Charity Book Fair

Book Fair O' Clock

Time for the charity book fair again. Unfortunately I had to go alone today, but tomorrow i am going to take whole family there:

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Fantasy alternate history, as in the Napoleonic times with magic. I have read good things about this book, so I'm happy to give it a try.

Bertrand Russell's Best, edited by Rogert Egner

Terry Jones, Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic. If I understand correctly this is a book after a computer game with which I am not familiar.

Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight. First novel of the Dragonriders of Pern series. The series has lots of volumes, and I could have bought more of them, but who knows how they are?

Anne McCaffrey, Dragonquest. Second novel in that series.

Kirk Mitchell, Cry Republic. As a teenager I read the trilogy of which this is the third novel in German translation. It is an alternate history story in which the Roman Empire never collapsed and has discovered electricity, steam and flight. Just noticed that the praise blurb on the front cover quotes Anne McCaffrey.

Great Dialogues of Plato, translated by W.H.D. Rouse. Continuing my education in classics, which perhaps should have happened in late high school but didn't.

Sean Williams, The Stone Mage and the Sea. I am afraid part of the reason I bought it is that I got confused and thought the author was Tad Williams. Ah well.

And for work:

H.T. Clifford & Gwen Ludlow, Keys to the Families and Genera of Queensland Flowering Plants. From the 1970s, but will still be useful.

Nicholas Gotelli, A Primer of Ecology. Having been trained as a systematist I am hoping to get a bit more insight into ecological modeling, and it includes a chapter on island biogeography that looks promising.

Andrew Young & Geoffrey Clarke, Genetics, Demography and Viability of Fragmented Populations. Because of a project I am currently involved with.

Two observations. First, as always I come home with loads of books but could only bring myself to donating two. Some day we will have to expand our book shelves, and I have no idea where. Second, it is astonishing how there are numerous copies of some books (e.g. McCaffrey's Nerilka's Story) but none whatsoever of other, one would think, equivalent books (e.g. the third volume of the same series).

Also, are the frequent ones frequent because they were so much more popular when they were published, or because nobody wants them now? On that note, it was interesting to see that the most frequent book in the "all faiths" section was The God Delusion. It was all the rage a decade ago, and I assume now lots of people think they don't need it anymore.