I went out for a simple walk today, and ended up spending more than I should have on books, at two used bookstores that I passed. Each time I thought, "Oh, it won't hurt if I just look around." But whenever I feel guilty about spending too much on books, I always remember the saying of Erasmus: Sometimes we have money for food and books, and sometimes just for books. My acquisitions, in no particular order:
Marco Polo, The Travels (Penguin)
Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Penguin)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader (Ballantine)
Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions 1 and 2 (PIMS)
Thomas Aquinas, Faith, reason and theology (PIMS)
Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion (Frederick Ungar)
George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul (Augsburg)
All of them will be a delight to read. The two Aquinas books were such I could not pass them up; they are translations of works I do not have translations of (namely, QQ 1 & 2, and the Exposition of Boethius's De Trinitate). And the Tolkien Reader has Farmer Giles, Tom Bombadil, On Fairy Stories, and Leaf by Niggle. On Fairy Stories alone would have been enough for me to buy it.
