JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

May 07 stash 5, originally uploaded by Koosama.

Mindful of my reading backlog, I only bought one book in May—an art book for kids called Seen Art? And a nice coloring book, because that’s how I ward off depression (it works for me). Then Ambeth said he was moving to a house with less shelf space so he was giving away a lot of books. Looting! To limit my avarice I only brought one tote bag, but got too many books anyway.

The jewels of this stash are The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, including facsimiles of the handwritten letters; and Confessions of a Master Forger (original title: Drawn to Trouble), the updated autobiography of Eric Hebborn. Hebborn “discovered” drawings by Leonardo, Van Dyck, Rubens, and Rembrandt, among other Old Masters, and when he was outed as a forger, he denied nothing. He died in mysterious circumstances in Rome in 1996. For further reading on art forgery, I got Christopher Wright’s The Art of the Forger, in which Wright argues that some of the world’s most famous paintings are in fact forgeries.

My friends and I share an interest in weird Church histories, so I got Joan Carroll Cruz’s The Incorruptibles—accounts of saints’ bodies which have not decomposed over centuries; Popes Complete—265 brief biographies (I checked: Rodrigo Borgia is in it); and The Girdle of Chastity, a fascinating history of chastity belts by Dr. Eric John Dingwall.

I also got some Gogol, Garcia Marquez, Tanizaki, Barthes (hopefully its brevity will forestall the migraine), and several history books (inc—check out this title—The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination). Which aggravates my own space problems, so I have to give away books to make room for the stuff. Every so often I put the books in boxes and donate them to a library, but I thought I’d let my blog readers have dibs.

Does anyone want a couple of dozen recent Filipino poetry and story collections? You’ll have to take the whole shebang. What about six Elmore Leonard paperbacks? Three novels by Philip Roth?

Update. Oneiros gets the books by Filipino authors, Connie the Philip Roths, and Sidewinder the Elmore Leonards. That takes care of the lot.