What books have you got your eye on?

[lemonstar]

Although I'm forever telling my wife that I don't need to go browsing in bookshops as I have quite enough things to read already I can't help but spot things that will sooner or later be mine She thinks I get bored wandering around the shops with her and the girls even though they really are great shoppers - they don't faff around, they know what they want, make their minds up quickly - anyway - really - I think they're great but they seem to want to pack me off to a bookshop and it's hard to argue.

These book titles are dancing annoyingly like marionettes on a wooden stage in the top of my head:-
Fire Season - Philip Connors
Tiny Campsites - Dixe Wills
Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 by R.S. Thomas (Hardcover) - only seen on ebay/Amazon for close to £200! - why is that?
Mathematics with Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb by Mary Stopes-Roe
(oops:edit) The Wind-up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami

And you?

Neil

[k-j]

I have a long list of titles I want to read, but you seem to be identifying actual physical editions of books in a store and lusting after them. I don't do this. If I want to read a specific book the city library is always my first port of call. If I'm away from home I seek out all the second hand book shops and comb them thoroughly for whatever looks interesting. Two or three times a year I scour my local second hand book shops in the same way - I just acquired a motley five the other day including an eye-popping illustrated edition of Ambrose Bierce and a nice older copy of Fancies and Goodnights, the stories of John Collier - which I already have in a newer edition but might be a good gift one day. But in general, my planned reading comes from the library, my unplanned reading from shops or raiding the shelves of my in-laws.

[lemonstar]

For some reason my back & legs start to ache more, and more quickly, if I'm in any shop other than a bookshop. Ask my wife. I look at things out of curiosity and think "this looks interesting!" but I'm not an impulsive buyer at all. I try to keep new titles in my head and look for them on ebay or in 2nd hand shops - it's usually many months or sometimes years between seeing new things I like the look of and actually acquiring them. Yes - you have a good point - I don't use the library enough but it's dominated by fiction and I hardly ever read fiction although I'm trying to read some by reading some Murakami. Fiction is OK - but I don't have any real passion for it. Our local library is terrible for service - you can wait ages for a whole trolley load of books to be put back on the shelves before being served in order to check books in or out - actually it's run by a loud brash Canadian woman!

I bought Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan" a few months ago & started reading that but I remember hearing about it when it came out in 2007 - it's taken that long for me to get around to seeking it out and that's a book that's right up my non-fiction street.

I bought the RS Thomas later collection - it's a new book(well newly reprinted) & I wasn't going to pick it up cheaply any other way.

[lemonstar]

Picked up Tiny Campsites - Dixe Wills for a tiny price on ebay - I always have searches in place that only let me know about things when they come up at a half decent price.

Was thinking about ordering all 3 1Q84 books by Murakami - when I checked prices the other night it is still cheaper to buy 3 fairly hefty hard backs (£16.49) from Amazon than Adobe DRM eBooks from WHSmiths(£20.98) but the Kindle versions are cheaper (£12.34) - I'm not sure about using or converting Kindle format books for my Sony eBook reader - 1 thing I meant to get round to checking out today. I'm not much for hardback books. I wasn't thinking about buying the 1Q84 series but the prices are pretty reasonable because they are new and I suspect they will cost a lot more when I think I'll actually get round to reading them - maybe back end of next year. It strikes me as disappointing that just when there is so much talk about the current surge in ebook self-publishing and (I think) a resurgence in reading & book buying, that ebooks aren't actually generally cheaper than real paper books (Kindle excepted) or is your perception different?

I don't know - what the thinking here? I love to have a couple of softback books stuffed in my bag when I'm out or away (I read a big chunk of Simon Singh - The Big Bang, while waiting for an x-ray on my knee yesterday) but I don't mind the ebook readers at all - in fact I like them more than I thought I would - they are light, you can highlight (well I do) great pieces of text and they are always open at the right page - no faffing around if the bookmark has fell out. I'd probably enjoy having Kindle reader software on an iPad but that's cash I don't have to spare right now.

Neil