Narnia Bloggin': 2 Narnia books I've added to my collection, and 1 I didn't

previously in this series: The Curious Case of the Odd Omnibus

Following my (oft ignored) rule of posting a new Narnia Bloggin' post after every five posts. 

I went to my local Savers thrift store (dangerous) because I had been emailed a coupon for 30% off books & media (very dangerous), and I have no self control. I found a lot of great books, not least of which were two The Chronicles of Narnia (TCON) copies that I was staggered to find!

Remember me mentioning that Cliff Neilsen updated his digital art TCON covers? I had tentatively thought about collecting them when they eventually turn up in thrift stores etc. in the future, but I never thought I'd find one so soon! These literally just came out last year, and I found The Magician's Nephew (MN) with the new cover showing Polly coming up out of the pond! I like this cover a lot better than the old one, which looked too science fiction-y and scary. The new cover art is more whimsical and fantastical. My only quibble is that I like the position and look of the rings in the old cover better; they don't look as good flattened like that. Also some internet commenter said the 3 rings like that look like a Mickey head, and I can't unsee it. I wish Neilsen had just done 2 rings, 1 yellow and 1 green, interlocking; 3 makes no sense, as only 2 rings per child are used in the book. You can see the comparison of the old and new covers here.

 

Pretty decent summary, although my inner pedant doesn't like the inaccuracies (Polly was tricked into touching a magical ring which sent her elsewhere, and Digory was forced to go after her to bring her back. This summary is inferring that both kids went on "a daring quest to save a life".) Anyway.

When I went to put MN with the other Cliff Neilsen TCON copies I own, I found that I don't actually have the old MN cover, so it's good I bought this one! For some reason I thought I had them all. I think that if I come across the old MN cover, I may buy it just to have the entire original Cliff Neilsen digital art covers for TCON. It would have to be cheap but in a good condition, though. IDK. I def will buy the rest of the new cover art copies as I come across them in thrift stores and whatnot. 

 

In my more cover art for TCON blog post, I had shared pretty covers for TCON that I do not own. Halfway between the last 2 big images, I wrote:

I found some pretty medieval-inspired covers that I like a lot, via the C.S. Lewis editions website. To see the other TCON books' covers in that series, click on each book in the main TCON editions webpage. I would def buy these if I saw them at the thrift store etc. in good condition. I love medieval/renaissance-inspired art.  

I never really thought I would come across one of these at my thrift store, as I don't think they were published in the US (the UK, maybe?). But lo and behold, there was The Last Battle (LB) with its beautiful medieval illuminated manuscripts-inspired border and illustrated capitals spelling out NARNIA! This TCON series was published by Lions of HarperCollins in Glasgow, Scotland (I was right!); there seem to have been a couple of variants of these covers, as some of them were tie-ins with the BBC TCON miniseries from the eighties (just the books that the miniseries adapted: LWW, PC, & VotDT). In looking at the other TCON titles in this covers series, it looks like the illustrated borders are the same for all the books, and only the inside illustration changes for each book. 

It's so beautiful. I'm so happy :) This back of book summary is accurate, I feel. 

 

I did not end up buying and keeping a deluxe edition TCON omnibus after all, as the ones I looked at were all lightly damaged in some way and/or had very uneven page edges, unforgivable for such an expensive deluxe special edition with such pretty painted edges. I realize I hadn't really specified whether I kept the copy I exchanged or not, in that blog post. They all went back. I'll keep an eye out at bookstores for an undamaged copy with even, flat fore edges, but it's not a priority. Ah well. :/

Happy 4th of July

My mom came in my room after working this morning, took one look at me and said, "You look like you've accomplished a lot today." I was like YEAH I DID. Here is a list of today's accomplishments:

1. I slept in until after 10 am. I have to get up at 7:30 for work so this is a BOON.
2. I finished the book I was reading (this will probly be written about in a separate post as there are actually several [well, 3] books I was reading at one time).  
3. I wrote about it in my reading journal.
4. I got dressed. (A sundress and a sports bra totally count as getting dressed.)
5. I bought The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet with Barnes & Noble's 20% off coupon for this holiday weekend. So psyched to read it.
6. I downloaded today's Nook Free Fridays selection.
7. I checked my email.
8. I Facebooked and read some articles on the Internet.
9. I entered for some Disney giveaway.
10. I bought this purple P&P shirt I've been eyeing forever from Out of Print since they're having a sitewide 30% off sale right now!
11. I haven't yet but I'm going to download the free ebook of Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which I got from Open Road at ALA Annual last weekend.

