I might be forced to get a job if I keep buying all these books!

I received a books-on-tape version of Robert Rankin's "Nostradamus Ate My Hamster" and I am precisely one tape into it and I'm hooked, and since I read WAY faster than the narrator can speak, I feel I just MUST have the book...

However, Rankin is hard to find in the US, many of his books are out of print. SO....

I bought the entire Brentford Trilogy (all 6 books lol)

From Amazon UK (sorry, couldn't find it elsewhere that would ship Stateside) I got:

The Antipope
The Brentford Triangle
The Sprouts of Wrath
and
The Brentford Chainstore Massacre

From Barnes & Noble in the US, I got (with free shipping)
East of Ealing and
Nostradamus Ate My Hamster

Am I a sad and scary individual or what?!

(normally I wouldn't go buy an entire series of books in one shot based on one tape of an Audio Book, but the person who gave me the tapes has read a couple of others and loved them...and we have VERY similar tastes - afterall, I got him hooked on Jasper!)

Oh, and while I was AT Borders today (we don't have any other bookstores near me, unfortunately) I picked up Terry Pratchett's "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents) Kid's book maybe, but it has a cat...LOL

I've been spending my cash on pony books. I found a specialist contact in Norwich (she collects them too). Elaine sends me lists now and again and gives me discounts. I only popped into the shop on the off-chance ! Serendipity, that's the word.

Twila, email me your address and i can send you the proof of the Witches of Chiswick.

The Amazing Maurice is great. Very funny. Could never get into the Rankin books, but thought they were better than Tom Holt's (who thought he was funnier than he actually was...)

I've bought too many books lately. My 'to read' pile is growing..

Have the book bug myself as am a voracious reader and have - through circumstance - become well practised in the art. Have read Holt and Rankin and at one time had everything Rnkin wrote but they didn't have the staying power for me i.e. lost interest in them. Have all 28 Dsicworld Novels or however many there are and have got into reading those - though I have got Douglas Adams' Bio to read. Has anyone read Carl Hiaasen or Christopher Brookmyre? If not consider this a recomendation.

Sadly, was forced to get a job quite a while ago and now work for SO31.



A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Wow, thanks Carla, will email you shortly! COOL...you know, it's nice to have "connections"!!!!

I've read Christopher Brookmyre. All of them. Stunning, fantastic, great.

Have you read the latest one, the Sacred Art of Stealing? The bank and the mad religious guy outside really exist, so it had me in hysterics...



:--

Do something pretty while you can...

I've read Hiaasen, but not Brookmyre. I'm in the local library now, so when I log-off I'll see whether they have any of his books. (Can't go out & buy any more books this month, I'm almost broke _ apart from the cash set aside for paying the next few weeks' rent _ already... and I only got paid on last Friday. Where does it all go to?)

************************************************************

"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."

I've got the book bug too. I'm starting to think it's an addiction. I simply can not stay out of a book store. I think I'm going to have to buy a bigger house so that I have room for all of my books.

If I have to be addicted to something - might as well be books!!

Tracy,

I *did* buy a bigger house to have room for all my books. Really.

Specifically, a five bedroom Craftsman built in 1911 with a 24 ft by 16 ft formal dining room which I converted into a library with 7 foot tall bookcases along the walls and some low ones sticking out into the room like in bookstores, dividing it up into three "reading sections". There were already floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases lining one side of the upstairs hallway, and there are two 6-foot tall bookcases in the computer room/office which hold my genealogy books and some reference books.

Which is enough shelving to barely hold the books I have now (estimated at about 10,000 of them.) Something will have to go to hold the ones I'm still buying, though.

Terri, I bet the woodworking in your house is amazing. I love those old California Craftsman houses. The interiors always look so substantial even if the room size itself is small. They always look "sturdy". Does yours have a lot of the stained quarter-sawn oak popular with a lot of the Craftsman homes?

Not sure what your particular area is like, but Spokane, WA has a lot of Craftsman houses...and a lot of Victorian/Craftsman homes too. Those are neat as well, blending some of the more ornate decoration with the sturdy simplicity of the Craftsman.

