Annual Book Sale 2026: My Husband's Books

Every year in September we attend the Planned Parenthood book sale, which lasts ten days. This time we visited five times. My husband's special interests at the sale are architecture and books about history; also fiction, including mysteries and science fiction.

Below are six of the books Glen purchased at the 2026 Planned Parenthood Book Sale.

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (2024) by Olivia Laing

This book has a lovely cover. Since I enjoy gardening and especially the results of gardening, I think I would like to read it also.

From the dust jacket:

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there is still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

Gun in Cheek: A Study of "Alternative" Crime Fiction (1982) by Bill Pronzini

This book was published in 1982. At that point, Bill Pronzini had published seven novels in his Nameless Detective series, which now consists of a total of 41 books. He has written other mystery series, edited many anthologies, and much more.

A description from Goodreads, for a different edition:

Welcome to the very best of the very worst in 20th-century mystery writing. Author Bill Pronzini takes a good-natured look at the genre's "alternative classics" in a retrospective of unintentionally hilarious crime fiction. Populated by the usual private eyes, arch-villains, amateur sleuths, and femmes fatales, these tales offer uniquely amusing reading that's as memorable in its own way as the works of the great mystery writers.

In addition to their pure entertainment value, these excerpts and witty appraisals of the "worst" in mystery fiction provide a historical perspective on the development and mores of modern-day crime stories.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia (2020) by Sophy Roberts

My husband read this book shortly after he got it at the book sale. He liked it a lot. It has maps and some photos. There is also a website.

Description from the dust jacket:

Siberia’s story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.

Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos — grand instruments created during the boom years of the nineteenth century, as well as humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the westernizing influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia is largely a story of music in this fascinating place, following Roberts on a three-year adventure as she tracks a number of different instruments to find one whose history is definitively Siberian. Her journey reveals a desolate land inhabited by wild tigers and deeply shaped by its dark history, yet one that is also profoundly beautiful — and peppered with pianos.

The Fate of the English Country House (1997) by David Littlejohn

Glen has a good number of book on country houses. This sounds like a good addition to his collection.

Description from the dust jacket:

In The Fate of the English Country House, David Littlejohn describes the past glories and troubled present condition of "the stately homes of England," both those that continue to serve as private houses, and those that have been turned into museums, tourist attractions, convention centers, hotels, country clubs, schools, apartments, hospitals, even prisons. By means of extensive conversations with their owners and managers (the book contains more than 50 photographs of the houses), the author takes us on a private tour of these remarkable places and evaluates the many proposals that have been put forward for their survival.

In the opening chapter we meet three near-neighbors in Oxfordshire, whose personal accounts introduce many of the themes of the book: the 11th Duke of Marlborough, whose family has been living at Blenheim Palace since 1710; the 21st Baron Saye and Sele, whose ancestors built romantic, moated Broughton Castle between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the Honorable Ann Harcourt, mistress of Stanton Harcourt Manor, which has belonged to her family since the twelfth century.

Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations (2025) by Sam Kean

Another great book cover. I hope the information inside is as good as the cover.

From the dust jacket:

History all too often neglects the tastes, textures, sounds, and smells that were an intimate part of our ancestors’ daily experience, but a new generation of researchers is resurrecting those hidden details, pioneering an exciting new discipline called experimental archaeology. These are scientists gone rogue: They make human mummies. They carve ancient spears and go hunting, then knap their own obsidian blades to skin the game. They build perilous boats and plunge out onto the open sea—all in the name of experiencing history as it was, with all its dangers, disappointments, and unexpected delights.

Beloved author Sam Kean joins these experimental archeologists on their adventures as they resurrect the lives of our ancestors, following in their footsteps at exotic locations across the globe, from remote Polynesian islands to forbidding arctic ice floes. He fires medieval catapults, tries his hand at ancient surgery and tattooing, builds Roman-style roads—and, in novelistic interludes, spins tales of the lives of people long gone with vivid imagination and his signature meticulous research.

Sword Beach: D-Day Baptism by Fire (2025) by Max Hastings 

Glen and I are both interested in World War II history, but Glen has actually read a lot of nonfiction books about that subject, whereas I mostly stick with documentaries, movies, and historical fiction. 

From the dust jacket:

Max Hastings’ Sword Beach tells the story of a handful of British soldiers and their critical role in D-Day’s parachute and seaborne offensive. On Sword, the codename of one of the two beaches assaulted by the British, scores of soldiers were killed by the first shots that they ever heard fired in anger. One British corporal insisted on apologizing to his enemy prisoners, and the Free French troops, 120-men strong, suffered 60 percent losses in the first days of fighting. With his signature blend of drama and detail, Hastings show how the men who landed on Sword played a critical role in Britain's preeminent landmark victory and the most spectacular battlefield event of World War II in the West.