Friday I went downtown for a full day class with Edward Tufte. He's a pretty good speaker and a lot of the material was interesting, but he had two odd habits. One was showing off his library (which I'm jealous of). First printings of Newton, etc. The other was spending a lot of his lecturing time saying "Please turn to page 41 of Envisioning Information", etc. Fortunately it was to show off diagrams and pictures and stuff mostly, but it still seemed a little odd to me. The upshot of this though was that I came home with all three of his books, which I've been wanting for awhile.

On the way there I finished The Hot Jazz Trio which like the other Kotzwinkle book I'd read (Fata Morgana) was ok, but not really my thing. I'd picked this one up somewhere cheap in SF based on the title, but I think I"ll probably pass on picking up more of his stuff in the future.

At home I started Perdido Street Station by China Mieville since I'd seen so many great reviews of it. So far I'm enjoying it, but it's over 700 pages long and not the world's fastest read so it might be awhile before I finish.

I sold quite a few books to Powells yesterday (a few duplicates, a few old UNIX programming books I've not touched in years, and a few books I really didn't like when I read them) and bought 3 (two there and one at Value Village which I stopped in for the first time ever). The VV book was a first edition hardcover of Rita Mae Brown's Bingo (for $2.99). At Powell's I bought Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey and Hotwire by Simon Ings. It's my third unread book by Ings, but since none of them are in print in the US, I figured I'd seize the opportunity.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 9:21 AM