Thrift Store Haul

On Saturday I took a quick trip to Goodwill because I learned last month that it is a good place to find cross stitch books and patterns. Which is was a goldmine for that but I also found some really great classics (and one other book) and I thought I would share them with you today.

A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’s most complex—and satisfying—novels. 

This edition brings together the complete Christmas stories of Charles Dickens. In this volume you will find the following entertaining holiday tales: A Christmas Tree, What Christmas is as We Grow Older, The Poor Relation’s Story, The Child’s Story, The Schoolboy’s Story, Nobody’s Story, The Seven Poor Travellers, The Holly-Tree, The Wreck of the Golden Mary, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, Going into Society, The Haunted House, A Message from the Sea, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, Somebody’s Luggage, Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy, Doctor Marigold, The Trial for Murder, The Signal-Man, Mugby Junction, and No Thoroughfare.

The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest “Sensation Novel.” Walter Hartright’s mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue. This new critical edition is the first to use the original manuscript of the novel. John Sutherland examines Collins’s contribution to Victorian fiction, traces his practices as a creator of plot, and provides a chronology of the novel’s complicated events.

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller. 

The Forsyte Saga is John Galsworthy’s monumental chronicle of the lives of the moneyed Forsytes, a family whose values are constantly at war with its passions. The story of Soames Forsyte’s marriage to the beautiful and rebellious Irene, and its effects upon the whole Forsyte clan, The Forsyte Saga is a brilliant social satire of the acquisitive sensibilities of a comfort-bound class in its final glory. Galsworthy spares none of his characters, revealing their weaknesses and shortcomings as clearly as he does the tenacity and perseverance that define the strongest members of the Forsyte family.

This edition contains the three original novels — The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let — and their connecting interludes, Indian Summer of a Forsyte and Awakening.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante’s descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and encounter with his dead love, Beatrice; and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption. 

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. His life was divided by political duties and poetry, the most of famous of which was inspired by his meeting with Bice Portinari, whom he called Beatrice,including La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy. He died in Ravenna in 1321.

~Cassie