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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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Today I went to the annual VNSA book sale. I normally avoid the Saturday craziness in favor of Sunday’s more relaxed atmosphere and half-off pricing plan. If you’ve never been, you absolutely must go sometime. There’s tens of thousands of books in a large hall, all relatively well-organized and accessible. I usually get quite a few good finds, even on Sunday. Of course, the best stuff usually gets purchased on Saturday but those people get there at 5 a.m. and wait in line for several hours for that. I did it once, but didn’t particularly enjoy it.

Here are the fifty books that I bought, in no particular order:
<ul>
<li>The Practice of Management by Peter F. Drucker</li>
<li>Give War a Chance by P.J. O’Rourke</li>
<li>The Essentials of C Programming Language by Ernest Ackermann</li>
<li>Bloom County: Loose Tails by Berke Breathed</li>
<li>Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel</li>
<li>All the Trouble in the World by P.J. O’Rourke</li>
<li>The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski</li>
<li>How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb</li>
<li>Proverbs to Live By by Gail Peterson</li>
<li>Cyber Rules: Strategies for Excelling at E-Business by Thomas Siebel and Pat House</li>
<li>Emily Dickinson’s Poems by Thomas Johnson</li>
<li>Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold</li>
<li>Total Quality Control for Management: Strategies and Techniques from Toyota and Toyoda Gosei by Masao Nemoto</li>
<li>P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training by Dr. Thomas Gordon</li>
<li>Unleashing the Killer App by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui</li>
<li>Adventures of a Verbivore by Richard Lederer</li>
<li>Holidays in Hell by P.J. O’Rourke</li>
<li>Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats by Douglas Bush</li>
<li>The Theory of Poetry by Lascelles Abercrombie</li>
<li>Managing for Results by Peter F. Drucker</li>
<li>The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolf Flesch</li>
<li>The Power of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden</li>
<li>Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter F. Drucker</li>
<li>Rational Thinking: A Study in Basic Logic by John Bennett</li>
<li>The Works of Bret Harte by Walter J. Black</li>
<li>The Works of Victor Hugo by Walter J. Black</li>
<li>The Works of Gilbert and Sullivan by Walter J. Black</li>
<li>The Spirit of Enterprise by George Gilder</li>
<li>Honoring the Self by Nathaniel Branden</li>
<li>Business Engineering with Object Technology by David Taylor</li>
<li>Versus by Ogden Nash</li>
<li>One Hundred and One Classic Love Poems by Contemporary Books</li>
<li>The Oxford Book of American Verse by F.O. Matthiessen</li>
<li>Poems by Alfred Tennyson by J.F.A. Pyre</li>
<li>City Ballads by Will Carleton</li>
<li>Poetry Handbook by Babette Deutsch</li>
<li>American Poetry and Prose by Norman Foerster</li>
<li>Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell</li>
<li>The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World: Part 1 by Richard Aldington</li>
<li>Haiku Poetry Volume 2 by J.W. Hackert</li>
<li>The Pursuit of Poetry by Louis Untermeyer</li>
<li>The Great Valley by Edgar Lee Masters</li>
<li>Positively Outrageous Service and Showmanship by T. Scott Gross</li>
<li>The Deming Management Method by Mary Walton</li>
<li>The New New Thing by Michael Lewis</li>
<li>The Colonial Experience: 1607-1774 by Clarence B. Carson</li>
<li>The Beginning of the Republic: 1775-1825 by Clarence B. Carson</li>
<li>The Sections and the Civil War: 1826-1877 by Clarence B. Carson</li>
<li>The Growth of America: 1878-1928 by Clarence B. Carson</li>
<li>The Welfare State: 1929-1985 by Clarence B. Carson</li>
</ul>

Reviewing them, you see some clear trends: poetry, P.J. O’Rourke, and business. I know that I’ve become more interested in all three lately—the results of which you, fair reader, will see one of these days.