Purchases I Don't Regret: Part Two

It's time for another post about a purchase I don't regret!

And this time, it's a two-for-one special on hardcover books. Specifically, Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

I never, ever buy hardcover books for pleasure reading--I think these are the only two new hardcovers I've bought in the past three years or so. Two reasons: they're a bitch to carry around in my purse, and they're expensive. (An additional reason: I almost never read something that close to its publication date.) I spent close to $60 on these two books.

They were, however, worth it.

Here's why:
1) I really, really wanted to read them. I wanted to read On Beauty both because I think Zadie Smith is an interesting young writer and because it works intertextually with Howards End, one of my all-time favorite books. I wanted to read Special Topics in Calamity Physics because it was being described as a "literary mystery," which is one of my favorite genres (though, as it turns out, if it's one of yours, too, I'd recommend Donna Tartt's The Secret History or anything by Dorothy L. Sayers instead.)
2) I enjoyed reading them (not to say I liked them without reserve, because that's not the case--but I enjoyed thinking through them and forming opinions about them).

Here's the important part, though:

3) Reading them soon after publication (that is, when only hardcover is available) added value to the reading experience. Other people were reading these books around the same time I was, and I had several very enjoyable conversations about them. There is no other time when a book offers that opportunity for lively, engaging conversation with a wide range of people.

I wouldn't make a habit of it, but sometimes it's worth it to pay double the price for the hardcover edition. It offers both the intellectual satisfaction of the communal focus on the book and the visceral satisfaction of holding a nice, fat, heavy hardcover book. And there's always the justification I'd use on my mother when I was a teenager:

"Oh, poor you, your daughter skipped the drunken party in favor of an expensive book."