Incoming Books: 18 November

Two or three times a year, I splurge on ABEbooks.com, and buy a bunch of things that I've been looking for (sometimes for years), but never found in person. Buying online is never as much fun as actually finding a book, and I certainly have too much to read already, but there's joy in knowing you'll get that book you've never actually seen in person.

I did another one of those orders a couple of weeks ago, and the last of the books have now dribbled in, so I brought them home from work. (I'm not sure why I ordered them sent to the office; I have that as my default address because I order piles of old SF books for omnibuses and other SFBC purposes, but I could have easily changed the address. Perhaps I'm trying to keep the wife from realizing just how many books I get in how short a time.)

And, so, added to my reading pile now are:

• In Search of the World's Worst Writers by Nick Page
• The Cat That Changed My Life by Bruce Eric Kaplan
• U.S. Journal by Calvin Trillin
• An Account of A Meeting With Denizens of Another World, 1871 by William Robert Loosley, edited and with commentary by David Langford
• The Blue Suit by Richard Rayner
• Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe
• Cinderella Sims by Lawrence Block
• One of Us Is Wrong by Samuel Holt
• Amazons by Cleo Birdwell
• The New Apocrypha by John Sladek
• The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux

If there's any theme to this grouping, it seems to be pseudonyms; both "Coe" and "Holt" are actually Donald E. Westlake, and "Birdwell" is Don DeLillo. The Block novel was originally published under a pseudonym; the edition I got was the first under Block's preferred title and bearing his name. And of course "Loosley" never existed; that whole book was written by Langford.

Pardon me; I've got some reading to do.