Bookstore Books 10/02/10

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crossley. I've wanted to read this book for a long time; since before we moved to Hawaii, in fact. So I was pleased to see it finally come through the bookstore. However, I read the first essay in the book last night and started to read a second but got bored. I intend to give it another go at a later date, but I'm beginning to suspect that I don't like "essay books," especially those written by people who think they're vastly more clever than they actually are.

As an aside, it really bugs me when people buy sale books at Borders or Barnes & Noble or whatever and can't be bothered to take the stickers off of them. Why would you want to carry around a book with a sticker on it that says "Buy one, get the second one half price"?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. I also have his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which has been sitting in the "to read" pile for quite some time. I don't anticipate reading either any time particularly soon.

Knockdown: The Harrowing True Account of a Yacht Race Turned Deadly by Martin Dugard. This is the account of the disaster that befell the 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race, when a freak storm paralyzed several of the boats, causing multiple deaths. I actually remember hearing about this disaster when it occurred.

I'm rather morbid. I love a good disaster story, so this is the one I'm most likely to delve into first, along with my European village book (see 9/26/10 blog post) and my Genghis Khan book (which had been in the "to read" pile for a very long time until recently).