Saturday, October 4, 2008

Friday Finds- Late!

So this week has seen some interesting things come into the house. I was lucky enough to snag four volumes of Osamu Tezuka's graphic novel series Buddha from Bookmooch- volumes 5-8- which made me really happy! It's an eight-volume series about the life of the Buddha by a man who basically founded the manga genre in Japan. He was heavily influenced by Disney in terms of his artistic style and I'm told the Buddha series is quite an accomplishment. I will probably review it once I finish the entire series, rather than go volume by volume, which means it will probably be a very long time before I blog about it.

My two other new additions come from a visit I made to a local used bookstore, one of those great hole-in-the-wall places we should all have access to. The first of my two finds there was Pocket Canons: Books of the Bible. This is a slipcased set of 10 miniature books, each covering a different book of the King James Bible and introduced by writers ranging from Meir Shalev to A.S. Byatt to the Dalai Lama. My edition is unfortunately missing one of the ten books but I'm going to try to pick it up on the online used book market sometime soon. The Books of Ruth and Esther, pictured here, is the volume I'm missing.

The second thing I found was Sunflower, a pre-World War II Hungarian novel by Gyula Krudy. I don't know much about it except it just piqued by interest.

But I think the best thing I got this week was Cosmos, by Carl Sagan. As a child I loved watching Sagan's series on PBS and I don't know why but I just never managed to get my hands on the book. Today is my and my husband's fifth wedding anniversay and this book was his gift to me. What makes it double-sweet is that he gave me his own first-edition hardback copy. Aww!!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooh, I'm jealous of all the Buddha! I've read the books twice now, and consider them one of my favourite graphic novel series. Osamu Tezuka is amazing.

Allison said...

I love Cosmos and Carl Sagan!! Love the show too...You will really enjoy the book! I'm jealous of that first edition!!

Anonymous said...

So weird that you just picked up Sunflower at a used book store. I just picked it up at a used/remaindered store last week. Started it tonight and it is amazing. So lyrical. I hope you enjoy it!