Tuesday, June 20, 2006

A very large stack of books

Amazon has a deal for you. The entire (to date) collection of 183 Library of America volumes can be yours for the low price of $3900. You'll save $2,500! Now keep in mind that each book is a really a number of books. You will get ALL of Faulkner in 5 volumes. You also get Kate Chopin's entire output in a single book. So this is a lot of reading. The prime audience would seem to be people who want to rapidly fill a bookshelf with impressive looking volumes or very hopeful parents. Or people who only give books for presents and want to stock up for the next 30 holidays.

The Amazon page has three first paragraph quizes for you to try out. At first I thought you just had to know but you have a series of books from which to choose. They are still pretty hard. You gotta love a quiz with Eudora Welty, Frederick Douglas, HP Lovecraft, Jim Thompson and Thoreau.

I should say that I own a small number of these books as I subscribed to the series for a few years. I stopped as I need to catch up and read more of them. I am unlikely to have gotten to John Dos Passos's USA, which is one of my favorite novels. The series is the closest thing we have to an American canon.

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