July 6 - department book quarry

Members of the department regularly leave unwanted books on the benches outside the main office. Most months, the quarry is composed of slightly outdated composition or literature textbooks. Come summertime, though, you get folks wanting to tidy their shelves, so they get rid of those volumes they always meant to get to but have given up on. Alternatively, the sentimental value evaporates from older volumes, or the shelves get too damned full -- or the person is retiring and having to cram an office full of books into a full house.

Not a large haul, but interesting and free:

• Dai Qing (ed. Patricia Adams & John Thibodeau), Yangtze! Yangtze! Debate over the Three Gorges Project -- this book was both published and banned in China in 1989, and while only 25,000 copies of the original remain at large in China, it was credited with a five-year delay in beginning this massive project. More in a subsequent post, because I'd like to read it sooner than later;
• ed. Margaret Barber & Grainne Ryder, Damming the Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don't Want You To Know -- an internationally authored 1990 companion text to the previous item in this list;
• ed. Edward M. White, The Writer's Control of Tone: Readings, with Analysis, for Thinking and Writing About Personal Experience -- dated but interesting composition handbook from the year of my birth; and
• ed. Derk Wynand, Introductions from an Island, 1976 -- a slim chapbook of writing by contemporary UVic creative writing students, including W.P. Kinsella, Theresa Kishkan, and Doug Beardsley.