Last month I got my annual Amazon gift certificate for being a Literotica moderator, and it was more than it has been in years past. I also had a little over $20 from Mechanical Turk, so I added that to my gift certificate balance and then spent at least a week dithering over what to buy. I ended up with four books three of which arrived yesterday.

Subway Style: 100 Years of Architecture & Design in the New York City Subway

I have been wanting this for a long time, and I’m really pleased with it. It’s much bigger than I was expecting, and it is chock-full of photos! The book is broken into chapters based on design elements (light fixtures, decorative tiles, etc.) and each chapter has a few pages of text followed by several pages of pictures from all around the system and all the way back to its creation. It doesn’t quite have as much as I was hoping for about the City Hall station, but it’s a great coffee table book and I will be browsing through it frequently.

Female Chauvinist Pigs

I wasn’t expecting this one to be hardcover - I guess because of the subject matter I was expecting something more flimsy. Although I support some points of feminist philosophy, I do not actively consider myself a feminist; this book seemed interesting anyway.

Deaf Peddler: Confessions of an Inside Man

For some reason this came individually shrink-wrapped. The subject matter is interesting to me, although I didn’t realize that the author was also in a wheelchair, which seems like it might affect the telling of the deaf peddler experience - this guy probably was more successful as a peddler because he was in a wheelchair. In any case, I’m reading this one first because it’s pretty thin. The print is large, the margins are pretty big, and it’s only 136 pages.

Embassy Residences in Washington

If you’ve been to DC and driven/walked along 16th Street or Embassy Row, you know there are some pretty awesome buildings there. One of my favorites is an African embassy along 16th street - I think it might be for Uganda - that has fantastic African architectural details. This book hasn’t arrived yet because I bought it at a discount from an Amazon Marketplace seller, but I’m looking forward to browsing through the pictures and learning how the embassies came to be.