Pile of Penguins

I’ve mentioned before that I love the Popular Penguins series, I think. The range of titles, the look and feel of the books, the low low price – what’s not to love?

And if you needed any proof of my obsession, here’s some photographic evidence showing the eleven titles I have bought to date:

1. Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson
2. The Classical World by Robin Lane Fox
3. Six Easy Pieces by Richard P Feynman
4. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
5. Congo Journey by Redmond O’Hanlon
6. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
7. Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
8. Empire by Niall Ferguson
9. Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer
10. Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
11. The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

I bought books 7 – 11 yesterday afternoon, spending the $46.15 I had in book vouchers. What other books are cheap enough at present that you can get five titles for $50?

According to the Penguin site, the ten most popular titles (as at 14 November 2008) are:

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez Gabriel (I’ve not seen this title around Perth shops!)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

The bag in the picture I got in Auckland, from one of the vendors at the conference exhibition. The sales rep told me two interesting facts:

1. Penguin are going to release another series in 2009, and
2. They released Hegemony of Survival by Noam Chomsky in the series, before realising they no longer had the rights to it. So if you got yourself a copy, it could be a rare book in the future. (It’s no longer listed on the Popular Penguins site.)

In the background you can see our eeePC collection: one black and one white eeePC 1000h (the black one’s mine, the white, M’s) and the old 700.