Deadly Bookish.

I'd forgotten!

I went down to Boulder this weekend to spend some hard-earned money. Ned drove, since he wanted a nerd's weekend out as well. We went to the comic store, where I bought Neil Gaiman's first of two issues on Batman, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?"-- They killed Bruce Wayne, because Grant Morrison is a terrible writer. I bought a one-shot of the new Marvel event, because Marvel just wants to string together event after event after event now, without any break to allow people to adjust. You can't shatter the world ten times in a row, guys, or it's never going to heal. House of M, Civil War, World War Hulk, The Initiative, Secret Invasion, and now Dark Reign-- Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin, is now a famed savior for shooting the queen of the alien-invader body-snatchers, and now he runs the Marvel universe and not Tony Stark, so he's setting it up so the bad guys have all the perks. I only bought the issue I bought because it was written by Bendis and drawn by Maleev, and I liked their run on Daredevil quite a bit. Ned and I went to a Gamestop and a small movie shop, too-- I bought two games I'd had my eye on, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and The World Ends With You. The movie shop was a bit overpriced, but had a few neat sections, some thoroughly packed: award nominees, grindhouse, and a well-stocked foreign films shelf.

For a more pedantic than plebian spin on literature, I went to a used bookstore. It's such a charming store, shelves packed tight with books, peculiarly organized by subject, books overflowing in huge piles on the floor. The shopkeeper is fantastically eloquent, too, a middle-aged guy who looks a little gruff and gave me a small tour of the packed store.

"Where are the classics?" I asked.
"Classics like, Greeks and Romans...?"
"Sure. Or more contemporary stuff too. Both."
"So more like... Flaubert?" I agreed, only recognizing the name thanks to Franny and Zooey. He started talking.
"Classics begin here and move along this shelf, into the next alcove here... Then they make a bit of a serpentine loop back to this shelf standing here, to finish on the other side of it." I was instantly entertained. He went on to point out the comic books (he recently bought up the stock of a street vendor who closed up, and has a ton of Sandman and all of Promethea at half-off, among other gems and some garbage), war, philosophy, mythology, religion ("And cookbooks, too. ...Don't ask."), psychology, and sci-fi/fantasy. I pestered him with various questions about where I might find certain books or authors, and was a on occasion disappointed by the absence of one book or another: Herodotus's Histories and Blood Meridian by Cormac McArthy, particularly. I went to the shop a few doors down afterwards but it was closed-- Just as well, the guy who ran that one, who I met last week when I bought Dune, was obnoxious, and the store was maddeningly claustrophobic. (Did I already say that in a prior entry?)

Sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks are in a little room on the back, each wall a shelf with a shelf in the middle too. It spills out into the main room, and I picked a copy of War of the Worlds, and the complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hardcover for nine dollars. In classics, I picked up Catcher in the Rye. In the poetry at the front of the store I found a copy of Paradise Lost. My prized find, though, is a thick beautiful paperback copy of the Inferno: original Italian on the left-hand page, translated English on the right-hand page, and annotations at the end of each canto. When I finish these all in like, three months, I'll go back and drop another 40 dollars, I'm sure, and probably twenty more shipping all these books home at the end of AmeriCorps.