Book Shopping Deluxe: Cheap book market.
I love books. If I could, I’d spend every dime I have on books. They smell nice, they look great, they make me feel all warm and fuzzy and make me want to curl up in my couch with a blanket on top of me, sipping hot chocolate milk while I dive into the adventures of heros and heroines. But books are expensive. If you go to the normal book shops and buy one of the most recent novels, you will end up having to spend at least 20 euros, sometimes even 30 euros. So I try to go to the cheaper book shops to satisfy my book-craving but the novels they have in stock there are very limited. Usually they have volume 1 and 3 of a series or 2 and 3 or whatever they can do to torment you. It’s some sort of sick and twisted game of society to turn us bookworms into freaking psychopaths because there is always one volume of our series missing, or even worse: the volume is there but the print is completely different. Go figure how that would look in my book closet. /whine. Because of all this, I was relieved to be able to go to a cheap yearly book market located near my university. Although eventually I was dissapointed because they had mostly English books while my native language is Dutch and although I like an English book once in a while, I do want at least 80 percent of my purchased books to be in Dutch, they had a lot more to choose from than the cheap book shops I used to go to. Regarding fantasy though, my all-time favourite genre, they were very lacking. I bought some historical novels, some English classics and something to keep my WoW fangirlness happy. Here’s the complete list of books I bought, for the total cheap price of 50 euros.
- Dracula (Wordsworth Classics) by Bram Stoker.
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
- North and South (Wordsworth Classics) by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Wordsworth Classics) by Robert Louis Stevenson.
- Jane Eyre (Wordsworth Classics) by Charlotte Bronte.
- Frankenstein (Wordsworth Classics) by Mary Shelley.
- The Annotated Elminster Collector’s Edition (The Elminster Series) by Ed Greenwood.
- The Dreamers Book 3: Crystal Gorge by David Eddings.
- The Dreamers Book 4: The Younger Gods by David Eddings.
- Sense and Sensibility (Wordsworth Classics) by Jane Austen.
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.
- The Alchemist’s Daughter by Katharine McMahon.
- Helen of Troy by Margaret George.
- World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Official Strategy Guide by BradyGames.
I know the last book is a bit outdated, but I bought it because I’m an official WoW fangirl and thought I couldn’t miss this guide in my collection. 
What about you guys, are you a bookworm like me or do you only read when you have to? Do you buy your novels at cheap book markets or do you prefer just buying one or two a year at the local book shop?
I’m a book lover myself, but I tend to stick with buying paperback novels. The ones I really want to read the next in the series, I’ll buy in hardcover though (usually it’s only 1 or 2 a year). As far as I know, there aren’t any cheap book markets (but that would be awesome if there were) around where I live. There are used book stores, but it’s hit or miss if you find anything worthwhile in them. There’s always used books on amazon.com but, you have to be careful about shipping costs for them.
You picked up some good ones though from where you went. The strategy guide, even if an older expansion, is still useful. I use our original strategy guide from time to time to look up where trainers or mining/herb nodes are and to have a bigger version of a map in front of me.
My native language is also Dutch, but I must say that I prefer my books in English. At least, if they were originally written in English.. Usually the word jokes and everything are much nicer in the original as a lot of the jokes tend to get lost in translation.
I love my local library!
And aside from spending a lot of time in the library, I do have a couple addresses where you can find some cheap books. There’s De Slegte. Normally there is a second-hand aisle and you can find great books, even very recent once, in decent state there. Most of the times it are books that people have read once and when they do their spring cleaning, they toss those books out.
Also, in Leuven, we have a small book store called the Boeken Cargo. I don’t know if that’s the offical name of the store, but they sell recent published books a bit cheaper than for example Fnac. I’ve already bought quite some books there and I have to stop myself from dropping by too often, because I always find something interesting.
I only borrow books from the library. Although I end up liking most books I read, I’d be hesitant to buy a book without knowing for sure whether it would be worth it or not