BOOKED

i always wonder, why even if you have more money than you'll ever likely to spend in your life time you'd still be looking for bargains.... i've seen this many times... some of the people i know who earn hundreds of thousands a year will grumble if they have to pay a couple of dollars more for that pirated computer software or games or would not buy things if it's about fifty cents above the price they think it should be. so i don't really feel that terrible saying that yes, i confess... i too am a cheapskate...especially when it comes to buying books. And more specifically, i'll say this. Perhaps more than ninety percents of books in my library - which is threathening to take over my whole living space - are bought from sales of one kind or another or from heavily discounted bargain bins. but this does not mean to say that i buy craps...in fact my collection is decidedly eclectic...even if i say so myself.

at the risk of sounding like a book snob, i confess that i would not pick a sophie fucking kinsella , or danielle asshole steele books or harry bloody potter if they are given to me for FREE!. but here's another thing. call me a cheapskate if you like, I was really looking forward to read gabriel garcia marquez autobiography Living to tell the tale but the price was , shall we say 'above my cut-off point'...so i'll wait...for it to appear in sales, and i've been waiting for it for more than theee years as this book first appeared sometimes in 2003! . and a few monts ago i saw the orhan pamuk non fiction 'istanbul' and as i've read an excerpt of of it sometimes back in GRANTA i was really looking forward to this one too...and standing there oblivious to everybody in the middle of the bookshop aisle i was completely absorbed reading that part of the book about gustave flaubert getting the clap on his journeys to the middle east...randy bugger that he was... and you would think i'd do the decent thing and buy the book... but no, i behaved like a damned cheapskate and decided not to buy it becuase it was a few ringgit shall we say 'above my cut-off point'. so i'll wait... and i justify myself with the lame excuse that i can afford to wait too as i still have thousands of books to read....

and here's another thing...i'm currently reading 'factotum' by bukowski and i bought this , yes, from a discount bin and if it was not for this i would not have bought it as the normal price is yes, shall we say 'above my cut-off point'...and what a good book it was too...i wished i would have discovered bukowski during my early formative years but even now i still find the book very enetrtaining. life of drifters and hobos seem to be a lot more colorful and interesting than most people i know it seems. and incidentally i had to stop reading 'stuart a life backward' another good book about a hobo because of this. and i guess i'll segue through and read his other famous book 'ham on rye' which i also bought yes, from a warehouse sales...and here's another thing... i was reading wikipedia on bukowski and belatedly discovered that he wrote a screenplay to an autobiographical film about himself 'barfly' and there is an excellent documentary on him according to rottentomatoes bukowski:born into this' so, i did what any self respecting cheapskate would do... i download these from internet .... for free.