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Into the pile of books I am in the midst of reading I managed to spare an hour or so to read Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. This is the second volume in the series. I very much enjoyed the first volume not long ago. This second volume was fun but not quite as fun. It suffered from second child syndrome. The characters are established, the storyline is in motion but things just sort of swirled around and didn’t go anywhere.

Oh, yes, Scott fought evil ex-boyfriend number two but it was too easy. Scott knew who the guy was ahead of time, was expecting to fight him, actually set a day and time to fight. When the fight came he won the battle with hardly a hitch. The best part was the unexpected fight between Scott’s recent ex-girlfriend Knives Chau and Ramona, his current girlfriend whose exes he is having to fight. The fight between Knives and Ramona took place at a library. It was a draw so they will be meeting again another time I’m sure.

There is nothing else to say about this one. Light, fun fluff.

So let’s pad out the fluff with the titles of a couple books I recently acquired from doing a little bookstore shopping.

• The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. I love Murakmai so there was no way I’d pass this one up. I already acquired Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage back in October. Have I mentioned that? I think I may not have. I was hoping to read that one over my vacation but *embarrassed shrug* some things just don’t happen like we want them to.
• A new cookbook, Mayim’s Vegan Table by Mayim Bialik. You may recognize her as Amy from the TV show Big Bang Theory. She has recipes in here for kugel and even challah. Yum, yum, yum! I will be keeping Bookman busy in the kitchen asking him to make me this and make me that.
• The Martian by Andy Weir. Bookman actually got this one but I told him to. Ulterior motives? Yup, I want to read it too. A mission on Mars goes wrong and the crew is forced to evacuate. They think Mark is dead and leave him there. But he isn’t dead. Now he is stranded alone with damaged equipment and supplies that will run out long before a rescue mission could reach him. Sounds tense, doesn’t it?
• The Canterbury Tales “translated” by Peter Ackroyd. Back in college I had to read some of the tales in the original old English and it was like reading a foreign language. I enjoyed the stories but man, I was certainly never going to read any more of these than I had to. Ackroyd’s update is written in prose but from the beginning passage I read in the bookstore it seems like he does a fair job of keeping it updated but close to the original.
• My friend Cath in the Netherlands and I regularly exchange poetry through the mail. We have decided for 2015 to each make a study of two poets. I chose John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop. I will be starting off the year with Keats since I already began dipping into his letters. But that was a library book. I wanted my own copy to keep and mark up and refer back to. The Selected Letters of John Keats is out of print so I had to track down a copy online. It promises to be like new and is working its way to me through the postal system.
• Since I will be reading all of Keats’ poetry, I thought perhaps it was a good idea to actually own it. I have some of Keats as part of a huge college textbook of Romantic poets from a seminar I took back in the day. But it doesn’t have everything. Sadly, none of the bookstores had Keats on their shelves. I’d cry unbelievable but it’s really not given the minuscule size of poetry sections these days. So I have resorted to ordering the Penguin Complete Poems edition from Barnes and Noble online. That too is making its way to me through the post.

A Bit of a book buying binge for me. Haven’t done that in a while. What fun!