When all the leaves have been blown off the trees and each day the temperature is not as warm as it was the day before, when the gloom of late fall settles in to stay awhile and going outside requires more than just slipping on sandals, one of the best things to do to is go to the bookstore of course! My Bookman and I visited Half Price Books this weekend and came home with some great finds:
Room Temperature (signed!) and The Fermata by Nicholson Baker. Dorothy has been raving about The Mezzanine and that's the one I was looking for so of course it wasn't there. But I think these two should do for now. I thought I had never read Baker before but I now realize I read Vox back when it first came out. I don't remember anything about it except that I read it.
Maybe I have to stop visiting Dorothy's blog for awhile (just kidding!) because I also found a poetry book by Jane Hirschfield, The Lives of the Heart. Again, not the one Dorothy raved about, but I read the first poem and it gave me that feeling in my stomach I get when I read a good poem that sorta reminds me of the way my stomach feels when the roller coaster car just begins to drop down from its peak.
Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. I'm a sucker for books like this.
An all-in-one volume of The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott for a whopping one dollar! That comes out to four books for a quarter each! My Bookman and I have been talking about reading this book for years. We have no more excuses, or rather we have to come up with new excuses, for not reading it.
I am planning on following up Emerson with Thoreau so I was delighted to find a pristine hardcover copy of Thoreau's Letters to a Spiritual Seeker.
We also made it home with Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries.
All this went a long way to getting rid of the gloom of the day. And even better, we overheard a teenage girl explaining to her friend why she was buying yet another copy of
Phantom of the Opera: "It was on the clearance shelf and I had to rescue it because it made me sad to see it there." I hope she has a long life of rescuing the books she loves.
