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MadMania
Faith, Books, and Stuff
Category: books
I love books, and have for a long time. I think a lot of it stems from when I was a kid, when we would go to the mall. Mom and my brother would go somewhere, and dad and I would go to the bookstore. I don’t know what dad was looking at, but I […]
The following image is scanned from an old edition of The Virginian I picked up at 2nd Street Books in Osceola. I have no idea what is going on in the picture, as I haven’t yet read the book; I just picked it up because my friend Trampas was named after the character in the […]
The first book I remember buying was The Magic Pudding. I got it at a book sale in Metcalf South Mall when I was about 4 or 5, which probably helps explain my love of cheap used bookstores. I never did read the book; I bought it because I liked the illustrations (I had not […]
John Blumenthal’s The Case of the Hard-Boiled Dicks is supposed to be a spoof of hard-boiled detective novels. The cover has a number of visual puns (hard-boiled eggs, a stiff wearing shoes with gum on the bottom), and the humor inside doesn’t get much better. A really good spoof understands the material being mocked; […]
Steel’s Used Christian Books has one of the absolute best selections of any used bookstore I have ever seen. Not only do they carry religious books of several orthodox and non-orthodox Christian denominations, as well as complete other religions. They also carry books on history, mythology, and various other odds and ends. When I was […]
This traditional Christian hymn was written in 1865 by Sabine Baring-Gould, an English scholar and author, most notably of The Book of Werewolves, a study of lycanthropy. The music was written by Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame.
One of my favorite bookstores is 2nd Street Books in Osceola, Missouri, a small town about a half an hour south of Clinton on Missouri Highway 13. The store is in an old building just off the square, and has a pretty large inventory of books from all genres. Prices are very good: almost all […]
While I was at my in-laws over Christmas, I picked up Trouble is My Business, a collection of four short Philip Marlowe stories by my favorite detective novelist, Raymond Chandler. If you haven’t read Chandler, he writes very economically, kind of the Anti-Tolkien. Where Tolkien might include the names of a landmark in three languages […]
For Christmas my pa-in-law got me My Word is My Bond, a memoir by Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame. It was a lot of fun, and I read it in two days. Moore had some hilarious stories involving scads of people in Hollywood and the theater and film industries. The book was awesome except […]