Chelsea, August 2006

I see this tag all over town, and it's always pink. In this case, I liked the color-coordination with the beige wall.

The charity book sale at my office finally came to an end on Friday, and we spent yesterday selling the 8,000-or-so leftover volumes to a bulk buyer, packing them up and totaling the receipts. Altogether we earned more than $40,000, making this our best year ever by far. (Last year’s receipts added up to $28,500.)

In addition to being able to feel good about raising money for a good cause, I like working for the book sale because I get first crack at the books!

Here’s what I came away with this year:

1. “Buddha or Bust,” Perry Garfinkel -- Garfinkel travels the globe to discover the heart of Buddhism and the reasons for its growing popularity, and discovers himself some things about himself in the process.

2. “Freakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner -- If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it really does work.

3. “Songs of the South,” Jennie Thornley Clarke (ed.) -- A 1913 volume of Reconstruction-era odes to Confederate soldiers and cotton bolls, by poets including Edgar Allan Poe and Sidney Lanier.

4. “Simple Gifts: Lessons in Living from a Shaker Village,” June Sprigg -- Sprigg’s memoir of living with elderly Shaker women in a vanishing settlement in New Hampshire in 1972.

5. “Lullaby,” Chuck Palahniuk -- A novelist I’ve wanted to try.

6. “Caught in Fading Light: Mountain Lions, Zen Masters, and Wild Nature,” Gary Thorp -- A Zen practitioner walks the woods of Northern California, in search of a mountain lion.

7. “Tropical Fish: A Golden Guide” -- I don’t have an aquarium now, but I had one as a child, and this small paperback reminds me of all my fish. (Plus, for a variety of reasons, it was free!)

8. “New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide,” Richard Alleman -- The classic guide to who did what where in New York, on- and off-screen.

9. “Gone to New York,” Ian Frazier -- Essays from a writer for The New Yorker and other magazines.

All of this cost me $26.50. Not too shabby!