September book haul

From an estate sale I went to a couple weeks ago:
-Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë (I read somewhere that fans of Jane Eyre would like this so I bought it)
-Laments For the Living by Dorothy Parker (I have her Enough Rope and adored it. This book is of short stories rather than poems but who cares)
-Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (I had bought a different copy for a friend for her birthday but apart from reading the few sonnets everybody knows I haven't read this myself)
-the aforementioned New York Public Library Desk Reference book, which I bought for and have at work

Oh I just remembered I had bought a book from an earlier estate sale as well. It's this 1800s book of Sir Walter Scott's collected poetical works, in leather. Not bookbinding leather, like straight up cowhide, with flowers painted on it. It's so old! I'm not a Scott fan (haven't read anything by him, although I have Ivanhoe waiting for me on my bookshelf) but it was so fragile and amazing I couldn't leave it behind. It has a picture and signature (probably also a picture, rather than physically signed) of the author inside, facing the title page, but the first like 8 pages are bug-eaten so I don't know which year it's from. Definitely from the 1800s, though.
I also bought from this estate sale the DVD of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I'd been wanting to watch for ages.

From my public library's year-round booksale:
-Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (read this already. Cracked up throughout, like straight up bursting out laughing p. much every page. One word: BANJOLELE. I must read the others. Only qualms: blackface is a plot point! Not once but twice!! And the N-word is dropped casually, constantly, by every character except for Jeeves [perf human being and the best]. Oh 1930s, you so racist. :/)
-Codex by Lev Grossman (I just like grabbed it off the shelf because it was called codex and the cataloging notes said medievalists–fiction. I'm currently reading this. It's about this guy, an investment banker or something, who gets assigned to catalog and sort a rare books collection/library of some English aristocrats and also gets hooked on a virtual reality, quest videogame which I think is supposed to mirror his IRL search for a mythical codex in that library. It's very slow moving; we just see the guy sort and catalog books and then go home and play the videogame and sleep. I love it. I can sort and catalog books all day; apparently I can also read about people sorting and cataloging books all day too. It's just my speed, interesting and old books and not too high-stakes. Also there's a standoffish medievalist grad student who helps the guy and she is basically 10000% done with everything and only cares about the books and medieval/Renaissance/book history. I love her. I'm sorta hoping they become bros instead of ending up together but that's what will probly happen.)

I just bought The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce, which is just as lovely as I remembered. Such a wonderful book. I had sorta forgotten about it until I saw the picture book at Barnes & Noble. It was, interestingly, a short animated film (which won an Oscar) first, then an app (which I did not know), and now a picture book. You'd think it'd be the other way around, ironically enough. Anyway, I found and read the book (gorgeous; they made it look like the one ML writes in!) but didn't buy it since picture books are hideously expensive. But lo and behold, I got a 20% off B&N coupon in my email and bought the book at a reduced price using the last of my giftcard money! Worth it.

Yardsale haul

• Lentenlands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis by Douglas H. Gresham ($1)
• Emma DVD (Gwyneth Paltrow version) ($1)
• Amélie DVD ($1)
• Bride & Prejudice DVD (yes, you read that right. It's the modern Bollywood retelling of P&P) (50 cents because it's just the DVD without the case)
• Possession DVD (ditto, 50 cents)

They also had all three extended editions of the LOTR movies but I already own the normal versions (also bought from a yard sale, lol) and let's be real, I would never get around to watching the extra footage. I haven't even watched the DVD extras from the Narnia movies.  Also they had some Tom Hanks movies and I wanted to call my sister and ask her if she wanted me to get them for her but my phone died. >:[

The family that lives on the corner across the street always has a yard sale every 6 months or so, and I usually walk down there and buy a classic book (this time it was the Barnes & Noble A Tale of Two Cities. 50 cents!). Well, the neighbor lady noticed my Pride & Prejudice sweatshirt and said she loves the story, that she's seen all the movies. I told her about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and she said she'll check them out! :DDD

I read Silas Marner and it was good, sad yet heartwarming at the end in that sympathetic, melodramatic way of most nineteenth century novels. It was good but from all that I'd heard of George Eliot, I sort of expected more? More fleshing out or explanations or whatever. There was a lot of buildup for Silas getting the little girl Eppie, and then it's just like "flashforward 18 years and Eppie's a gorgeous golden-haired girl!" Like of course she is. But for all that's spent on Silas's life prior to that? No depictions of single-father life? No struggles with raising a little girl on one's hermit/miserly own? And we're just told that Godfrey Cass just like marries his love, just like that? I hate just being told things. Show, don't merely tell! I just feel like there was a lot of potential in the story and with its characters. How did Godfrey convince his wife to marry him? How did she take over the household and get it running well? How did Godfrey live with the guilt of pretending the child wasn't his? I hate just being told stuff after the fact. IDK. I'm used to Dickens and Austen.

Anyway, I'm now reading Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales. I'm of course familiar with and have read most of them, but I like having a complete collection. I bought it at Barnes & Noble last Saturday night. It's not a gorgeous leatherbound book like the Hans Christian Andersen one that I bought at the same time, but the Grimm's was $8 while the other was $20, so. The Grimm's has a lovely wood scene painting as the dustjacket cover, while the HCA one is a gorgeous purple leatherbound one with gold designs. A bit too cutesy to be truly old-fashioned, but it's still nice. The books are uploaded to my LibraryThing (widget in sidebar). Oh, I also bought the fourth season of Ugly Betty on DVD, so now I own the entire show. I will have to watch it one of these days.

