 Welcome to Church of the Chair, where the only thing greasier than a secondhand store is a secondhand whore. I'm your host E and today we're heading down to secondhand Charles. So me and my family went to secondhand Charles in Macon, Georgia this past week and I traded in 42 books and got $68 worth of credit. Sounds about right. It's the game's top of bookstores. And I ended up getting 7 books for $64.68. Let's jump into that. The first two books I got are both by the same author, David Eggers. One is a hologram for the king and the other one is the circle. The reason I picked up this one is because it is, as you can see, a National Book Award finalist. I am trying to read all of the National Book Award finalists and winners over the next couple of years. And I started with 2011 and I'll be going all the way up until 2023. I have no idea how long it'll take me to read all of these books, but I'm hoping to get to them in the next year. Unfortunately for those of you who like to listen to me, read the descriptions of these books. Neither one of these books have a description on the back or the inside flap, so you're going to have to head over to Amazon to check it out or whatever bookstore you want to. If you're interested in any of these books then I am going to be showing off today. You can click on the affiliate link down there in the description and I get a few pennies for you going over there. You don't even have to buy the book that I have linked just as long as you follow that link and then do your shopping from there. I'd appreciate you. Next up we are back on that National Book Awards bullshit with Juno Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her. Here's what this one is about. Juno Diaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting impossible power of love. Obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible, yunor. A young hard head whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender and funny, these stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience and that the half life of love is forever. Next up is a book that I got from my series Time for a Tome where I try to highlight books at least over 700-800 pages. Sometimes I'll go as low as 6 as I did with Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James, but this one is a suitable boy by Vikram Seth and I have read a certain music I think is the name of the other one. Let me look it up for you. Unequal music. I read that one and absolutely adored it. It was also either a Pulitzer for it or National Book Award. I'm not 100% sure, but I saw this and I saw the absolute girth of this bad boy. It is over 1400 pages. It would be if I were to read it. It would be the longest book I have ever read because right now that honor resides with Alan Moore's Jerusalem, which I will not bad talk here, but I didn't care too much for it. So what is a suitable boy about? Let me read that to you. Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story. Lada and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mera, are both trying to find, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal, a suitable boy for Lada to marry. Yet in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, a suitable boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spends a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex multi-ethnic society in flux, a suitable boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence. This sounds amazing. Once again it is 1400 pages. I have no idea when or if I'll even get to it. I bought this one after my What Would You Read on the Way to Mars video I did a couple days ago or last week, it was last Monday I believe or Tuesday. But yeah, this one, boy if you guys want me to do it let me know down there in the comments and I will try my damnedest to get through it. Now I'm going to be honest with you, this one once again is a National Book Award finalist. I went to 2nd and Charles specifically looking for those books on my list but I did happen to get two that did not fit the bill, they were just books that I had been looking for. But this one was an NBA finalist and it is The Roundhouse by Luis Erdrich, Erdrich I'm not sure. Let's read the description. One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coots, Coutts, C-O-U-T-T-S is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened. Either to the police or to her husband Basil and 13 year old son Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust permanently into an adult world for which he is ill-prepared. While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to rest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends Cappy, Zach, and Angus to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to The Roundhouse, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning, written with undeniable urgency and illuminating the harsh realities of contemporary life in a community where Ojibwe and white lives uneasily together, The Roundhouse is a brilliant and entertaining novel, a masterpiece of literary fiction. Louise Erdick embraces tragedy, the comic, a spirit world very much present in the lives of all of her all too human characters and a tale of injustice that is unfortunately an authentic reflection of what happens in our own world today. This is the one that I am most excited for, but I have to wait until I get to the NBA finalists and winners from 2012 before I can read this one because I'm a little bit OCD with things like that. Next up are two books, once again from the same author and the reason I'm picking these up is because I'm collecting his books in hardcover as long as I can find them second hand. Why second hand? Because I don't care too much for this individual as an individual, but I have enjoyed his work in the past so I try not to give the author any kind of compensation for his work. If you think that's wrong, that's fine. If you can separate the art and the artist, that's fine also, but I got The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, I have this one in paperback, I wanted a hardcover and I got his newest one, Crossroads. I'm not going to be reading the descriptions of either one of them because I actually want no spoilers whatsoever and he usually just writes about families anyways. If you can't tell, I love family sagas and stuff like that. I gotta get this off so I don't have to layer. Get off me! Next up, I have to give a shout out to my buddy Jacob Brennan. I had no idea that this book was on sale and he mentioned it over on the Discord and I absolutely had to get it because this author is I believe our greatest living short story author. I'm not a huge fan of his novels, but when it comes to short stories, I believe they are perfect the way they are and that is Clive Barker's Dark Worlds by Phil and Sarah Stokes. I'm just going to briefly show you what this is like. There's all different kinds of artwork and the reason I got this other than I just think it's cool, it's like a coffee table book, the reason why I got this is because I am planning a Clive Barker Theorist video. I have read all of his short stories and I can tie those together no problem. I am also going to try my best to get through all of his novels. I've already read The Damnation Game and The Thief of Always and I am able to connect those back to the Hellbound Heart. I can connect several of them back to the Hellbound Heart and other books in his catalog. If you guys want to see a Clive Barker Theorist series, once I'm done with the King Redux videos, the Redux reviews, the movie reviews, once I'm done with that, if you want me to jump into Clive Barker, I need you to spam down there in the comment section. I need a lot of you to say yes because I'm not really looking that forward to reading his novels, but I'll do it for you guys if you want to see it. But that's all the time I have for you today. If you have any of these books and want to give me your opinion, please don't spoil anything for me. Don't even give me descriptions about what the books are about, especially not the ones that I wouldn't read the description of. But if you want to do that, I would appreciate it. Tell me whether or not you liked it, whether or not you hated it, whether or not you were mad about it, all that stuff down there in the comments. But until next time, what's the point of AMSR? What's the point of that? Anyways, I'll hell the chair.