On the way home from dinner tonight, I snagged (as usual) on the $1 or less cart outside of the used bookstore. One book I looked at made my blood boil, but no matter. The other I picked up was rollickingly amusing prose, and I figured that it was worth the posted 50 cents. So, naturally, I had to wander over to the new arrivals case, as well. Whereupon I was most cruelly mugged.
In the end, the damage was less than dinner but not inconsiderable (our four mojitos, while tasty, were somewhat expensive).
The cute bookseller flipped the first book over with a moue of disappointment– it wasn't the book she had thought it was. "Oh. I have this on my bookshelf, but I haven't read it yet."
I have that problem too.
Her boyfriend, it seems, is vexed by her careful piles of books– so insulating, so safe– and is threatening to build her bookshelves. Our conversation ranged from the architectural needs of a massive library, to storage and filing of books (subject matter, dewey decimal, random), to anne fadiman's essays (the ones she recommended, which I'd already read, and the ones I just finished reading, which she hadn't), to 84 Charing Cross (It's a tavern now! -I know, I visited it, too.) I commented that the grandson of one of the owners had been a cryptographer, and she exclaimed- "I clipped his obituary from the times!" I commended his book
Between Silk and Cyanide to her, and we discussed how he had become interested in cryptography (deciphering the codes his grandfather and other booksellers used to record the price they paid for a book in the book itself). Aha! she exclaimed. You need to read
Parnassus on Wheels... also
Haunted Bookshop!
She won. I have not yet read these.
So, books read recently:
Why? by Charles Tilly. This is a extraordinary inquiry into how and why we construct explanations and stories, the purposes they serve, and how we construct different ones depending on our relation to the person we are telling it to.
At Large and at Small by Anne Fadiman. This was a beautiful escape into some lovely prose, ranging from ice cream to insect collecting to charles lamb to death and loss and moving.
Read this book.The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr. Yes, I'm taking a course on Modern Iran. I didn't mean to buy this book, however- I'd gone to the bookstore in the week after finals looking for a mindless romance but after an hour of aimlessly picking books up and putting them down, somehow walked over to Kramers and bought this instead. It's an exceedingly accessible introduction to the Gordian knot that is the Muslim world.
And the books that mugged me this evening (and thus not yet read):
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