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Mid last week I lugged back some books culled from Brit Council Library's selection of items which hadn't been borrowed for a long time, or at all. If they are any indication of what is not the reading preference of local members of the library, then all the better for me when comes the next cull BC lib lays out another superb selection for people like me.

I was the second person to go around two rows of tables laden with items withdrawn from the library, including magazines selling for just RM1. I was right on time, at 10 AM, when the video conferencing room opened. However a woman was already inside,the first one there in fact. She was obviously very early, probably very eager. She was already fingering the book spines. I espied a resigned look on her face: what an awful selection! And I drove in so early! Luckily for me,she was not making any selections yet. She was definitely of the ilk I'm talking about, who probably went for good-reads, easy-reads, chic-lits, bestsellers, thrillers, and all that are the reverse of what I picked up when I went a few circles around the row of tables, past her. Here are my grabs:

Short story collections:
AL Kennedy's Indelible Acts
James Kelman's The Good Times
Jackie Kay's Why don't you stop talking

paperbacks:
Tim Park's Mimi's Ghost
David Peace's Nineteen Eightythree
Neil Jordan's Sunrise with Sea Monster
Alice Thomas Ellis's The Sin Eater
Iris Murdoch's A fairly honourable defeat
Patrick Neate's Twelve Bar Blues
Shena Mackay's An Advent Calendar
Zadie Smith's White Teeth

Hardbacks:
William Golding's Lord of the Flies (special Faber Library collection)
Tim Winton's Dirt Music
Jeanette Winterson's Art & Lies
Chrissie Glazebrook's Blue Spark Sisters
Michael Frayn's Spies
Shena Mackay's Heligoland
William Boyd's Any Human Heart
Abdul Razak Gurnah's By the Sea
JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello

I actually checked out most of the books before, except for just a few. You'd see I also got an easy read - guilty but not ashamed - in the form of Glazebrook because I was laughing all through her book.

After this, still more books to collect, from Kino, where I got McEwan's latest and three paperbacks, of Philip Roth's Everyman, Will Self's The Book of Dave and Louise Welsh's The Bullet Trick. All 20% off already! So I didn't have to use the special discount voucher, and the cashier gave me another voucher. They are for discounts of selected categories every month for six months. But I'm only interested in this month's, which is fiction. I'm hoping Toby Litt's and Graham Swift's new books would get here before the month's end.