Springtime Book Porn

Was bored today with what I had on hand to read, so I decided to make a trip again to McKay's.  Browsed through the foreign language section first (as I am wont to do) and I found two very dissimilar books that caught my eye.  The first is Che Guevara's El diario del Che en Bolivia, in Spanish of course.  The other seems to be a fairly popular German epic fantasy series opener (a prequel in this case) by Michael Peinkofer called Die Zauberer (The Magician is the English translation for the title).  My German is too rusty to consider tackling this in the near future, but I bought it in part because this 2009 cover might be of interest to those who like hooded cover characters.  Thoughts on this cover and how it compares to US/UK covers of the 2009-2012 period?

Also decided to check out a 19th century play by el Duque de Rivas, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino, and a translation by an Italian writer, Dacia Maraini's Voices, based on the blurb's focus on Maraini's tendency to "ask fundamental questions about the human condition."

Boniface Mongo-Mboussa's Désir D'Afrique caught my attention because I am very unfamiliar with African writers writing in French (not that I'm all that well-informed of those writing in English or other languages).  Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek is one of those modern classics that I have yet to read.  I hope to rectify that in the near future.

Fae Menne Ng's Bone attracted my attention due to its description of Asian-American life in San Francisco's Chinatown.  Doris Lessing is an author I've been meaning to read more of over the past few years, so buying a copy of her The Memoirs of a Survivor was a no-brainer.

McKay's has begun selling a small number of new books at their new location and Tupelo Hassman's Girlchild has an intriguing premise to it.  I really enjoyed the two Colson Whitehead books I've read to date (Zone One and The Colossus of New York), so I am looking forward to reading John Henry Days in the near future, around the time I read his The Intuitionist.

Still have almost $5 in store credit.  Not bad for barely taking in any books this time (I plan to take in much more the next time I go, after I begin another book cull to reduce the numbers in my house by 100-200 over the next three months).