Not only is today the one day in David Nicholls’s bestselling novel, One Day, in which two star-crossed lovers (soon to be played by Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway in a film adaptation directed by An Education’s Lone Sherfig) meet every July 15 from 1988 through 2007, it is also the start of Powerbooks’s out-of-nowhere month-long Power Sale.  The promotional materials warn potential buyers of “blow-you-away prices.” Guess what. They’re not kidding. From now until August 15, customers of the specialty bookstore can avail of selected books with discounts of up to 80%, a fancy percentage which practically translates to a special “This copy only: P49.95” price tag on a number of titles, including these books I had the good fortune of finding not two hours ago.  Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. I couldn’t find a copy of Mitchell’s most popular novel, Cloud Atlas, and at only 20% off, the hardcover edition of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is still too expensive for my purchasing power, so I settled for this paperback instead, which I gather is also among his best works.  Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid by Lemony Snicket. “Life is a turbulent journey, fraught with confusion, heartbreak, and inconvenience. This book will not help.” Sold.  Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus by Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot. I like that this is a satire of pseudo-intellectualism co-written by the author of the famous line, “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,” but not nearly as much as I like that its title is, at least to me, delightfully reminiscent of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. End Zone and Valparaiso by Don DeLillo. I am not a huge fan of Mr. DeLillo. Heck, no.  Bullet Points by Mark Watson. With a blurb by Stephen Fry (“Woody Allen and William Boyd have a bastard love-child and his name is Mark Watson.”) and a cover illustration by Tom Gauld (as recognizably quirky as any of his works on several books by the late Jose Saramago), this book earned its own bullet point in this post even before I read its title.  Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Lackluster title. Misleading name for a male author. One of TIME’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. I’ll be the judge of that.  How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. I have never read a page written by Marcel Proust in my entire quarter-century of existence. Perhaps I never will. For one thing, his most famous work, In Search of Lost Time, reportedly has one-and-a-quarter-million words. I think I’d rather read Mr. Botton’s edifying words, which I guesstimate in this book are far fewer than in Mr. Proust’s masterpiece, for now.  The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett. Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader was brilliant. This is simply me making like the protagonist of that book.  How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide by John Sutherland. Supposedly for optimum enjoyment of all of the above.

Not only is today the one day in David Nicholls’s bestselling novel, One Day, in which two star-crossed lovers (soon to be played by Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway in a film adaptation directed by An Education’s Lone Sherfig) meet every July 15 from 1988 through 2007, it is also the start of Powerbooks’s out-of-nowhere month-long Power Sale. 

The promotional materials warn potential buyers of “blow-you-away prices.” Guess what. They’re not kidding. From now until August 15, customers of the specialty bookstore can avail of selected books with discounts of up to 80%, a fancy percentage which practically translates to a special “This copy only: P49.95” price tag on a number of titles, including these books I had the good fortune of finding not two hours ago. 

  • Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. I couldn’t find a copy of Mitchell’s most popular novel, Cloud Atlas, and at only 20% off, the hardcover edition of his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is still too expensive for my purchasing power, so I settled for this paperback instead, which I gather is also among his best works. 
  • Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid by Lemony Snicket. “Life is a turbulent journey, fraught with confusion, heartbreak, and inconvenience. This book will not help.” Sold. 
  • Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus by Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot. I like that this is a satire of pseudo-intellectualism co-written by the author of the famous line, “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,” but not nearly as much as I like that its title is, at least to me, delightfully reminiscent of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
  • End Zone and Valparaiso by Don DeLillo. I am not a huge fan of Mr. DeLillo. Heck, no. 
  • Bullet Points by Mark Watson. With a blurb by Stephen Fry (“Woody Allen and William Boyd have a bastard love-child and his name is Mark Watson.”) and a cover illustration by Tom Gauld (as recognizably quirky as any of his works on several books by the late Jose Saramago), this book earned its own bullet point in this post even before I read its title. 
  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Lackluster title. Misleading name for a male author. One of TIME’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. I’ll be the judge of that. 
  • How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. I have never read a page written by Marcel Proust in my entire quarter-century of existence. Perhaps I never will. For one thing, his most famous work, In Search of Lost Time, reportedly has one-and-a-quarter-million words. I think I’d rather read Mr. Botton’s edifying words, which I guesstimate in this book are far fewer than in Mr. Proust’s masterpiece, for now. 
  • The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett. Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader was brilliant. This is simply me making like the protagonist of that book. 
  • How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide by John Sutherland. Supposedly for optimum enjoyment of all of the above.

Notes

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