Cody Musser vs Internet: Take Two!

I'm sure that is a relief to most everyone that is actually visiting. Dystopia is cool, sure, but it can get a little ...meh... after the eighth or so consecutive novel. So, I can only imagine then what reading my poorly written blurbs on uncountable dystopian novels can be like. Chinese water torture, I'd imagine. We should all be pretty much stoked that this is all I covered in my dystopian literature course, as if there were more, I'd surely be absolving myself from returning to regular content. Alas, there are no more, and here I am, to return to posting about games and movies and the like. I hope I was missed. Before that though, I did ask for one more minute on books. See, today was quite the book day.

Working at a book store yields the occasional day that, for lack of a better term, could be called ... HOLY FREE FUCKING BOOK DAY! Today was that day ... strip day. Occasionally, we have too many copies of one book or another, they simply aren't selling, and when this occurs, specifically to mass market paperbacks, there are just too many for it to be cost effective to return them all to the publisher. Therefore, mass market paperbacks are stripped, the covers removed, and the bulk of the novels are trashed, or in our case, relegated to cardboard boxes and then picked clean by the vulture-like staff of a bookstore. A few strips here and there and you might get a good book to take home, if you're lucky enough to have done the strips or had someone tell you about them. Today, though, was a little different. We had 650 strips. Yeah, let it settle in. 650 books were headed to the dustbins today, mostly from fiction, but also mystery, romance, and science fiction, and to save them from their fate, they needed a hero, a reader of the greatest variety. They needed me.

So, scour the boxes I did, and goodness, look at my bounty.



Nary a dent on 650, but there was (after I had already filled a bag, I found this out) a lightly suggested limit of 5 ... or so. I'm told this rule is definitely not enforced. That's probably good. Here's the lineup:

Aztec and Aztec Autumn by Gary Jennings - Supposedly great novelizations of Aztec fiction.
Casino Royale by Ian Flemming - I've never read 007, so why not start at the beginning?
Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield - A very timely novelization of the battle of Thermopylae.
A Hellboy novelization that seemed interesting.
Sarum and London by Edward Rutherford - The suggestion of my cafe manager. Two large and daunting historical pieces of fiction.
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl - A serial killer murders through Dante's Inferno.
Two books from the Dark Tower series by Steven King - I've been meaning to get on it all.
Two random Robotech novelizations that ... well, they were free. Come on.
What's In Your Food by ... Statham - It's a food guidebook ... again ... free.
Halo: Ghosts of Onyx by Eric Nylund - A totally pleasant surprise.
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - It was a movie, and it sounded familiar.

Not bad, eh? It's a little less cool when you realize the books all look like this:



Obviously, with all of those books, my reading should be lined up all through the summer. Oh ... wait, I already had started the beginning of another mountain of books for the summer.



I won't go through the entire listing of this one, but take heed of the hot stuff like Camus, Kafka, and some new Palahniuk that, in truth, won't last the rest of the week let alone make it to Summer Reading. It's. So. Good.

Anyways, that should be it for books a while. I'll talk about video games again, like I promised.