I Still Have Too Many Books

It occured to me about a week ago that I didn’t have enough literature on my shelves. Though my bookshelves groan under the weight of my books, novels and poetry make up less than a third of them. Non-fiction makes up about a third, and the most represented genre are the graphic novels, though the number of volumes per series gives that contingent an unfair advantage.

Anyway, I wanted to read some good fiction or poetry, so off I went, and have set myself even more hopelessly behind in my reading backlog. I found good stuff, and for cheap too (they were all used), but I look at this list of books I got and despair. I list only those books I’ve purchased in the last seven days.

From Half-Price Books:

The Iliad, by Homer (trans. Robert Fitzgerald)

Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh,

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

La Vita Nuova, by Dante (trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti), which I just finished reading today, all 48 pages of it.

I had actually wanted to pick up Les Miserables, but HPB didn’t have any copies except for one abridged edition. They did have eight or nine copies of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, oddly enough.

I also picked up On Duties, by Cicero, while there.

From a neighbourhood garage sale:

Bullfinch’s Mythology, ed. Edmund Fuller

The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

The Gulag Archipelago, by Solzhenitsyn again. I got One Day because it was shorter at HPB, but at garage sale prices I couldn’t resist. I also got a non-fiction book here, Searching for Your Ancestors, by Gilbert Doane.

From a local comic-book store:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill.