Books as Christmas gifts - Library humor

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_mistress/32230922/in/set-717735/lightbox/

There certainly is a point to that.

Cute.

For our gift exchange at work, I added a book to my Wish List, one that was printed in the 80's (but noted that "used" was okay). Really didn't expect her to find it, but by golly she did! She went to Powell's, which is Portland's humongous book store.

What book was it?


I put a few on my list for this year too: A Pleasure to Burn by Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, Goblins of Labyrinth by Brian Froud.

And everybody's getting books from me this year too, for my mother, several detective collections and Perry Mason and Kolchak: the Night Strangler, and for my brother books on M*A*S*H and Night of the Living Dead and the 3 Stooges, and my nephews are getting Gremlins 1 and 2 and Oz books and my niece is getting the first 4 Oz books by Baum as well. And I had ordered the play The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart, not the novel, and I got the novel instead, and I don't know why but I had an idea I should send it to Patch Adams for a Christmas present, so I did and I'm hoping he doesn't have a copy already but he said he has something like 13,000 books, or maybe it was 30,000...so who knows?

Sounds like quite the literary family. Good.

The book is "The Neon Rain" by James Lee Burke, first of the Robicheaux series about a cop in Louisiana. Two movies were made from his books: "The Electric Mist" (w/Tommy Lee Jones) and "Heaven's Prisoners" (w/Alec Baldwin).

Bluesmama wrote:Sounds like quite the literary family. Good.

The book is "The Neon Rain" by James Lee Burke, first of the Robicheaux series about a cop in Louisiana. Two movies were made from his books: "The Electric Mist" (w/Tommy Lee Jones) and "Heaven's Prisoners" (w/Alec Baldwin).

For a large part I think so...one of my nephews is by his own admission not a particularly good reader in that he usually loses interest, but I've managed to find some things that appeal to him: Rambo 1, 2 and 3, The Body Snatchers, etc.

Supernova wrote:

For a large part I think so...one of my nephews is by his own admission not a particularly good reader in that he usually loses interest, but I've managed to find some things that appeal to him: Rambo 1, 2 and 3, The Body Snatchers, etc.

That's good. Whatever gets them to read.

I do admit, I find it bothersome that books are getting replaced by hand-held gadgets (iphones) where people do FB, emails, videos, and games instead of reading. This is a humongous change that I've noticed when I ride mass-transit, or even the people who sit waiting in our office.

Bluesmama wrote:

That's good. Whatever gets them to read.

I do admit, I find it bothersome that books are getting replaced by hand-held gadgets (iphones) where people do FB, emails, videos, and games instead of reading. This is a humongous change that I've noticed when I ride mass-transit, or even the people who sit waiting in our office.

Totally, very annoying. I like books, when I take a book somewhere it's because I want a book, not a video game, not a cell phone, not a blackberry, etc., I want to read and that's all I want to do while I have to wait for the dentist or whatever.

I love books as gifts, a friend however says she doesn't want to give me a book because once read it is all used up. Then she is not much of a reader herself.

Suzi wrote:I love books as gifts, a friend however says she doesn't want to give me a book because once read it is all used up. Then she is not much of a reader herself.

Yeah that doesn't make much sense. Think about it, how many people give/get movies as presents? And you can remember the details of a movie a LOT easier than you can the details of a book, but nobody says the movies are all used up after one viewing.

I got real lucky she gave me $50.00 for Xmas, I can probably get 2 or 3 books with that! LOL

Suzi wrote:I got real lucky she gave me $50.00 for Xmas, I can probably get 2 or 3 books with that! LOL

Lucky, if I had that kind of money I could probably get about 12 of them off Amazon, or...well a whole lot of them from the thrift store.

I got a few books for Christmas, one full of optical illusions, A Practical Guide to Dragons, Dragonology, and Ray Bradbury's A Pleasure to Burn.

I buy most of my books at garage sales, so once in a while a book comes along that I hear about and want to read like J.C Dugard's book. So getting a book like that as a gift is super.

I don't go to a lot of garage sales, I get most of my books either off of Amazon, or from the thrift shop where they're 25 cents each or 10 for $1, and in September and February the library has its annual book sales and I get a LOT of stuff there. The library's book sale is a miniature black Friday, everybody pushing and grabbing for the same things and you have to grab something fast or it will be gone.

I'm fortunate in that here the library sales are big and most people don't want what I do. I don't read much fiction , so I pretty well have my choice at the sales.

I've already got a few books put away for my mother for Christmas. I got her this one collection of Columbo stories written by the show's actual writer, and The President's Mystery, which was originally started by Franklin Roosevelt, but he couldn't come up with an end for it, so he brought in many mystery writers and eventually had Erle Stanley Gardner who created Perry Mason to finish it.

Also I got her the book of The Court of Last Resort, which in the 50s was a TV show but was also Erle Stanley Gardner once again, and several people who worked in law enforcement, looking at cases where the defendants had no hope, and working together to find out if they were actually innocent or not, and they were successful for a while, but before too long the whole thing unfortunately just fell apart.

Anybody buying or asking for books this year?

The only one I've asked for is Dorothy of Oz in continuing my collection of the Oz books above and beyond L. Frank Baum's original collection. Though as a present to myself I've gotten the novel for Gaslight and the play The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. In addition to the ones I previously listed for my mother this year, I also got her The Range Rider, 3 Mr. Moto mystery novels, and a novel started by Agatha Christie, then finished by 3 separate mystery writers.

My wife loves to read even more than I do but I usually just get her Barnes and Noble gift cards unless I know she will like a particular book. That's how we started on A Song of Ice and Fire (aka A Game of Thrones). I don't have any books on my list this year.

I want someone to buy me 50 Shades of Grey. Heard it was really good.