Today I bought 20 books. That is a personal record. I don't remember having bought more than 4 books in one go!

I went to the city today with Romy & Victoria for lunch and some shopping. I got to the city a bit early and so I went to the place where I always go to kill some time, the Reader's Feast Bookstore on Swanston St. There, in the 'Classics' section, I found a rather spiff version of Sun Tzu's Art Of War and I said to myself "Wow, that's so spiff!" - it was completely modernised into a thin paperback with a clean white background with black and blue embossed text on the cover.

It certainly drew my attention and so I picked it up to have a look at it. On the back cover of the book there was a list writings/books by famous philosophers, radicals and great thinkers such as Plato, Marx, Orwell, Freud and Machiavelli that are also in the 'series'. And then I thought "Now this is COOL..." as I am really into these books but have always found them too expensive and inconvenient to read but now here they are: accessible and very cheap ($9.95 per book). So I scanned around the bookshelves trying to find the rest of the series (they had them in alphabetical order according to author). It was rather easy to find due to their concise size and simple yet stunning embossed covers.

I collected a few of the ones I thought would be interesting to read and so in the end I decided to purchase 3 books from the series by Orwell, Marx and Nietzsch. $30. Then I walked around the corner to find out that I could purchase the entire of series 1 for $60. That's 20 revolutionary books for just $60. It was a deal I couldn't resist even if Adrian Brody stood there in his Zegna suit and said "No, you should rather spend this money on those gorgeous yellow pointy snakeskin heels that you are absolutely dying to have!"

So I walked out of the bookstore with the following books in a big bag:

• George Orwell - Why I Write
  
  
• Sigmund Freud - Civilisation and Its Discontents
  
  
• Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
  
  
• John Ruskin - On Art and Life
  
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Why I am So Wise
  
  
• Thomas Paine - Common Sense
  
  
• Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
  
  
• Charles Darwin - On Natural Selection
  
  
• Edward Gibbon - Christians and The Fall Of Rome
  
  
• William Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating
  
  
• Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World
  
  
• Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Women
  
  
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
  
  
• Seneca - On Shortness of Life
  
  
• Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
  
  
• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manisfesto
  
  
• St Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner
  
  
• Thomas a Kempis - The Inner Life
  
  
• Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship
  
  
• Jonathan Swift - A Tale of the Tub

I'm totally excited. Sun Tzu's Art of War is in series 2 together with a lot of other Asian philosophers/thinkers/great minds (whatever you will). I think I'll eventuate to that once I'm done with this set. Gonna start with Orwell because that was the one I really wanted to buy in the first place. And Nietzsch? I've been mildly exposed to his Ubermensch ideology and so I want to read this one to better understand what he's really on about. I don't really know what it is about this stuff that draws me. I guess it's because I've been a long fan of philosophy and have this fascination with wanting to know how others perceive the world in which I can use to compare with my own views. These books have had such a enormous impact on world history and therefore serves my curiosity about them whenever and wherever I hear about them, which is ever so often.

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