The Price of Books

I spent the better part of this morning and afternoon cleaning and clearing: selecting clothes to be sold to Buffalo Exchange; selecting clothes to be donated to Goodwill; selecting books that I no longer needed to live with.

This last job was relatively painless because I created a simple criteria--if I knew I would never read a book again, it was gone. This led to some darn good books leaving the fold (most notably Mailer's Executioner's Song), but it felt right, good.

I took the 15 or so books to Half-Price, having never sold there before so not knowing how much to expect. The sum total for Mailer, Rushdie, Eco, Mark Bowden, and others: Eight dollars.

Yaoza. Yaoza. How much had they cost me? How much could I get on eBay? Why don't I use libraries?

In the end I took their offer, and used it to buy Ben Marcus' Notable American Women and Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association Inc. Such is my cycle.