Sunday, August 31, 2003 Books in the Mail Whoops, it's been a couple of weeks, but I forget to mention my big book shipment from Daedalus Books. A couple of times a year, maybe, I order books from Daedalus, a quality remaindered-book catalog based in Maryland that I often ordered from when I lived in California. They ship internationally, charging a flat $15 for up to 10 books (plus $1.50 for each additional book), meaning that it only makes sense to order in bulk, as it were. The shipping is by sea--normally taking 5 weeks to arrive--so I order stuff that looks vaguely interesting or I'm not in a hurry about. This most recent shipment of 14 books, for some reason, took 8 weeks to arrive. It seems a postal system problem, since Ben (one of my co-workers) had ordered a book by mail from a different US bookseller, and his shipment was similarly delayed. In fact, for a couple of weeks, we would greet each other at the office by asking, "So, did you get your books yet?" There was, perhaps, a side benefit: because it took so long I had quite forgotten what I'd ordered, so in opening the box I got the chance to be surprised all over again. One title I did remember, because I'd discussed it with Ben was Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. The name of Walter Benjamin , a German literary critic, had somehow come up in a conversation, and I had confessed that I had never heard the name except as part of the above title. Ben, in turn, confessed that, although he was born in Texas (but mostly raised in the UK), he's never heard of Larry McMurty. It was the one book out of the fourteen in this most recent batch that I remembered, since I wanted to show it to Ben, and perhaps pass it on to him. In any case, in this book shipment were: From Dawn to Decadence : 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun A Dictionary of Diplomacy by Geoff Berridge & Alan James High Lonesome Road by Betsy Thornton The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense by Michael Shermer Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily by Theresa Maggio Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell Driving over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Lynn Alley Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame by Victoria Brooks, Bob Shacochis, Paul Bowles A Living Bay: The Underwater World of Monterey Bay by Lovell Langstroth, Libby Langstroth, Todd Newberry, & the Monterey Bay Aquarium The Fracture Zone : My Return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality by Thomas Lynch Where the Earth Ends: A Journey Beyond Patagonia by John Harrison Essentials of Cooking by James Peterson Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry 10:14:30 AM    Comment on this post! []