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Bookstore Shocker

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A small neighborhood bookstore in Pontevedra shocked my sensibilities, and not in a good way. Books weren’t arranged by author’s name, genre, country, or language. They were strewn around in untidy, careless piles. There was no principle behind the arrangement unless there’s such a thing as principled messiness. It took effort to prevent myself from sorting them nicely.

Only an absolute maniac could find anything in that ungodly disarray. Thankfully, I am a maniac, and here is my haul:

Prepare yourselves, my friends. Five of these are not fiction, so we’ll be able to discover new ideas.

26 responses to “Bookstore Shocker”

  1. Ol. Avatar
    Ol.

    I look forward to reading your reviews. Izqd can y der. is probably the kind of book I need to read now. Also, geopolitics is a hot topic, at least in the francophone world. Nice hunting! Enjoy Galicia! Where Spanish food is actually good.

    Ol.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      They have this very curious habit of service a pound-cake type thing for free with coffee. People put it into the coffee and eat it out with teaspoons.

      We did not try it ourselves.

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      1. Ol. Avatar
        Ol.

        I was unaware of that habit!

        Ol.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I’ve only seen it in pretty old people. Maybe a rural custom.

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  2. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Books weren’t arranged …. They were strewn around in untidy, careless piles”

    I was in a used book store in 2023 in Malta like that (another visitor made a short youtube video of it but it would not do your blood pressure any favors).

    Spy novels next to French textbooks next to kids books next to historical romance next to manga…. I was interested in books in Maltese and the owner took me to where they predominated and helped me pick out a handful.

    Part of my wanted to dive in and check every nook and cranny and part of my wanted to run away screaming and part of my was afraid that a big pile or random books might fall on my head….

    Sadly I didn’t have a chance to check out of it was still there during last Christmas….

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      But get this: it wasn’t even a used book store. These are new expensive books. There were boxes of new bestsellers spilling out onto the floor.

      This was a very strange experience.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “new expensive books …. spilling out onto the floor”

        Kind of weird, but…. when I go to Spain it’s not to find order and logic, so…..

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  3. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    How I envy you. Was in Pontevedra only once, in 1990… Great memories!

    Books in disarray: such a Spanish thing! They could be potatoes or beans or pears… No need to sort them, such a lovely way of getting a book: by sheer luck of the draw.

    Again, how I envy you! Reminds me of a lovely trove of old-fashioned copybooks that I came across in a dusty stationery shop in Santiago de Compostela… bought the whole lot!

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    OT: somewhere in that list of pardons Biden just signed, Leonard Peltier finally got his sentence commuted.

    So I guess I can finally think of something positive to say about the JB term?

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  5. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Also OT: but apparently part of that stack of papers DJT signed yesterday afternoon was: full pardon of all the J6ers, AND all the recent political prosecutions of prolife activists! Brandon Straka is cleared. Haven’t seen official word on Bevelyn yet, but, fingers crossed!

    https://x.com/VoteHarrisOut/status/1881591115478151447

    https://x.com/BrandonStraka/status/1881514312411324737

    Might be in this link, but I am on on X so can’t see it:

    https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1881497882286776681

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      AND DANGITALL IT’S GONNA SNOW HERE TODAY.

      I know it’s super fun where y’all are, but here, it’s the fracking apocalypse. A once-in-35-years weather event we are radically unprepared for. And nobody here can drive in *good* weather. No salt, no plows, no snow tires, and at best maybe the 5% of the population here knows how to drive in those conditions.

      The last time this happened, my county used dump trucks full of sand, and road-grading equipment, to spread sand on the bridges. The weight cracked one of them, and we had to urgently move the timetable up for replacing the thing.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “once-in-35-years weather event we are radically unprepared for”

        I remembered the one time it really snowed when I lived in North Florida (it got cold enough several times every year but the other conditions were usually missing).

        First I almost broke my neck cause I didn’t realize snow covered steps were slippery…. then the power was out for several hours (fortunately I had gas heating and some people didn’t have power for a week or more… ice made branches fall onto power lines and…. yeah nothing good happens then in a city full of trees….).

