There will be books.

For the past two weeks, up to today, I have amassed a total of 13 books from booksales, 12 since I will be reselling one to a colleague upon his request, which I will then borrow in some distant future. That’s some kind of record for me, which doesn’t mean that I have to beat somebody else’s or even mine, because I haven’t set such a shitty record. Especially with the fact that every time I’m mulling the idea of picking a book I’m wracking my head senseless of the actual nearest possible time I will be able to pick it up, this time actually reading the damn book. And whenever I get into such argument with myself, which is every time, I justify the purchase with the selfish geeky argument that someone will have picked it up in another hour, day or week. Despite the seeming obliviousness of this generation to the wonder of books, one can never discredit the fact that if you decide to let go of that fateful meeting with a rare, yellowed Thomas Pynchon novel like The Crying of Lot 49, somebody who have been itching for the same book would pick it up the next day.

The ones I bought at a local mall atrium booksale over a period of one week are truly gems, because, all of them are sold at 20 pesos: a cover-torn copy of Alex Garland’s The Beach, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood a new version of which is sold at NBS for more than 500 pesos, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth and John Le Carre’s The Looking-Glass War since I didn’t try hardest to look for The Spy who came in from the Cold. (I have long been meaning to read, make it pick, a Le Carre book because it’s practically everywhere in booksales and they say The Spy is the quintessential spy novel.)

At another mall, which sold books from the price range of 89-189 pesos: The 9/11 Investigations edited by former Newsweek editor Steven Strasser, a compilation book of the 9/11 commission reports and other relevant interviews. Pegged at 189 which is not bad actually if you think about it.

At an NBS in a local mall, where a massive flood of hardbound books caused me extreme excitement and a real decision-making pain in the ass: Ray Bradbury’s The Cat’s Pajamas: Short Stories, Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium which is also sold in paperback in the same store at 359 pesos, John Hemingway’s Strange Tribe, A Family Memoir, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, Alan Greenspan: The Age of Turbulence and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. 99 pesos each.