so ruinously bored by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I almost hesitated to pick up this book, so clearly a spiritual ancestor of the Piketty bore-fest. But I really liked Phillips’s The Politics of Rich and Poor, and I feel certain that if Open Letters Monthly had existed back in 2002 (how did the world manage to scrape by without it?), I’d have requested this book from the publisher and consumed it eagerly. Resolved then not to let Piketty trauma afflict me, I added this to my pile. I’ll report back what I thought of it.

I’ve already made plain what I thought of Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed: I loved it, considered it, too, one of the best novels of 2013 (much to my surprise, since this is an author who’s seldom pleased me in the past), and then promptly lost my copies (I had the ARC and the finished hardcover, both mysteriously vanished) – so it was very handy to find this paperback in the bin, especially since this is a prime example of the kind of book that reveals more of itself upon re-reading.

And speaking of re-reading! Hee. When I saw this neat little hardcover copy of The Return of the King, I couldn’t help myself – I grabbed it, even though I have one or two editions of the book already and have read it once or twice. And as inevitable as the sunrise, it was the first book from this haul that I read, thrilling again to the Siege of Gondor and Battle of Pelennor Fields, the madness of Denethor and the death of Theoden, and the long Appendices at the back that are in themselves so full of stories that they could easily spawn a thousand pieces of LOTR fan fiction. Granted, I could have enjoyed all those things by simply returning home and taking one of my other volumes of Return of the King off the shelf – but this one was right there! Hopelessly impulsive, I know.

Impulsive too the last book in our haul this time around, yet another novel from 2013, Julie Garwood’s Hotshot, a paper-thin but mindlessly entertaining modern-day romance in which a sexy resort owner falls in love all over again with the sexy FBI agent who was her childhood friend. The book has all the trappings of New York Times-ready contemporary romances: the female lead has a man’s name, the male lead has a ridiculously action-hero name, the writing consists almost entirely of clichés and idioms, and the plot, such as it is, turns on a mundane triviality. If Garwood weren’t such a practiced and snappy pacer (and if the cover didn’t feature a certain someone), the whole thing wouldn’t be worth picking up off a table, let alone reading. But she is, so I did.

And there you have it! A nice healthy July book-haul! It doesn’t reflect what came to the OLM Post Office box on Friday, or yesterday, but since Sunday is the one day of the week when I don’t traffic in books of any kind, it’ll do just fine for today.