Towards 100 Books : 75 !

Two months before the year ends, and my book count stands at 75 with these additions.

1) Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl
2) Memoirs Are Made of These Swan Adamson
3) Malaysian Politicians Say the Darnest Things comp. by Amir Muhammad
4) My Name Is Red Orhan Pamuk

The goal of 100 books this year suddenly seems not achievable. I blame Togo!

Pearson & Penguin Books Warehouse Sale

Lately there has been a slew of tempting book sales, but I've managed to keep away. This one caught my interest, though. I like Penguin!

From ShoppingNSales

Today's Buy: 25 October 07

After a hiatus of not visiting any bookstores, I 'accidentally' walked into MPH Sunway Pyramid and came away with these:


Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things
compiled by Amir Muhammad
with illustrations by Shahril Nizam
RM 24.00 (20% disc)











Blue Shoes and Happiness
Alexander McCall Smith
RM 36.00











A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon
RM 25.42 (25% disc)

Jom

Stealing Books

Found on Yahoo! Odd News

Great news! They're stealing our books!

Mon Oct 15, 10:44 AM ET

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The Frankfurt Book Fair has an indicator to help publishers gauge public interest in the new offerings presented at the annual exhibition -- the unofficial "most stolen book" index.

Bild am Sonntag and Germany's ZDF television have come up with lists of titles most stolen from 15 leading German publishers' stands set up in the Frankfurt trade fair grounds.

"The most-stolen books are usually the most-sold later on," Claudia Hanssen of the Goldmann Verlag publishing house told Bild am Sonntag newspaper, which published a list of the 10 most stolen German-language books this year.

"They're the popular ones and are most likely to end up on the best-seller lists," Hanssen added.

The German translation of Nobel Peace prizewinner Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," outlining the dangers of global warming, featured among the mainly German titles on the list.

More than 100,000 people attended the book fair, which ended Sunday. There were 7,448 exhibitions where publishers from 108 countries presented some 400,000 different books, videos and other products.

Coffee with Red

I'm currently reading Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and its giving me a severe coffee craving.

The book is hardly about coffee, but there's so much coffee dripped all over the story. You can almost smell that wonderful aroma from the bits and pieces of coffee-text.

Relieving it has just upped my craving. I'm off to make myself another cup of coffee.

Read (past tense)

Recently I reviewed my credit card statements, to get a feel of my spending patterns. No surprises that entries like MPH, Borders and Kinokuniya regularly crop up. But do I really read all the books I greedily buy?

Ha.. that's why I keep lists. I like ticking things off. Let's do a quick one on recent buys.

29 April [100%]
READ The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood
READ The File on H Ismail Kadare
READ She'll Take It Mary Carter

2 June [100%]
READ More Work for the Undertaker Margery Allingham
READ The Color Purple Alice Walker

27 June [42%]
TBR To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
TBR The Trial Franz Kafka
READ The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
TBR Going Sane Adam Phillips
TBR Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
READ The Outsider Albert Camus
READ A Clockwok Orange Anthony Burgess

8 July [100%]
READ Testing Kate Whitney Gaskell
READ Marley & Me John Grogan

12 July [100%]
READ In The Country of Men Hisham Matar
READ Special Topics in Calamity Physics Marisha Pessl
READ Confessions of an Air Hostess Marisa Mackle

2 Aug [55%]
TBR The Man Who Was Thursday G. K. Chesterson
READ King Solomon's Mines H. Rider Haggard
TBR The Lost World Arthur Conan Doyle
READ The Sky is Crazy Yvonne Lee
READ The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler
TBR My Name is Red Orhan Pamuk
TBR The Story of My Life Helen Keller
TBR Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands Jorge Amado
READ The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Agatha Christie
READ Memoirs Are Made of These Swan Adamson
READ Lost For Words Lorelai Mathias

MORAL : Don't buy books in bulk, especially at sales.

Proselytizing

Excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red

I was told that scoundrels and rebels were gathering in coffeehouses and proselytizing until dawn

pros·e·ly·tize
1. To induce someone to convert to one's own religious faith.
2. To induce someone to join one's own political party or to espouse one's doctrine.