Loads o' books

Every second year, the University of Queensland has a fund-raising alumni book sale. We went today (Saturday): first time in four year that we'd attended.

My wife and I enjoy books -- and the kids seem to, as well.


Below is a snapshot of the piles of books: mine, my wife's, and our three children's (combined).

I think my pile is equal to the other two combined.



Put differently, here's the height comparison of my pile of books and CDs to the height of a three-year-old boy.

Looks like about shoulder height. That's decent enough.



Picked up a few CDs (a buck or two each). "Best of" Huey Lewis and the News (I'm of that era, but didn't have any of their stuff); misc. Irish folk music; instrumental versions of various t.v. show theme songs; an alternative version of Bush's Sixteen Stone album; and two classical music CDs. Six CDs.



Here's the proportion, by rough topic, of the books. Serves as a profile of my interests -- although filtered by what books were available. For example, if there had been more martial arts books on the "Sports" table (there was only one -- and I already owned it), that topic would've made a showing.

As you can see, the "Carpentry/Woodworking/How to Make a Fence (Playhouse, etc.)" category was the biggest. Second was fiction -- mostly little kid and teen-age-level fiction. Included a book from the "Wizard of Oz" series, plus one of his from another series. Several anthologies of bedtime stores. Also Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which I'd read long ago. Most books were only a dollar or two, so they were easy to acquire. ;)

Next was "Camping/Cooking/Outdoors/Scouting" -- including two reprints of some early 1900s Boy Scout manuals, and an older Australian Girl Guides handbook.

Next was "Languages/Cultural", including a Japanese-English dictionary, and a children's pictoral book on how Vikings lived.

Then "Music/Art": a "how to paint" book, a book on being a band director/teacher, a children's biography of Beethoven, and a children's biography on Mozard.

And finally, two books on computers: one on the theory behind programming languages; the other was a children's book about home computers -- from 1985! (2kb of RAM; tape drives; modems where you put the telephone headset on the modem device...)


Somewhere in those categories was a "how to" book on beekeeping. I don't plan on keeping bees -- but it looked interesting, and seemed worth the buck-and-a-half.


A **very** good day. :)


--GG