Monday, June 15, 2009

Today's discount book purchases

Today at the library's used book sale section I picked up:

Cosmos (hc) by Carl Sagan for 1 dollar.

The Stand: Complete and Uncut (hc) by Stephen King for 1 dollar.

Having previously subjected myself to the poorly written first Left Behind novel, I thought I might give Stephen King's pop-horror take on End Times literature a shot.* My desire to read The Stand has been piqued for some time now by Robert Price's Point of Inquiry discussion of the subject of Jesus second-coming literature (although Price, I seem to recall, actually liked the Left Behind books; which makes sense to me only in the sense that someone might like Ed Wood's movies.)

As for Cosmos, you can take for granted that I'm going to purchase any discount book written by Sagan that I come in contact with, as he is one of my favorite popular science writers. Every one of his books that I have read has been fantastic. Plus, maybe reading the book will help motivate me to find the time to watch the original tv series on Hulu.

*Check out the Left Behind archive of posts at Slactivist for page by page deconstruction of the books to see what I mean.

2 comments:

Earthling said...

You can't go wrong with Carl Sagan-- and Cosmos is one of his best books (as well as the miniseries)

Hume's Ghost said...

Yep. Unfortunately, the book seems to have resided in the home of a heavy smoker for several decades. The pages are heavily saturated with the smell of cigarette smoke ... it's quite noxious.