Library book sale!

Please share opinions on any of these, should you be familiar with them:

Elegy for Iris, by John Bayley. Memoir by Iris Murdoch's husband, of their life together and her slow decline due to Alzheimer's. I'm sure it will be incredibly depressing, but a peek inside convinced me to buy it: it's really, really well-written.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel, by Peter Cameron. Mainstream YA novel, though it looks like it's borderline adult. I love the title, and the first page is in a similar style.

Night Gate: The Gateway Trilogy Book One and Winter Door: The Gateway Trilogy Book Two, by Isobelle Carmody. YA fantasy; the third book does not seem to exist, or at least not yet. Love the premise: a teenage girl whose best friends are her four dogs goes through a magical gateway into fantasyland, where her dogs are transformed into humans with similar personalities to their doggy selves. Links to inexpensive Kindle editions.

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (P.S.), by Edward Dolnick. Nonfiction about the brazen theft of "The Scream;" looks really fun. Discounted on Amazon.

Deathworld (Wildside Edition), by Harry Harrison. I am a sucker for "everything on this planet can kill you!" Only 99 cents on Kindle.

The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi. Mainstream magic realism about a Nigerian/English girl with a creepy best friend. I'm guessing the best friend is ambiguously a spirit/folklore being/imaginary. I've heard good things about this.

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language, by Katherine Russell Rich. (Currently discounted to $6.00.) Memoir by American woman who moves to Udaipur (a city in Rajasthan) to study Hindi. It looks like it pays a lot of attention to the process of learning a second language as an adult.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, by Ronald Takaki. A history of America in terms of its non-dominant groups: Asian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jews, Indians, etc. I've read portions of this before, but not the whole thing. What I've read was well-written and detailed, and did a good job of pulling together many different perspectives to give a broad yet personal view of America.

Gentlemen's Alliance +, Vol. 1, by Arina Tanemura. Fluffy-looking shoujo manga. In return for a business loan of 50 million yen, the prestigious Kamiya family gave their daughter Haine away to the Otomiya family. Haine, now an Otomiya, is appointed to the student council of the exclusive Imperial Academy, a private school for the aristocracy. Even though Haine is of proper lineage to be on the council, she finds herself struggling to find her place among the many secrets of its elite members, especially those of the president who holds her heart--Shizumasa Togu, aka "the Emperor.