I was in Providence visiting with wonderful friends and readers-of-Sycorax-Pine (hi, guys! It was great to see you!) over the weekend, and somehow I came back with 50% more luggage than I took there. Actually, I know how it happened: I bought some books and (even more delightful) I was given some books. So, in the interest of my new spirit of bookish disclosure, I give you "They just walked through my door - honest! September acquisitions, Part the first":

• Gifts
  
• An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (from J. and R.) - I read and enjoyed The Dream of Scipio a few years ago (although my attempt to loan it to a friend was not, I think, ultimately viewed as an act of friendship, on account of its slow plot progression), so I am looking forward to what is apparently an Oxonian mystery set in the Restoration.
• A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen ed. by Diana E. Henderson (from C.) - This sounds like a rollicking good read, as far as my academic reading goes, with articles entitled "Getting Back to Shakespeare: Whose Film is it Anyway?" and "Hamlet among the Pixelvisionaries."
• Ryder by Djuna Barnes (from C.) - a genre-ambiguous, possibly autobiographical book which the jacket describes as

  One of modern literatures first and best denunciations of patriarchal repression , Ryder employs an exuberant prose by which narrator Julie Ryder derides her hated father, polygamous Wendell Ryder. Barnes satirizes masculinity and domesticity by way of parable, poem and play, and a prose style that echoes Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.*
  

  
  
• Purchases (They were having a 50% off sale in the Drama section of a bookstore we visited. Could I really resist?)
  
• Blood Knot and Other Plays by Athol Fugard - After I bought this, I had the most unsettling feeling that I already owned it. But it isn't in LibraryThing, so I think I must just have gazed at it longingly in bookstores for so many years that I developed the same feeling of familiarity with its cover that I have with my own books.
• The End of Acting: A Radical View by Richard Hornby - I can now return the library copy that has languished long on my shelves. This is a source of some rejoicing, since I have now reached the official limit to the number of books I can have out of the library at any one time (I think it is somewhere between 125 and 200). But I still want more. MORE!
  

* While I read the dust jacket of the Barnes book aloud to my friends, I suddenly exclaimed "Isn't Anatomy of Melancholy by Richard, not Robert, Burton?" "No, no" said my friends, "RICHARD Burton was married to Elizabeth Taylor." "Not THAT Richard Burton," I replied, "The Richard Burton who translated 1001 Nights and the Kama Sutra." Well, it emerges that I was quite wrong, of course. Robert Burton did write Anatomy of Melancholy in the Renaissance, and Richard Burton (not THAT Richard Burton) also translated 1001 Nights and the Kama Sutra ... about two hundred years later. Ah, my impeccable sense of history....