from Einstein's Daughter to Hemingway's Death

I weeded some paperbacks today. I tend the browsing paperbacks collection at the Claremont Branch in Berkeley. Because there's no budget for paperbacks I choose from donations and good stuff does come in. The flip side of adding new books is deleting old ones. Today I went through the list of science fiction and nonfiction and removed from the spinning racks books that have been going around and around under book hungry eyes for two years yet have left the building four times or less -- in a few cases, not once. Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, for instance. I'd thought we'd have a Hemingway die-hard or two passing through. But no. Either that or they long since pored over his every word. His fiction still does okay. I guess the bullfighting revival hasn't sparked yet. I wasn't familiar with any of the sci-fi/fantasy authors I was removing. I don't try very hard to keep up but I like a science fiction novel now & again. Oh yes, there was one -- Michael Crichton. His time has passed? His Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World, turned under uninterested eyes.

Other nonfic that came off the shelves today: Michele Zackheim's Einstein's Daughter, Lars Eighner's Travels with Lizbeth, Cleveland Amory's Ranch of Dreams, a 2006 issue of the literary magazine West Branch. Those, anyway, are the ones I'm hanging onto for possible lunchtime reading. Others that I turned over to the Friends of the Library for their book sale include: Surviving Schizophrenia, a Rita Mae Brown book on writing (I forget the title), and Vision on Fire (this one chronicles Emma Goldman's efforts on behalf of the good guys during the Spanish Civil War back in the 30s).