Miss Christine: Book party

It was a good week for books!

On Friday, I went to the Friends of the Fort Dodge Public Library's book sale and bought several books for $1 for hardcover, 50 cents for paperback. Then I went back on Saturday and got books for $1 a bag. (I would have bought a 2006 set of World Book encyclopedias except they were missing the U-V volume!) On Friday, I bought books that I didn't want to miss, and on Saturday, I bought lots of books for our Literacy Night book exchange (this Tuesday). We have some to start at the library that we're weeding, but if they were any good we'd be keeping those, so I wanted to get some nice ones to begin the night. Then we went to Goodwill and I was able to pick up a few more.

So check these out!

These are for the book exchange:

Some of my favorites from there:

Some boy is going to be really happy with this dinosaur book:

This is from The Zoom Trilogy by Tim Wynne-Jones and Eric Beddows:

Here are some I got for my sons:

For my poli-sci/history major at Grinnell:

Here are the books I got for myself:

I really like that What do you know? book. It was published in 1990, but I'm particularly fond of its quizzes - so far, I've only taken one, but I was scored 90/100, "having an uncommonly good grasp of common knowledge." I didn't know who Albert Schweitzer, Kurt Waldheim, Virginia Woolf, Ray Kroc, Timothy Leary, or Norman Mailer were (or at least not specific enough to count). I didn't know in what countries Alamogordo, Managua, or Gdansk were (I know my college son is embarrassed for me). I didn't know who wrote The Color Purple (I'm embarrassed for me). I'll have to see if there is a new edition - so I didn't know Kurt Waldheim was the Secretary-General of the UN in the 1970s and president of Austria in the 1980s. I know all about Honest Toddler!

Here's an image from the inside (obviously that is Ernest Hemingway and Amelia Earhardt, which of course you knew as you also have an uncommonly good grasp of common knowledge, right?):

I used to have "international night" dinner parties, and I loved to use cookbooks from the "Cooking the _____ way" series. If you want the basic, definitive recipes of a culture, these are the way to go. I'm going to be on the lookout for more.

And another cookbook:

From some of my favorite authors:

And here are a few I got for the library:

This is a wordless book, but it seems more Where's Waldo than Flotsam:

And finally, not sure if this one is for the take a book table, the library, or for my future grandchildren - The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown: