Mother’s Day Loot
I’ll use just about any excuse for new books, and Mother’s Day was no exception. So after a nice dinner out on Saturday night, my husband turned me loose in the bookstore. I did my best to keep the total reasonable, and still managed to walk away with four books:
Since I only pull my Riverside Shakespeare from the shelves as a reference, I’ve been enjoying Barnes & Noble’s new Shakespeare series. At only $6.95 per play, the books are a bargain. They’re laid out nicely, too. Saturday night, I picked up The Tempest.
I’m also replacing some of my favorites from college, back when trade paperbacks were only available for textbooks and manuals, not fiction. I hate the “pocket” size paperbacks, and some of mine are getting musty, too, from periods of storage in the basement. So I got a new copy of D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, a book I first read for a college class. I also got a new copy of Sense and Sensibility, since my last one was eaten by my golden retriever in her puppyhood.
And last but not least, I couldn’t resist Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlose de Laclos. The film was remarkable–after all these years, I still remember that last image of Glenn Close wiping away her makeup, the facade destroyed, the game her character had devised to wreak her will on others having destroyed her in the end. I happened on the book when I was looking at the Barnes & Noble Classics section, and am looking forward to reading it.
One of the things that sealed the sale on Les Liaisons Dangereuses is its epistolary form. I’m especially intrigued with epistolary fiction. One of my favorite novels, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, is partially epistolary, and the “documents” are used to remarkable effect, both in plot and theme. Given how old the form is, it’s sometimes remarkably modern, a meta-fiction.
While I was shopping for gifts for my mom and mother-in-law, I also ran across a copy of the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for just $5, so I gifted myself that little gem, too. The screenplay, by the multi-talented Emma Thompson, won an Academy Award.