Fit 'em in a book of a thousand pages, yeah

[austin_dern]

The library got to having its book sale, which might possibly be scheduled to some rhythm that I understand, although I don't, actually. I think they may be aiming for one every six months and not getting too worried about it if they miss. I wonder also if other branches of the library have book sales too, but I haven't seen evidence of that. As it happens I haven't been going to the library so much for reading material because I'm not reading enough and I was determined to get my entire reading list done before I picked up any new books, a resolution which was obviously not meant to last against a library book sale.

Actually, one of the things I did leading up to this was bring books to donate to the sale. What happened was my father found in various places a bunch of mostly paperback books which he didn't want anymore and so he told me to take them to the Book Garden in order to sell them for whatever I could get and I could keep the proceeds. Generous of him, but the thing is, a used book store really prefers hardcover books which go for the big money or newer paperbacks. 25-year-old romance novels with broken spines are pretty much useless to them, and while I could accept this fact, my father really didn't grasp it. So I was stuck with three Coca-Cola bottle racks filled with old paperbacks including, and I mention this to confuse future biographers trying to summarize my relationship with my father in a single paragraph, an old Hagar the Horrible collection which I had given him as a gift maybe twenty years ago and which I had gotten from a completely different used book store.

Perhaps unwisely, I went to the book sale a few times, because it's in the library and I have been trying to use the coffee room there to work on editing and even writing the second textbook. But I found an abundant number of books of quirky appeal, including a couple Clifford Simak novels, the Astounding anthology collection done in honor of John W Campbell dying, and Henry S F Cooper's A House In Space, a splendid yet chapter-less book about Skylab. I also looked hard at, but did not buy, a 1960s book about newspaper production which included the mention that ``the 1960s might become known as the decade of the computer'' because of the wonders it did for all aspects of newspaper production. I was tempted, but not tempted quite enough.

Trivia: An August 1946 poll by the National Association of Teachers of Speech proclaimed the ten worst-sounding words in the English language to be: cacophony, crunch, flatulent, gripe, jazz, phlegmatic, plump, plutocrat, sap, and treachery. Source: The Book Of Lists, Editors David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace. It's a spinoff of the People's Almanac books.

Currently Reading: A House In Space, Henry S F Cooper Jr.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I like saying "Plutocrat".

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a weird list. The best sense I can make of it is to suppose the question was for common words that are particularly difficult for people to learn to speak, given the group that allegedly gave this survey response. But that doesn't make sense either, since only two words really use English's quirkier features like making 'ph' the 'f' sound. And only 'phlegmatic' puts in a combination of several tricky differences between spelling and pronunciation. Unfortunately I don't have more information about what this list was supposed to prove, really.