The Best Laid Plans… The Lifeline Book Sale

Went to the Lifeline Bookfest yesterday. Lifeline is an Australian charity that runs a Crisis Support Line, offering phone support for suicide prevention and bereavement support.

Over nine days they sell millions of second hand books donated at their charity shops and other collection points (I think there are also donations of remaindered books, as sometimes you see multiple copies of the same book all in very good condition).

The books are laid out on tables in a huge hall (they take over several halls in the Brisbane Exhibition and Conference Centre), and as books are purchased they lay out more books, so it’s a case of choose from whatever is currently on the tables. The books are split into $1, $2.50, and “high quality”.

Based on past experience, I hit the $2.50 selection (I’ve found the $1 selection is of variable quality, and for a lot of the classics—at least the out of copyright ones—the high quality section is close to, or even more than, the price of a new mass-market paperback). It took over 5 hours to go though just the Australiana and Literature/Classics tables, but I’ve more or less bought a year of reading for not a lot of money.

From the Literature/Classics table:

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Fanny Burney, Evelina^†
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales^‡
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
• —, Great Expectations
• Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundered Years of Solitude
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
• D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
• Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
• Vladimir Nabakov, Lolita
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho^†
• Anthony Trollope, The Warden
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
• Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey
• Émile Zola, Germinal

^† I expect these to be dreadful, but before I tackle Northanger Abbey, I feel I need to read some of the books Jane Austen is satirizing.
^‡ This will be a long-term project, as it’s in middle English.

Noticably absent were Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Proust. The Cervantes I bought was the only copy I saw. On the other hand, I was wading through lakes of Jane Austen.

I also picked up a few genre books from that table:

• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
• Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly

Memo to self, next time take a list of the Sherlock Holmes books I already have, so I can complete the set.

From the Australiana table:

• Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River
• Murray Bail, Eucalyptus
• Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
• —, True History of the Kelly Gang
• Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life
• A.B. Facey, A Fortunate Life
• Miles (Stella) Franklin, My Brilliant Career
• Mrs. Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn, We of the Never Never
• George Johnston, My Brother Jack
• Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain
• Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Sally Morgan, My Place
• Ruth Park, The Harp in the South
• Neville Shute, A Town Like Alice

Bryce Courtenay, Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Christina Stead, Christos Tsiolkas, Patrick White (at least Voss, Tim Winton, and Markus Zusak were not in evidence.

I also picked up a few fact books (I dislike the term “non-fiction”—defining something by what it is not is silly):

• Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance
• Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
• Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Doesn’t quite match up with the original plans, but it’s a decent start on the classics.