I love shopping for books. I'll spend hours stalking the shelves of a bookshop. I'm not very good at making my mind up, and there so many to choose from. I so much prefer the old fashioned sort of bookshop, the musty smell, the new and secondhand books all jumbled up together, the basements and little rooms tucked away at the back. In London those shops are dying off one by one, and in New York they barely exist at all.
So my new bookshop is online. I decided yesterday to buy some new books. I just finished a book about Audrey Hepburn (a gift from my lovely auntie Paddy) and need something to read. I have unread books on my shelves at home... but I just couldn't help myself. I spent two wonderful hours (it could have been longer) browsing books and finally settled on three:
"The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" the story of an NY journalist who went in search of six relatives who were lost in the Holocaust, a sort of family history detective story of how he traced them and discovered who they were;
"Homemade Biography: How to Collect, Record and Tell the Life Story of Someone You Love" (yes Mum and Dad that's you!);
and "The Thirteenth Tale" about a woman who writes the biography of a mysterious author, part family history tale, part ghost story, it sounded intriguing.
I'm cheap so I went for the free shipping which takes forever. I think I'll read my Eric Clapton book in the meantime. Or The Master and Margherita. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows again. Or...
3 comments:
I read the New York Times review for the Thirteenth Tale and they were fairly complimentary which, you know, is sayin' something for the NYT.
Sounded interesting to me, too -- takes place in a fictional town that's based on Cooperstown, NY, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and author of the "first American novel," James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans).
I'm a nerd.
Me, again. Don't forget about that super cool old bookstore somewhere in the East Village where I bought Screwtape Letters. Where was that place? And there was one close to where you used to live on the UES, too, right?
That's right. They sold everything in there. I haven't been back up to that neighbourhood in a long while.
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