In fact, my dream is to have a Victorian/Craftsman cottage with a stone porch and entryway, cedar shingle roof and roses and ivy growing up the side and pergola. (I can dream can't I?? LOL...not a lot of those kind of houses in Northern Virginia!)

I'm impressed. Seriously impressed.

The actor Russell Hunter once said he used to have about 7000 books but had to get rid of about half his collection because his wife wanted to move to a smaller house. My thought at the time was, "wow, he really must love his wife..."



..........................................................................................

That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

Gosh, makes my collection of maybe 2,500-3,000 seem like small beer. Mind you, I live in a two bedroom flat, and don't actually have many books in the bedrooms. The hall, landing and living room, on the other hand......It's just as well the flat has strong Victorian floor boards (I live in the attic)

AAC,

Yes, the woodwork in my house is impressive, at least downstairs, but it is not oak except for the floors. The walls and ceiling are panelled in redwood, which was a style popularized in Berkeley. And it does have a big front porch supported by four stone pillars, and shingles on the sides of the large gable roof. But no pergola or climbing roses.

There is a book published in 1973 called "A Sidewalk Guide to Santa Cruz Architecture". My house just gets a small one paragraph blurb (and no photo) in the main text, which mentions hundreds of houses and other buildings, but there is a short appendix that has pen-and-ink drawings of the major architectural styles (about 7 or 8 of them), and a drawing of my house is used as the example for the "Shingle Style".

I will email you some pictures next week. I am leaving for a short trip to Albuquerque tomorrow morning and won't be back until Sunday. I do all my posting from work, and don't have the pictures here.

And hey, Virginia has a lot of beautiful old homes too! And they don't cost as much as they do here. (I read a lot of mysteries, and for some reason the authors of mysteries set in places like Virginia and Ohio and the Carolinas seem to like to drop comments about the price of a house, intending to casually indicate someone's income level or something, and all it does is set me off on a tailspin about the awful price of housing here, because they seem to think houses in the $250K range are upscale. And here you couldn't buy a dilapidated one-bedroom house with a leaky roof for that price.)

oh gosh, not anymore....prices here are outrageous! Townhouses go for $300K for nice ones...for a 4 bedroom upscale 3 level house inside the beltway, those go for $600K easily...Down near us, a standard 4 bedroom/2.5 bath decent house goes for about $325K and that's with next to no property...barely a 1/4 acre!

But I do know that your area can be insane! My husband's uncle lived in a modestly nice home near San Jose and it was over $400K...they bought a MUCH nicer and BIGGER house outside of NYC in the deep NJ suburbs for about the same...just a little more and about tripled their space.

I am truly impressed! I've loved the Victorian/Craftsman style for years. I missed buying one a few years ago by 1 day!! So, my quest begins again.

AAC I thought house prices here were ridiculously high! I'm in CT, Fairfield County and the average price for 3 bedroom/1.5 bath in a fairly nice area is about $285K. Of course that doesn't take into consideration all the $1M mansions!

Well, until Dad builds more bookshelves or I find a bigger house, the books will continue to take over each room.

Maybe I'll convert the garage to a library? The car can certainly sit outside!

Tracy

I'm truly impressed to find more people with more books than me - I only have about 1250 just now. In my defence, I think both Skiffle and Terri are older than me - gives me time to catch up! (And now I have a goal - 10,000!)



:--

Do something pretty while you can...

I have read everything Brookmyre currently has to offer; half of Hiaasen's offerring; and although I have all the Discworld cannon even less of them!!

The problem with me is splurges I have, quite literally, in the past talked a shelf-load of books to the counter to purchase - the bookshop was clsoing down and there were these Robert Rankin books with a tag line referring to Terry Pratchett and almost had a checkout-coronary!

Am currently reading "Be Cool" by Elmore Leonard which is quite good as is MJ Simpson's book on DN Adams. plus there are the Graham Hancock books I've always been been meaning to read.

I need the motivation - train travel or tv. Am currently finding Big Brother very educational. When my big-ger brother puts it on I go and read a book.



A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.