Book Shopping

One of the greatest regrets I have is not actually reading the books assigned to me in English class.

Like many others I defaulted to SparkNotes, study guides, and reading the first and last chapters. College, though, adds a new perspective. The works we were assigned in English class are a selection from the canon of Western Literature. They are a part of being culturally literate, and only reading SparkNotes and claiming to be culturally literate is like only reading phonics and claiming to be literate.

I was browsing Amazon for books the other day, and scanning this list (my utterly unrealistic goal is to read the majority of these) to find something good to read. It's astounding how many of the books there were assigned reading in a high school AP English class. Now the so hated assigned reading has new appeal to me as books I actually want to read. Or perhaps more accurately for some of them, want to have read.

Shopping for books is fun though. Shopping on Amazon is also very fun, the products are so cross referenced and connected, that starting with one or two titles in mind, I can spend another hour adding books to my shopping cart until I realize I can't afford them. Wikipedia is like this too, damned internal links within articles are sucking up all the time which I should be spending studying.

The $0.99 price tag on books is an evil deception. But I thought I had found a way around it by buying multiple books from the same seller. Didn't work. It's still one shipping charge per book even if they all ship from the same location.