I know! I said I wouldn’t be buying any books until Clunes, but as luck would have it I found myself in a secondhand bookstore this week. Thinking I wouldn’t find anything I would want to buy, just intending to have a browse around and waste some time – I’m really good at self deception, it would seem – but found a few books that begged to be bought home with me.

• Capone: Life Behind Bars at Alcatraz by Mark Douglas Brown
• Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland
• The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in America by Hergé
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson
• The Noticeably Stouter QI Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
• Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson [review]

My Mum returned from the U.S.A. this week and she brought with her a bounty of gifts, including the Tintin and Capone books above. The Capone book looks really fascinating, stuffed with actual documents from the gangster’s time at Alcatraz. She also visited the set of Gilmore Girls at Warner Brothers Studio, which was exciting enough when she was telling me all about it, but then she pulled out a t-shirt with the logo for Luke’s Diner on it – I may have cried a little bit. As well as all this, she took a passing snapshot of the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco for me, what a champ!

It’s been a really strange week. Two bouts of sickness that hit me out of nowhere, and a major computer malfunction thanks to Microsoft which meant I had to completely reinstall Windows and reformat everything. Luckily nothing was lost, but it was still a bit of a pain. The week wasn’t all bad news though, I found out that I’m going to be getting more hours and new responsibilities at the bookstore from next week. Always good, and hopefully it means a big paycheck due just in time for Clunes.

• Lapham’s Quarterly look at who was under the influence of what while they were writing.
• We all heard about the Pulitzer Prize winners this week, and the Wall Street Journal takes a look at how a small, independent publisher managed to take out the coveted prize for fiction with Paul Harding’s Tinkers.
• A 1992 survey on the sex life of librarians, and if inspired by some of the statistics from there, some choice pick up lines for use on the information professional object of your desire.
• It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Carson McCullers here, hasn’t it? Well, Lauren Rosen is directing a film adaptation of my favourite Carson short story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” and CSU’s Carson McCullers Center has some behind the scenes photographs.
• I’ve been thinking about getting an Ex Libris stamp made – I don’t know, one of those whims that I probably won’t follow through on, but found a selection of historically interesting bookplates.

[image credit: "This Year's Summer Reading" by flickr user ephemera assemblyman]