Yesterday, as the end of a string of busy days -- Monday I went with my brother to his apartment in Brooklyn to do some pre-move packing and dispersing; Sunday was Xmas #5 up with my extended family in Albany, NY; Saturday was a trip into NYC to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not please-let's-not-call-it-a-museum in honor of Thing 2's eighth birthday that day; Friday was something else I've forgotten; and Thursday was the annual Day of Three Christmases -- I took Thing 1 off to my nominal favorite bookstore, the
Montclair Book Center.
(I say "nominal," because their new stock is looking a bit thin this season -- cutting back is probably a great strategy in this market, and I want to see them stick around another few decades, but it does make poking through the store somewhat less exciting. But they're happy to do special orders, as I know because they're in the middle of processing a big one for me.)
Thing 1 got
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
, and we picked up
Ripley's Believe It or Not: The Remarkable...Revealed
for Thing 2 (who was with The Wife, handing the other half of the day's appointments).
And, for myself, I found:
Christopher Buckley's
Supreme Courtship
-- I've been reading his books for a couple of decades now, and we seem to be much the same kind of Republican, which warms what few cockles my heart has. This is another humorous novel about politics -- it's probably not as good as his sublime
Thank You for Smoking
, but what is?
Two more of the recent Penguin repackagings of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels:
Doctor No
and
For Your Eyes Only
. I'm toying with the idea of gathering the set and then reading them all straight through (something like
my Loren Estleman binge in 2007).
Another Stewart O'Nan novel,
The Night Country
, because I was so impressed by
The Speed Queen and
Last Night at the Lobster (I was just thinking about
Lobster recently, actually, when The Wife and I had an early lunch at a Red Lobster on the boys' last full day of school) -- and even though I already have O'Nan's
A Prayer for the Dying
on the to-be-read shelf.
Lemony Snicket's
The Lump of Coal
, a holiday tale that I read this afternoon. (It didn't take long.)
And
State by State
, a collection of essays about each of the fifty states by a wide variety of distinguished contributors, all edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. It's the kind of book I think I want to read, even though I secretly suspect it will still be sitting on my shelf, uncracked, five years from now. We all need books like that, though: books for every plausible person we might be in the near future.
2 comments:
Thank you for articulating a good reason to buy the books I probably will never get around to reading!
A Prayer for the Dying is an amazing novel. I am eager to read Lobster soon.
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