One of the bookstores in town is going out of business. Not due to a lack of business, but the owner wanted to move on and couldn't find a buyer. I live in a college town, so despite its small size, there are two large bookstores. The fancy one, and the one that is closing. The one that is closing has books stacked up, old paperbacks, and cheap prices.
And getting cheaper, because in an attempt to liquidize the merchandise, they have been doing sales. For the first month, it was 25% off. I bought a lot of things under those conditions. Today it was 50% off. I bought around $150 dollars worth of books today, discounted to $75. About forty books. Combined with the books that I got in the past few weeks, I have a large stash of books to be read. I am a quick reader, but even reading very quickly, 40 books will take a while to read. Especially, for example, The Guide to the Perplexed or The Phenomenology of Perception. Some of them will be shorter and go quicker. If anyone has been following my write-ups, they might have noticed that I am writing about even more Ace Doubles than I have in the past. That is because this bookstore had a lot of them. In previous weeks, I bought the cheaper ones, but today, I bought 20 volumes, which at 50% off cost me...about 20 dollars. That is a lot of books to read. Counting ones I had from past weeks, I still have 32 more volumes to read. 64 books. Even at one a day, that would take me two months of reading. So expect to see more of those. I also purchased some books by Nobel Prize winning authors, as part of my Nobel Prize in Literature Quest, which I will write about more soon.
As a final note, I want to explain one of the reasons why Ace Double novels have captured my attention so much lately. In one of those intellectual cross-pollinations that this site is so good at, I have been thinking a lot about how modernism and the idea of the Rights State has waned. Beliefs in things like scientific method and rational discourse are now under attack, even in the world capital of politeness, Ottawa, Canada. Which I am explaining sloppily because this is a daylog. But anyway, if we look back at the 1960s, and in the science-fiction world, that was a time when many of these issues were being imagined in different ways. Some of those books do seem to espouse white, male technological power, but the ideas are on a spectrum. Some put a lot of value in science and technology, while others have a quasi-mystical bent, describing something closer to transhumanism. Some glorify individualism, and rough-and-ready fighters, but many advocate gentler, more humane values. And despite occasional depictions that seem insensitive now, most of them are strongly against chauvinism or xenophobia. In other words, someone raised on the pulp values of Ace Doubles would seem to have some basis for being able to see through some of the nastier and stupider values going around right now.
But right now, it is late and I have to sleep, but I will explore all of this later.