Trip to a used book store

My mom and I went to Half Price Books today. I'm taking a literature class titled "Great British Writers" this semester and there are nine books I'm supposed to get for that class alone. Nine!

But any day I'm allowed into a used book store is pretty much guaranteed to be a good day. The only problem was that I knew my mom would get sidetracked from our mission to look for school books immediately so I thought maybe if I managed to stay focused there was a chance we might make it out of there before closing. That resolve didn't exactly last very long. I picked up two non-British books from the clearance shelves outside, before even entering the store.

Exciting find number one: Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl for $1.00. You can't get much better than that. I don't remember much about what's in the book because it's been a really long time since I read it but I know I really liked it and can't wait to read it again. It's a very creative mix of sci-fi and fantasy.

Next I found a writing book called "Chapter after Chapter" by Heather Sellers. It's mainly about dedication and focus. I like what I've read so far (introduction and chapter 1) and think it will be helpful for me.

After that I stuck with my goal to find the books for school and was quite successful. My mom and I found six of the nine books at that store for reasonable prices. Of the other three my sister is supposed to have two, though so far I've only found one in the places she directed me to look. Looking for the books I need for my computer and Bible classes was completely unsuccessful, but I didn't have high hopes for finding those there anyway.

At this point my mom felt the need to look through just about the entire store so there was no reason for me not to wander through the sections that interested me too. I started with music, went to computer games, then various fiction, sci-fi and fantasy sections. I found it amusing that "Tolkien" is its own shelf category but most of the books written by Tolkien were on a different, though nearby, shelf. And then I looked at art books but none that interested me were all that cheap so I moved on to see if my mom was anywhere near ready to go yet. She was still in the wedding section (my sister is getting married this summer) which luckily was right next to the writing section so I wasn't too bored.

Finally I returned to the performing arts section where my mom had left her basket of books to see what she had picked up and wait. While waiting I noticed a book titled "I Hate My Life and Want to Die" and curious about what the point of such a book might be (it was about depressing songs), started looking through the introductory material. Of course that's the moment that my mom returns and demands to know what I'm reading. Needless to say, I didn't have a chance to find out what the rest of the top ten genres of depressing songs were. I think I'll live.