Book acquisition May through July
Aug. 16th, 2024 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
de_eekhoornBooks I am allowed to buy: -11.
These two were in the pick-up-for-free box of the small English-language library in my quartier.
The Land where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax
They were giving this away for free! It’s a mint-quality hardback! This is why one can never leave a free-books box unexamined. I am still half convinced someone made a mistake.
My Boyhood and Youth, John Muir
Good quality Penguin paperback, although it will probably start falling apart as soon as I start reading it. I’m interested in shifts in land use in the United States, it was there, it was free; I could probably have left this one in the box.
Three books that were gifts from my mother.
Cueillette de plantes et fruits sauvages comestibles en Méditerranée, Zohra Bellahsene
A handily small book, somewhat more discursive than precise. To identify something I am going to eat I am going to want more than a single photo, but I do have other books for that already. This provides an idea of what the edible species are and of what flora is characteristic for the region. Also contains recipes, in part from the author’s own childhood in Kabylia (in Algeria).
Les bases de la botanique du terrain, Rita Lüder
On the complete other end of the spectrum, identifying things by flipping through my flowers-by-color book has limits, and a recent outing I went on with the student botanical society showed me the existence of a more systematic way of identifying plants of which I am almost fully ignorant. This book proposes to teach exactly that. It’s translated from the German and insofar as it is region-specific at all it is so for Middle Europe, which is not where I am, but especially the more weed-like species do tend spread quite widely over the continent.
Guide Delachaux: Tous les Oiseaux de France, Frédéric Jiguet & Aurélien Audevard
This book has the nice poetic descriptions of the birds’ song and call which one desires to see in a bird guide. Now to find the species corresponding to my ornithologist former housemate’s description of “sounding like radio static”. That one is apparently pretty common on campus.
These two were in the pick-up-for-free box of the small English-language library in my quartier.
The Land where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax
They were giving this away for free! It’s a mint-quality hardback! This is why one can never leave a free-books box unexamined. I am still half convinced someone made a mistake.
My Boyhood and Youth, John Muir
Good quality Penguin paperback, although it will probably start falling apart as soon as I start reading it. I’m interested in shifts in land use in the United States, it was there, it was free; I could probably have left this one in the box.
Three books that were gifts from my mother.
Cueillette de plantes et fruits sauvages comestibles en Méditerranée, Zohra Bellahsene
A handily small book, somewhat more discursive than precise. To identify something I am going to eat I am going to want more than a single photo, but I do have other books for that already. This provides an idea of what the edible species are and of what flora is characteristic for the region. Also contains recipes, in part from the author’s own childhood in Kabylia (in Algeria).
Les bases de la botanique du terrain, Rita Lüder
On the complete other end of the spectrum, identifying things by flipping through my flowers-by-color book has limits, and a recent outing I went on with the student botanical society showed me the existence of a more systematic way of identifying plants of which I am almost fully ignorant. This book proposes to teach exactly that. It’s translated from the German and insofar as it is region-specific at all it is so for Middle Europe, which is not where I am, but especially the more weed-like species do tend spread quite widely over the continent.
Guide Delachaux: Tous les Oiseaux de France, Frédéric Jiguet & Aurélien Audevard
This book has the nice poetic descriptions of the birds’ song and call which one desires to see in a bird guide. Now to find the species corresponding to my ornithologist former housemate’s description of “sounding like radio static”. That one is apparently pretty common on campus.
