![](\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/pix\/MagicThief.jpg\")
It turned out that the only one of the books I was looking for that they had was Jumper<\/cite>, the Steven Gould novel that the recent movie was based on. I liked the movie but felt like there was a bunch missing from it; I hoped the book would fill things in. I was rather surprised at the checkout counter when one of the guys behind the desk said (loosely paraphrased), \"I saw the movie of this, but I felt like there was a bunch missing from it; I hope the book fills things in.\" I wonder if that's a common reaction, or just coincidence. (I had actually started reading the book a couple weeks ago, so I suspected that the storyline was different enough that it wouldn't be much help, but I was intrigued anyway.)<\/p>\nI also asked if they had two other books, which I hadn't found on the shelves: Philadelphia Chickens<\/cite> and David J. Schwartz's just-released Superpowers<\/cite><\/a> (which I'd heard him read from at WisCon and very much enjoyed). They said they had a copy of Chickens<\/cite> in stock but they couldn't find it on the shelves. Sadly, they didn't have Superpowers<\/cite>, and ordering through them doesn't tend to get them to order more than one copy.<\/p>\n I was pleased, though, to see that they had a couple copies of Sarah Prineas's just-released first novel, The Magic Thief<\/cite><\/a>, even set face-outward on the shelf. For those who haven't encountered it, it's a middle-grade<\/a> fantasy novel, the first in a new trilogy, featuring a young thief in a quasi-Victorian world who steals a magical focus from a wizard.<\/p>\n I also ended up picking up a copy of the first volume of the comic book Rex Mundi<\/cite><\/a>, which I hadn't heard of but which looked intriguing, and the latest Hartwell\/Cramer Year's Best SF<\/cite>.<\/p>\n The Prisoner of Zenda<\/cite>, though, seems like an excellent choice for this kind of thing, and if I'd been thinking I might've even bought it; I think my only copy of it is electronic. And now that I think about it and do some further research, the rest of the selections also seem like good choices of classic adventure books: The Lost World<\/cite>, The 39 Steps<\/cite>, Riddle of the Sands<\/cite>. I haven't read any of them (and not sure whether I've seen the Hitchcock movie of Steps<\/cite>), but they sound very adventuresome.<\/p>\n Anyway. I came home and ordered the rest of the books I wanted from Amazon, particularly the last three volumes of the complete Theodore Sturgeon short stories, which I had been misguidedly waiting for paperback editions of for years. I seem to have missed the window on volume 8, Bright Segment<\/cite>--it appears to have gone out of print, and I doubt there'll be a paperback version, and the used hardcover copies available via Amazon are pretty pricy. I'll probably pick one up there anyway sooner or later.<\/p>\n Anyway, all the book shopping cheered me up significantly. Yay, books! Remains to be seen whether that mood boost will last.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night I went grocery shopping, then stopped by my local bookstore. (Books Inc, in downtown Mountain View.) There were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[117],"class_list":["post-11227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-sturgeon"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/pix\/GreatBooksforBoys.jpg\")
I was startled to see a display of old-fashioned Adventure Novels, reprinted by Penguin, with the display title \"Great Books for Boys.\" I gather that Boys' Adventure is coming into vogue again, perhaps spurred by the success of the Dangerous Book for Boys<\/cite><\/a> (and Daring Book for Girls<\/cite><\/a>), but I was surprised by the particular selections. Well, okay, I was specifically surprised by the inclusion of H. Rider Haggard's She<\/cite>--certainly a classic adventure novel, but one which is not unproblematic in a variety of ways in the modern world. Another selection, Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday<\/cite>, also seems an odd choice; I haven't read it, but I gather that it has pretty heavy philosophical underpinnings.<\/p>\n