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What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

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Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#171

Post by chanbam »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #129
gostsamo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I read HPMOR and this paragraph was one of many delights there: The cold in the room seemed to deepen. “A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin.” Harry swallowed. “What...sort of curse?” And the fury on Professor Quirrell’s face was no longer contained. “Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffind…

Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting

I wholeheartedly recommend it

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#172

Post by nanomonkey »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #129
gostsamo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I read HPMOR and this paragraph was one of many delights there: The cold in the room seemed to deepen. “A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin.” Harry swallowed. “What...sort of curse?” And the fury on Professor Quirrell’s face was no longer contained. “Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffind…

Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting

It is good, but loooong. I would suggest the audio-book for a painless experience.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#173

Post by russellbeattie »

geocrasher wrote: post #151
russellbeattie wrote: post #71

Not the strangest thing in the world, but I'm currently on a Mark Twain reading binge. He's absolutely amazing - if all you've read of his is Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, you need to read his non-fiction travelogues. His observations were prescient almost beyond belief, and his acerbic humor is laugh out loud funny. Here's the strange bit: His book "Roughing It" is about his experience as a young man of moving to…

"Roughing It" is one of my all time favorite books. I grew up around Virginia City (Reno/Carson) and will be moving back to that region in a couple of weeks. It remains one of my favorite books. I need to give it another read.

Nice! I live in the Bay Area and been to Tahoe a bunch of times, though never to the Nevada side. I didn’t know anything about the Comstock Lode besides the name. It’s an amazing story. But is Virginia City just sitting on top of a massive empty mine to this day??

Twain’s descriptions of how empty Tahoe was then are pretty incredible to imagine. He guessed that they may have been the only people camping on the lake at the time.

The part where he accidentally starts a raging forest fire that spreads over the mountains is much less humorous today, I have to admit. Hopefully it was one of the times he was exaggerating for effect.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#174

Post by LegitShady »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #87

My Israeli friend went thru his Grandmother's books after her death. Found hundreds in 'old Shekels' among the pages. Saving against some disaster I imagine. Except they were worthless - there was an amnesty for turning them in, that had expired decades ago.

My mom once told me (morbidly so i guess) that when she passes to flip through all the books and check all her cd cases. I guess that's where she keeps her emergency cash as well.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#175

Post by hiptobecubic »

burlesona wrote: post #147
shepherdjerred wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you recommend HMOR? I’ve never heard of it, but the Wikipedia page sounded interesting

I thought it was quite good. If you basically like Harry Potter but find it infuriating how often the protagonists problems could have been solved in five minutes if they would have just told the adults... then HPMOR might interest you. Now, it's a didactic book, it's rather long, and you may or may not agree with the author's worldview, so whether you'll really enjoy it I can't say. But it's very well-written and in…

I feel like basically the only way in which the original Harry Potter story is more believable is that in the original story, almost everyone is impressively thoughtless

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#176

Post by bombcar »

vlunkr wrote: post #65
bluGill wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good auctioneers make sure that there is a buyer for specific things like that. I'm surprised that there wasn't a used book buyer in the crowd. Though maybe his guy didn't show up.

It's a Salvation Army auction. I imagine the main purpose is to dump stuff that they haven't found any other use for. They get all this stuff for free, any money they happen to make from an auction is just a nice bonus.

Exactly this - and 99% of the time a “pallet of books from Salvation Army/Goodwill” will be entirely romance novels and cookbooks and not worth the pulp.

Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

#180

Post by asciimov »

jacobolus wrote: post #20
spywaregorilla wrote: post #14

> He looked around at the faces in the crowd and said, “I’m opening the bidding at one dollar.” I about shit myself. I bid the $1 immediately to get things rolling. Well, after I bid, he looked around and said, “Once, twice, sold that man there for $1.” I just laughed… and wondered how the Hell I was going to get this pallet home and what I was going to do with all those books. > When I asked the auctioneer afterward…

The books were worth tens of thousands of dollars (sold individually on the second-hand book market, after being carefully catalogued etc.), but nobody interested in buying books happened to be at the auction and the auctioneer set a $1 minimum bid because he didn’t know anything about books and was more interested in disposing of the books than making money from the sale. The auction house could surely get significa…

Like most used things these days, book buying/selling/collecting was way easier 20 years ago, before smart phones.

Nowadays half of the market is flippers and scalpers, prices have shot up, and nobody is getting a pallet of good books for a dollar anymore.

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