My public library has a big book sale every Fall. They take over the largest room in a local convention center for four days, and it draws hundreds of people. This year’s sale was over the weekend, and so I drove out through an early snowstorm to pore over the remnants, which was still a wide variety and many of them in nearly new condition. The science fiction and fantasy sections were almost gone, but there were plenty of choices in the fiction section. Because it was the last day, and the library is trying to get rid of as many books as possible on that last day, you could buy a full box of books for just $5. While some people left with multiple boxes filled to the top, I left with just one box of seventeen books. I’ve read two of them before and was lucky enough to find them in hardcover!

In no particular order, here are the books I bought:

• Tolstoy Lied by Rachel Kadish
• Letters from Yellowstone by Diane Smith
• A Way in the World by V.S. Naipul
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf
• After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima, translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene
• The Framingham Fiend by Gregory Harris
• The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip
• The Blade of the Courtesans by Keiichiro Ryu, translated from the Japanese by James M. Vardaman
• The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
• The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major
• Tales of the Witch World by Andre Norton, et al
• The Tale of the Shining Princess adapted by Sally Fisher from a translation of the story by Donald Keene
• The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay
• Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky translated from the French by Sandra Smith
  
• The Sister Queens by Sophie Perinot
• The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder by Erin Blakemore
• Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman

I honestly don’t know where I’m going to put all of these books! Though I did unhaul some books a few weeks ago, I don’t have that much room on my shelves. They will probably end up in my little studio where the books are starting to take over the shelves currently holding all my art supplies.