Trawling Through the Thrift Stores -- by Joseph Finn

 

Hello everyone and welcome to my new column here where I weekly highlight anything interesting I might have found in my shopping at thrift stores, estate sales, Little Free Libraries and the like.  Each week I'll highlight five items and talk a bit about why I bought them.

This week, I'll start with finding the complete trilogy of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti novellas. Okorafor is one of my favorite of the newer science-fiction novelists, who is doing wonderful work in what she refers to as African-Futurism, science fiction set in or about Africa.  This is a wonderful series about a young woman named Binti who ends up going off-world to university and stumbles into something much darker than she expected when her ship is boarded by an alien species.  I've read all of these a couple of times and look forward to reading them all again.

For some reason, I've only read One Hundred Years Of Solitude from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so I grabbed this one to eventually get to.  (Oh god, my huge To Be Read Pile.)  If nothing else, it's a great title.  I just wish this edition didn't have the Oprah seal; I prefer my books to not have award seals at all (removable stickers, I'm just fine with them).

I only know Jun'ichirō Tanizaki by reputation (he died in 1965 and I'm not sure at all how well published he is in the USA) so this was an easy snag for me.  I really know nothing about this book at all except for it being a story collection so I'm definitely looking forward to see how I like them.

Ring Lardner is one of my favorites of the weird era in the early 20th century of slang-filled sportswriters, but oddly I've never particularly read his fiction writing.  This looks like a really solid Penguin collection of Lardner's fiction, including apparently his most famous works about a semi-literata ballplayer named Jack Keefe.  Flipping through, the tone of this seems to be James-Thurberesque humor and that's something I can definitely get into.

Finally, another author I only know by reputation.  I think many Nobel winners, like the majority of writers, tend to fade away and be somewhat forgotten (and yet somehow Hemingway keep going, which beffudles me).  Who knows, maybe Mann is for me.  I love the cover on this Bantam paperback from 1970.