Books!

We were out at Peter's Canyon last Saturday, where we had a pretty good day birding. We had 57 species, I think. But this, this is not a birding post.

We found something else, just as exciting, a $1.00 bookstore. It's on the corner of Jamboree and Chapman in Orange, I think. I wasn't feeling all that well at the time, so it's kinda foggy. Anyway, it's a huge warehouse sort of store, about the size of a medium supermarket - like Stater Bros in La Mirada. It's got a bunch of aisles of books, all $1.00. Of course, it's terribly hard to find anything, but for $1.00, you'll take what you can get.

Our best find was made by Libby. She found Tolkien's Smith of Wooten Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. Neither of us had read those stories before. They're both sort of novelettes; really just children's books. I liked Farmer Giles of Ham better than Smith of Wooten Major, but Smith of Wooten Major was very typical of Tolkien. It's about a man's interactions with Faery, but it doesn't have much of a plot. Farmer Giles of Ham is about Farmer Giles, of course, and his adventures with a giant, a dragon, and a king. It's a fake English history about the area around the Thames. The Thames, it turns out, was named after Tame - which is what his dragon became. Very entertaining reading, and I'm glad Libby picked it up.

I got the Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. Unfortunately, it's not at all funny. Rather bad, in fact. However, it's not nearly as bad as Tarzan of the Apes. I picked up the very first of Edgar Rice Burrough's silly series on a whim, but it's not really worth anything. It's all in terrible earnest, but the dialogue (why does Blogger want me to spell that without a "ue"?) and plot points are wretched. Tarzan wasn't even adopted by gorillas, but by some sort of great ape that Burrough's mostly just calls anthropoids. They are, of course, at perpetual and deadly war with gorillas, and everything else. Tarzan, of course, goes about magnificently killing everything. But he also learns to read English from his parents' effects. Of course, he can't speak English, as he's been raised by apes. He doesn't speak anything until a French officer teaches him to read English in French. So he pronounces "me" as "moi" and so forth. How confusing would that be? But it works well enough that he's fluent in about two weeks.

As you can see, I spent a lot of time reading when I was sick. I also finished Huckleberry Finn for the first time, so I'm caught up with the rest of America, now.