WHAT I'M READING . WHAT HE'S READING

THE SHINING - STEPHEN KING

 



I've searched used-book stores across Washington for years to find a used copy of The Shining (but never got around to simply ordering one online).  On a time-killing trip to The Goodwill, I come across this simple and beautiful copy sitting timidly between Chicken Soup For The Teenage Soul and an Anne Rice novel.  It is paperback, to boot (my favorite)!  I nearly scream in the middle of a sea of jabbering children and shawled women crouching to read the self-help books.  I'm so excited, I start feverishly reading the titles of the books that are left to scan.  Pulp novel... shitty pulp novel... natural cookbook... On Writing!  Another Stephen King book, and one that had been stolen from me years past.  It was a wonderful trip to goodwill, and at a total of $3.00, I could hardly believe it.

I would normally have two books to mention on these posts, but we won't go book-hunting until tomorrow.  Joe just finished The Shining this morning before class, and it took him less than 24 hours to read.  This morning I wake up to find him smiling and nearly pulling out his hair in excitement.  Throughout the book he suspected - and at the end it all came together - that this book had numerous references to Stephen Kings world in The Dark Tower series (of which Joe is lost within for the rest of his life).

In our Uptown Shopping Center here in Richland, there's five antique stores and a large used book, comic and game store called Adventures Underground.  One antique store has an expansive library in the back.  I hate to think of the person who must have died, and whose family just put their books in an antique store.  But Joe and I are thankful, for we've found many a treasure in it's depths.  My unearthed gem is a first edition hardback of Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  Searching through the shelves, I could hardly read the gold lettering on the blue binding, so I of course snatched it out.  It's always the ones with no title or dust cover that are the lucky finds.  I had just bought a small paperback of this book and read it a few weeks before, and as I opened it I found a tattered ripped piece from a newspaper advertising little girls' Mary-Janes.  It was this and it's uneven pages that made me research more into it's printing date, after purchasing it. 

My husbands gem was another first edition; Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.  He had been searching for this non-fiction for years and we found it without dust cover and sitting on top of the standing books on the top shelf.  It's pages were rough and beautifully uneven, and filled with age-stained stories and photos of all the great Spanish bull fighters.

I hope that tomorrow we can unearth more treasures.