Did a bit of shopping today.

We were at Shinsegae, the "world's largest department store" today. I'd heard they had a pretty good selection of English books at the bookstore there, so I wanted to check it out.

Of course, distributors of English books in Korea and Japan tend to stick to things they are pretty darn certain they're going to sell (NYT best-sellers, kids fiction like HP or Percy Jackson, movie tie in books, and whatever Oprah's talking about these days), plus some high profit margin stuff like Penguin/Oxford/wherever prints of public domain titles, or high end coffee table type books.

So while they do have a bigger number of titles than my local bookstore that carries some English books, they didn't really have that much better of a selection.

I did end up picking up a new copy of Beowulf in verse (the copy I've had since college is a prose translation), and The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Of course, I've read Beowulf I don't know how many times. I just wanted a nice verse translation, and the introductory essay and background material, glossary, and the two-page fragment of the Fight at Finnsburg are at least new to me.

I've also been meaning to pick up The Children of Hurin for a while now. Of course, having read the Silmarillion, I know the basics of the story. Silmarillion actually goes into Turin's story fairly in depth, but I've been looking forward to this anyway.