Barnes & Noble Haul

I love my family and friends. Whenever it's my birthday or Christmas or graduation, they all immediately know to give me Barnes & Noble giftcards. I have a lot thanks to graduating from UCLA, so I went to B&N and bought books (of course).
I got:
-Miracles by C.S. Lewis
-Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon [unfinished] by Jane Austen [in one volume]
-The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
-Abarat by Clive Barker

I'm pleased with these finds but I'm going to have to check a few finished versions of Sanditon out from the library. I think I mentioned that The Mystery of Edwin Drood is my favorite Dickens probably but I'm sad it's unfinished. We'll see how I like Sanditon and The Watsons. I've read Lady Susan before; it is a riot. She's a total Wilhelmina Slater rich femme fatale with the guys twisted around her finger. Love her.  I think I'm going to return Abarat, though, because there are no illustrations. Clive Barker is apparently also a painter, and the copy of Abarat I checked out from the library was hardcover and had his weird, creepy, wondrous paintings to supplement the story. Since I know about them I must have them in the copy of the book I own.
As always, all my books are in my LibraryThing (widget in sidebar).

Thrift Store Book Haul/Bookshelf Blues

Ah, spring break! How sweet it is to not have to worry about homework for a little under two weeks. Well, except that I should work on my portfolio. And I returned to my old room to find that my dad had rearranged it all and left me with 12 boxes of stuff to go through that are cluttering up my room. But oh well. One of the first things I did when I got home was to go to the neighborhood thrift store with my dad. He found a large mirror with a wooden frame he was able to varnish and hang over my mom's dresser for $5, and I bought books! I wanted to look at the clothes too but I never seem to make it there. This time I bought:
-The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I have this one already, obviously, but I'm collecting the Cliff Nielsen covers)
-Heroes and Villains: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling, The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame, and "Custard the Dragon" by Ogden Nash (this mini anthology was made for use in the classroom to teach elementary kids literature)
-The Golden Key by George Macdonald with illustrations by Maurice Sendak (lovely, lovely story. Maurice Sendak's style isn't a very good match for George Macdonald's stories, but I'm fond of him because he's one of the illustrators of my childhood. George Macdonald was basically C.S. Lewis's C.S. Lewis, if that makes any sense, and you see his influence in CSL's books)
-Ex-Libris by Ross King (a mystery set in 1600s England where a bookseller/antiquarian must find a lost manuscript. This sounds so up my alley; I can't wait to read it)
-Silas Marner by George Eliot
-Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende (a Chilean woman makes her way to Gold Rush California. I've been meaning to read Allende; there are so few Latina writers, especially Latina fantasy writers. This book is historical fiction though)
-Life of Pi by Yann Martel
As always, these are up on my LibraryThing (widget in sidebar).

I've also had to rearrange my books because when my dad moved the bookshelves, he put back the books but mixed mine with my sister's. It's interesting because he mostly left them in the same order, but in an entirely different place. So my C.S. Lewis shelf is down pat, as is for the most part my fairy tales/myths/Arthurian lit/primary fantasy shelf, but I'm not so sure about the bottom three shelves. I'd like to keep all my fantasy books together, especially because I have a lot of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones and they are/were all pals, but since I'm out of room I have a second fantasy block on the fourth shelf. Right now after CSL I have poetry, then Possession forming the poetry-literature bridge to my Austen books, and since those are all B&N Classics I keep The Scarlet Pimpernel with them and that leads me to mysteries (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Sherlock Holmes and Rivals/Further Rivals of, The Woman in White) then my Dickens (starting with The Mystery of Edwin Drood to bridge with the mysteries, then going backwards in time), then I have my second fantasy set because they don't quite fit in elsewhere, plus DWJ's Dogsbody bridges nicely with my animals books. Then from animal books I go into Old-Fashioned type Books and books about girls. Then after that it's just what fits (mostly modern). I'm actually thinking of switching my poetry/lit shelf and the fantasy/animals shelf so that it's after CSL; that makes more sense. And my dad stuffed other books of mine elsewhere, so I'm probly going to come across them and wail in despair. I've actually started putting some of my books (either religious or less-loved) in my sister's bookshelf; she has way fewer books than me. I do NOT need fewer books; I need more shelf space. And more time to read.

There's this contest I'm sort of toying with the idea of entering. Students are supposed to submit a bibliography of 50 or fewer books they've collected. I have exactly 50 CSL books if you count the extra Narnia books and ignore the George Macdonald writing anthology edited by CSL. I'm afraid I'd look like a fanatic turning that in, though. But I could also possibly win money. IDK.