And I just got a birthday prezzie from Kristin T, and it's on now sitting on my incunabulae shelf, where I can not only keep the cats away from it, but where I can drool over it at a safe distance without risking spotting it with my own saliva.

I'm so happy you like it! Aimee, it was a special 50th birthday find of an older book that I knew Deb would like. I won't give away what it is, though. If Deb wants to share, she can. If not, that's fine too.

Not that I haven't read any older people books, or anything.

Well, actually, the Harry Potter books have a very accessible style to them, since it's usually an omniscient narrator. With Pike, if he's not writing first-person, he's often writing third-person teen, so a lot of the language feels off.

I forgot to add Remember Me to the list

I got that one for fifty cents and read it recently. It's still pretty cool. Another good one was Die Softly. Need to find that one. They actually had Witch, but it was the icky re-release cover, so it pissed me off.

I won't give away what it is, though. If Deb wants to share, she can. If not, that's fine too.

Perfect condition original Book Club edition of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, which is the book of his - along with his passion for cats and his dislike for facism - that makes me forgive all the macho. I love that novel with every inch of my beating heart, because Paris is my other home city (Florence has become the third head of that triad) and very few non-French writers got Paris the way Hemingway did.

And Kristin is angelic.

very few non-French writers got Paris the way Hemingway did.

"In Paris we eat brains every night" is the opening line of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? t /Lorrie Moore likes carrots

(natter) Actually, only brains I ever noticed on a Paris menu was tete de veau. I backed away crossing myself a lot more often in Greece, where they put it in a variety of regional soups.... (natter)

I've not read it, Deb. They quoted from it liberally in City of Angels, though.

Just browsing Bibliomania and this seemed worth sharing:

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

December 1st

Philip Larkin, who died on this day in 1985, probably would have agreed on the general principle of Wilde's comment. One of his finest poems, "Talking in Bed" (from The Whitsun Weddings) puts it like this, in his characteristic mode that lies somewhere between humour and profound sadness:

"At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind."

Larkin had something of a melancholy nature as these lines illustrate, but like his friend Kingsley Amis could be relied on for some moments of delightful wit. As a judge at the Booker Prize awards in 1977, Larkin said of the various entries and of modern fiction in general that, "Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end". But usually he was capable of the grouchiness one might well associate with a man who worked in a library in Hull for the greater part of his life. Which, of course, he did. John Carey once, brilliantly and accurately, wrote that Larkin's, "attitude to most accredited sources of pleasure would make Scrooge seem unduly frolicsome". His views on death (best seen in "An Arundel Tomb" and "Aubade") were typical in their negativity: in the year before his death he wrote that "I am getting progressively less fond of poems about old age as I near the Pearly Gates". Woody Allen, born today and whose Collected Prose is essential reading for anyone for whom free association is more palatable than free love, put it best when it came to the matter of death and art. He exclaimed, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying".

Aw, too bad he's dead. We might've made each other...not happy, certainly, but appreciably less miserable :) It'd be weird, being the cheery one.

Nah, Larkin was a racist & a fascist sympathizer. Wholly the product of his times & upbringing, sure, but he's better to read than to know.

Seven Seasons of Buffy -- with an introduction by Drew Goddard and chapters written by (for example) - Jennifer Crusie, David Brin, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Charlaine Harris. .. looks interesting.