Lots O' Heavy Books

My Stack O Books

So one thing we found on the cheap in the States were books. Lots and lots of books. As both my wife and I are avid readers and used to love hanging out in bookstores on a Friday night just wandering the aisles looking for something to read, being back in the States with tons of English books was a little overwhelming.

In particular my Mother introduced us to Half Price Books Records, and Magazines. The concept is similar the record stores or CD stores of old that would buy your old stuff from you and sell it at reasonable prices to the next guy. The nice thing about this chain is that it essentially has all the same sections as a normal bookstore. As the majority of the titles are contributed past reads the shelves are littered with strange anomalies.

My favorite find, Twinkie, Deconstructed, which goes through the entire Twinkie ingredient list and explains where each ingredient comes from, how it is made, and why it is in the Twinkie in the first place. It is a great read too.

The only trouble with going nuts in an American bookstore is that you somehow have to get the books back to Europe with you. We had investigated the M-Bag for sending books oversea's via the U.S. Post Office. That was an attractive option at $3 a pound but after weighing our bags just before our flight we realized we have enough weight allowance left to put our stack of books (40 inches high, 1 meter for the metric folks) in our luggage.

With four large suitcases right at maximum capacity getting to and from airports was a bit difficult but now I have what I need to keep me busy for 2009.

As a side note, I had some fun experimenting in taking the photo for this post. I have included of shot of the pile leaning against a door with different tape measures as I was finding the best angle.