Incoming Books: 30 December

Yesterday, as the end of a string of busy days -- Monday I went with my brother to his apartment in Brooklyn to do some pre-move packing and dispersing; Sunday was Xmas #5 up with my extended family in Albany, NY; Saturday was a trip into NYC to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not please-let's-not-call-it-a-museum in honor of Thing 2's eighth birthday that day; Friday was something else I've forgotten; and Thursday was the annual Day of Three Christmases -- I took Thing 1 off to my nominal favorite bookstore, the Montclair Book Center.

(I say "nominal," because their new stock is looking a bit thin this season -- cutting back is probably a great strategy in this market, and I want to see them stick around another few decades, but it does make poking through the store somewhat less exciting. But they're happy to do special orders, as I know because they're in the middle of processing a big one for me.)

Thing 1 got Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and we picked up Ripley's Believe It or Not: The Remarkable...Revealed for Thing 2 (who was with The Wife, handing the other half of the day's appointments).

And, for myself, I found:

Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship -- I've been reading his books for a couple of decades now, and we seem to be much the same kind of Republican, which warms what few cockles my heart has. This is another humorous novel about politics -- it's probably not as good as his sublime Thank You for Smoking, but what is?

Two more of the recent Penguin repackagings of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels: Doctor No and For Your Eyes Only. I'm toying with the idea of gathering the set and then reading them all straight through (something like my Loren Estleman binge in 2007).

Another Stewart O'Nan novel, The Night Country, because I was so impressed by The Speed Queen and Last Night at the Lobster (I was just thinking about Lobster recently, actually, when The Wife and I had an early lunch at a Red Lobster on the boys' last full day of school) -- and even though I already have O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying on the to-be-read shelf.

Lemony Snicket's The Lump of Coal, a holiday tale that I read this afternoon. (It didn't take long.)

And State by State, a collection of essays about each of the fifty states by a wide variety of distinguished contributors, all edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. It's the kind of book I think I want to read, even though I secretly suspect it will still be sitting on my shelf, uncracked, five years from now. We all need books like that, though: books for every plausible person we might be in the near future.