Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Two Recent Finds

The great thing about dealing in used books is the constant potential for delightful surprises. A couple of nice recent finds:

Bernard Grun's The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events. I'm sure there are other books out there that do the same thing – give you a horizontal view of historical events from 5000 A.D. to the (then) present year (1978 in this edition). Each two-page spread gives you that year's important events in the following categories:

History and Politics
Literature and Theater
Religion, Philosophy and Learning
Visual Arts
Music
Science, Technology and Growth
Daily Life

A great resource for writers. However, if you're like me can can't remember what happened last year, you might want an updated version. But hey, for $0.01 on Amazon, you can't go wrong. (I paid the outrageous price of $0.33 for my copy.)

I also ran across a collection of stories by Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories. I read the first two stories last night and thoroughly enjoyed them. Rich, wonderfully crafted, creepy, slightly elusive, very thought-provoking. Aickman could easily become one of my favorite writers.

Now Playing = Chet Baker – The Pacific Jazz Years

1 comment:

John said...

I spent a great portion of my youth on the floor beside the bookshelves in the family room with Timetables of History on one side and the Rand McNally World Atlas on the other. (Which explains alot about me.) I've always been fascinated by what was going on at the edges of events in history textbooks, like what else happened in 1066 besides the Norman Conquest.