        Then a friend stopped by and insisted we go out to see what’s going on and go to the movies… the parking lot there was every so slightly inclined so… saw lots of vehicles sliding around…..

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Was that, by chance, the infamous Blizzard of ’89?

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          1. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            “infamous Blizzard of ’89?”

            OMG yes…. mentally I had moved it a couple of years later (confusing it maybe with another cold spell when I was still living in the same place)…..I was sure it was 1991 but checking other things it must have been 89 which means my brain has begun the wild mixing of events…

            Similarly, at an online conference during covid a speaker was from UF and I looked up Gainesville on google maps in a fit of nostalgia… and was hopelessly confused for the longest time as mentally I had switched the east/west axis to north/south…. it took me the longest time to find places I had known very well… (and the fact that lots of landmarks had been knocked down and replaced by anonymous office buildings didn’t help….

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              Yeah, it’s like that. I usually flip the N/S axis. I don’t know why, but in my head, Payne’s Prarie wants to be north of town.

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        2. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          –roughly same thing happened in my hometown in 89. It was right around Christmas, my grandparents were in to visit, staying in the family fishing cabin in the north end of the county, like 30 minutes’ drive from us on a normal day. So we set out Christmas morning to go see them, and had to stop at a Waffle House for breakfast halfway because it turned out to be like a 2-hr odyssey in those conditions. Cars in ditches *everywhere*, people just sailing through intersections sideways… we watched this one poor woman in a huge Detroit sedan trying to get up a steep driveway– kept revving the engine, going almost up the slope, then sliding backwards back down into the road, over and over.

          My parents had lived for a time in the frozen north, and knew what they were doing, but nobody else did, so it hardly mattered. We crawled up that highway. At the cabin, the heat pump outflow had a sprinkler attached to it, and of course the heat had been running all night. Sprinkler had been in range of a tree, a fence, a couple of shrubs and a weedy patch, and had made an astonishing ice garden. We took the family Christmas photos there that year.

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      2. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        methylethyl

        LOL, who is this y’all, sure it is great for the kids, but somebody has to shovel all the @#$% climate warming ;-D

        Liked by 1 person

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Hehe. I sure got enough of that while living the the Frozen North.

          It is real, big-flakes, blowing-wind, Christmas-movie snow out there right now. The kids are in some kind of Florida-child nirvana. They are wearing dish gloves and trying to scrape the 1-inch accumulation off the yard with dustpans, to build a snowman 😀

          Neighbor kid was over in his sandals and socks to help…

          Liked by 2 people

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            That’s extraordinary! I hope everybody is safe. Weather conditions are, indeed, very wintery across North America. We have record colds back home. Which, of course, will end they day I come back because why should I have any fun?

            Liked by 1 person

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            1. methylethyl Avatar
              methylethyl

              we have got at least six inches, on the ground, right now, and still snowing. It’s extraordinary. At least on our street, people seem to be heeding the stay-off-the-roads alerts. Most everything is closed, not just govt stuff, but everything nonessential, because you can’t reasonably ask your employees to get out on the roads either. First time my kids have ever gotten a snow day 🙂

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              1. methylethyl Avatar
                methylethyl

                Jiminy Cricket!

                We are due for another couple hours of snow here. I just went out with a yardstick to measure on the smooth white flat space in the front yard, and it’s 8.5 inches deep.

                Previous record for all of recorded history in this town was 5″.

                I can’t imagine that it won’t be 9″ total, at least.

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    2. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      Apologies for cluttering the combox! Delete if a nuisance.

      https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/return-to-in-person-work/

      Federal employees have been ordered to show up to work, per executive order 😀

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        I want you to enjoy with me here, the WaPo switching their editorial guidance. J6 is now, MSM-officially, a “Riot”, not an “Insurrection”.

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/20/trump-pardons-jan-6-defendants

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    3. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      No deportations yet?

      Let’s hope we see something soon.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        We’ll see!

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      2. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Apparently the asylum-application-app has already been switched off. So that’s a good start.

        https://peterhalligan.substack.com/p/it-always-was-as-easy-as-that-trump

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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