It's really nice to come home from work and to have your son state rather strongly that he wants to go to the bookstore later that night. It was a real sacrifice for me, but we took the grueling two-or-so-mile trip to Half Price Books.
The bad news is that they didn't give me the books for free. The good news is that they gave me two books for a good price. The first was a recent book (2003) by William H. C. Frend entitled From Dogma to History: How Our Understanding of the Early Church Developed (Amazon). Amazon has it on sale for $19.99 currently; I got it for $4.98.
The second book isn't nearly so recent, Cranfield's commentary on Mark in the Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary series. They had it for $24.99. It is out of stock at Eisenbrauns, but they have it listed for $33.25. Or you can get it from Amazon for $40. Yeah, I call that a win.
So, good book day! Since I just finished my book on Erasmus, I will probably be looking for a new book soon. Perhaps the Frend volume? For now I've got (only!) two books partially read, a biography of Constantine and a book on Greek literature. I still have about 800 pages to go on the latter, so that one will take me a long time to finish. I rarely read books as long as The Stand; like this volume, they are generally not as interesting and so take forever.
