Yesterday Paul and I hauled fifty or so books to the Goodwill, but of course we did not come home empty-handed. Give away fifty books, replace them with five: such a minor number allows me to continue feeling like a Virtuous Housekeep rather than a Reckless Acquistor of volumes that I may or may not ever get around to reading.

Here are my new Goodwill spoils:

* Margaret Atwood's 1995 poetry collection Morning in the Burned House, which contains intriguing titles such as "King Lear in Respite Care" and "The Loneliness of the Military Historian." Did you know that in 1995 Atwood had 27 books on her list of "Other Books by Margaret Atwood"? How is that even possible? She must have sent away for some kind of "You, Too, Can Write As Many Books As Trollope and Updike!" correspondence course.

* T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays, a demure black hardback owned in November 1953 by someone from Storrs, Connecticut, with an unreadably curly signature that seems to say "ChaelllOcoenJr." I cannot tell whether Chaelll ever read any of these essays and I cannot tell whether I will either because as soon as I looked through the table of contents ("The Metaphysical Poet," "Modern Education and the Classics," "Four Elizabethan Dramatists," etc.), all I wanted to do is give this book back to Chaelll and go read Virginia Woolf's Common Reader instead. However, now I'm stuck with it.

* J. M. Coetzee's Youth, a 2002 novel in a Penguin paperback edition that may never have been opened before I decided to look inside, although the "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" sticker on the front is dinged and worn, as if the book has spent much of its life being packed up in boxes and moved around in the backs of pickups and then unpacked in order to be inserted yet again into tight quarters on a bookshelf made of milk crates. According to the cover blurb, this novel will make me "angry, amused, scornful and sympathetic by turns."

* Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, a slim novel first published in 1923 but reprinted here in a flowery paperback circa 1990 especially designed to attract middle-aged female readers looking for light literature and perhaps not realizing that the book is all about a middle-aged woman who is losing her looks and leading a dead-end life in a no-account burg, which, I suspect, is not a story that many middle-aged female readers will wish to open as they lie in bed after a long day of shopping, baby-sitting, being ignored, eating unhealthy food that makes them gain weight, etc. I am an exception insofar as it is exactly the kind of book I'd be likely to open, though I do hate the cover.

* E. L. Doctorow's 2005 Civil War novel The March, which, speaking of covers, is notably different from the Cather, being one of those oversized yet cheap hardbacks with a manly pebbled dust cover featuring giant serifed type, a big cannon silhouette, and a fiery orange sunset behind the cannon. The whole effect is Herman Wouk-ish or James Michener-esque, which if I were E. L. Doctorow would make me gloomy but maybe he likes it.