Incoming Books: 27 October

Just keeping track of your own motivations can be a full-time job. I'd almost forgotten one of the major reasons I'd wanted to do a blog in the first place: I read Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree (fourteen months worth of columns about his reading, including lists of books coming in and books read) a few months back and wanted to do something similar myself.

Luckily, I remembered today, after my first decent book-shopping trip since I started this blog. The Wife and Thing 2 were with me, so it was a short trip (barely an hour in the wonderful Montclair Book Center), and a short stack of books at the end.

I find lists of books endlessly fascinating, so I hope others will as well. In any case, here's what I got:

• Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn
  
• Sixpence House by Paul Collins
  
• Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't As Scary... edited by Ted Thompson
  
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

And also a few things for the kids:

• Max's Halloween by Rosemary Wells (a board book)
  
• David Smells by David Shannon (another board book)
  
• The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein (we got The Missing Piece from the library last week, and Thing 1 seems to like it a lot; besides, this was a hardcover for half price!)
  
• Little Critter Storybook Collection by Mercer Mayer (both Things like this series, and I like it more than they do; this is an omnibus of seven of the books, six of which I didn't have)
  
• A-Z Dot-To-Dots, picked by The Wife for the times we need quiet stuff for the boys to do
  
• Creepy Crawly Calypso by Tony Langham and Debbie Harter (Thing 2 chose this one, mostly, because it came with a CD)

The kid books will all have been read at bedtime. The others will start off at the top of my reading pile, but you never know where they will end up. They are all pretty short, though; I find that it's the long books that sink down into the pile and form their own geological strata.