(Extra) value reading

You had to know I couldn't resist the contrast with the last post...

This weekend, the annual city-wide charity book sale was going on. I didn't realize it actually started on Friday, so we didn't go down till Sunday, and I was wondering if there would be anything good left.

I don't know what we might have missed, but I found me some great finds! Some of them have been on my amazon list for a while, and some of them were just really interesting in that I-hadn't-thought-about-buying-this-book, but-here-it-is kind of way. After all, at $1-$2 a book, and the proceeds going to charity, it was very tempting to buy more than I could realistically read (at least until next year's sale!)

But I found Will in the World, which I know I won't get to read for a while, but it just sounded so interesting I wanted to have it.

I also found Primate Visions, which I could realistically spend a week reading sometime soon because it fits in with the dissertation reading. I'm also reading a fiction novel by Will Self called Great Apes, in which a man wakes up to find the world populated by intelligent chimps who tell him he only thinks he's human. And no, it's not like Planet of the Apes, it's far better done.

I also got a copy of R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the play that first coined the term "robot" in it's contemporary use in 1921. I know less about this play, and since it's by a Russian, it isn't useful as an example of a British writer grappling with the issues raised by cyborgs or robots, but I also have suggested it as a volume in a GenEd class that I might get to teach on the Social effects of Technology, so I'd like to take a look at it more closely.

I also picked up Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer - I've heard both authors speak before, and they're both science fiction writers, but I haven't read any of their work (and, again, their themes are related to the dissertation), so I'm hoping to find a couple new authors I like. Karl is a Canadian Mennonite science fiction writer - how cool is that? - so I'm just intensely curious about his writing. Interestingly, I cannot find an image for Sawyer's book of the volume I actually have - the one I have is a U.S. published version, 1st printing by the looks of it, so it's weird that the cover on mine is different (much more interesting in my opinion). I also just picked up Sawyer's newest novel, Humans that I'm reviewing for Wordfest this fall, so here's hoping I like his stuff enough to read 2 novels of his!

I did not buy any Stephen King, or any Danielle Steel, even though there were a LOT of copies of probably everything both have ever written...