Books and More Books

It's too bad when a used book store closes, but on the other hand closing sales have added to my stock of books here at home several times over the years. Last week I got word that a small used book store near where I used to live in the western suburbs was closing, and on Friday afternoon I went. I emerged from the store with a hand-basket full of books in three grocery-store sized plastic bags, all for $6.

I was looking for two categories of books among titles I hadn't read before: merely interesting and damn interesting. Serendipity is all you have in a search like that.

I found no fewer than three books about shipwrecks, and what former boy doesn't like to read about that? The Last Voyage of the Lusitania was apparently published (in 1956) to capitalize on the success of A Night to Remember, which was out the year before. Went Missing is about "ships that sailed the Great Lakes and were swallowed up without a trace." Shipwreck, subtitled "The Strange Fate of the Morro Castle," intrigued me because I'd never heard of the Morro Castle (it caught fire off New Jersey in 1934). The back of the book says, "What lay behind the mysterious death of the Captain before the fire? What was the truth about the mysterious cargo in the hold? What was the cause of the first mate's bizarre behavior? Was there really a Communist conspiracy among the crew?" I hope it lives up to its publisher's hype.

More mainstream popular history can be found in Benedict Arnold, Patriot and Traitor; A Bright Shining Lie; The Stakes of Power, 1845-1877; and No Man's Land, which promises an account of the final months of World War I. The Devil's Crown seems to be a companion volume to a BBC series about Henry II and his sons that I haven't seen (bring on the kings 'n' battles, I say).

Scandals, Vandals and DaVincis seems to be essays about various famed works of art, and the volume of Seabiscuit that I found looks like it was released around the time of the movie of the same name (which I didn't see). But I have to like the looks of a book that includes a chapter called, "The Dingbustingest Contest You Ever Clapped An Eye On." Into Thin Air should be highly readable, from what I've heard: it's interesting when people die. For the same reason, I picked up Black Hawk Down.

I might be one of the few to consider this damn interesting, but Longitude, "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time," seems very promising to me.

Decent travel titles were pretty thin on the shelves, but I did manage to come away with Pecked to Death by Ducks, a collection by Tim Cahill, and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. Fiction that I wanted to read -- this excluded the store's vast number of romance books, pounds of spy yarns, pecks of mysteries, and rows and rows of Star Trek titles -- was also fairly thin. I put The Flight of the Phoenix (air crash!), The Last Full Measure (war!) and The Remains of the Day (butlers?) in the basket.

I also found two of the three Space Trilogy books by C.S. Lewis. These were the only titles commented on by the clerk, who had absolutely nothing to do but read and ring up orders (I was one of two customers during the hour I spent there). "Interesting books, I read them last year," he said. "Science fiction sure was a different thing back then."

Also: a couple of back issues of that uniquely pretentious British magazine Granta, a late '80s Zippy collection, and one of the Straight Dope books. In a house with numerous interruptions, those last two are easy reading.