Lifetime Reading Plan

Weeding of the collection unearthed a copy of The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classical Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. It was gifted to me when I finished my M.Phil. degree. The plan is a very ambitious but comprehensive one, providing readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. Mine is a copy of the fourth edition, which features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century). This is a lifetime reading plan, and it may take 50 years to read these books. If you accept this challenge, Fadiman says your commitment to this plan should be like your attitude toward a career, marriage, or children. Work at it and these books will become your lifetime companions. I was not slavish or completely faithful to this list (I doubt I’ll read everything on this list), but I did read (in whole or in part) about a fourth of the 133 entries on this list. The book/giant list is more like a reference for finding new reading ideas. I like lists, which give me the illusion of order in a chaotic world, but I never feel obliged to fulfilling any list.

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. Homer, The Iliad
3. Homer, The Odyssey
4. Confucius, The Analects
5. Aeschylus, The Oresteia
6. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
7. Euripides, Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra, The Bacchae
8. Herodotus, The Histories
9. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
10. Sun-tzu, The Art of War
11. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, The Clouds, The Birds
12. Plato, Selected Works
13. Aristotle, Ethics, Politics, Poetics
14. Mencius, The Book of Mencius
15. The Ramayana
16. The Mahabharata
17. The Bhagavad Gita
18. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Records of the Grand Historian
19. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
20. Virgil, The Aeneid
21. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
22. Saint Augustine, The Confessions
23. Kalidasa, The Cloud Messenger, Sakuntala
24. The Koran
25. Hui-neng, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
26. Firdausi, Shah Nameh
27. Sei Shônagon, The Pillow Book
28. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
29. Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat
30. Dante, The Divine Comedy
31. Luo Kuan-chung, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
32. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
33. The Thousand and One Nights
34. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
35. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
36. Wu Ch’eng-en, Journey to the West
37. Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays
38. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
39. William Shakespeare, Complete Works
40. John Donne, Selected Works
41. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei)
42. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
43. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
44. René Descartes, Discourse on Method
45. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Sonnets, Areopagitica
46. Molière, Selected Plays
47. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (Pensées)
48. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
49. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
50. Matsuo Bashô, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
51. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
52. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
53. Voltaire, Candide and other works
54. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
55. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
56. Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in, The Dream of the Red Chamber (a.k.a. The Story of the Stone)
57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
58. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
59. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
60. Thomas Jefferson and others, Basic Documents in American History (ed. Richard B. Morris)
61. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, The Federalist Papers (ed. Clinton Rossiter)
62. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
63. William Blake, Selected Works
64. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
65. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
66. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma
67. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
68. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette
69. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works
70. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales
71. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
72. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women
73. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species
74. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
75. Edgar Allan Poe, Short Stories and Other Works
76. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
77. Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend,
The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit
78. Anthony Trollope, The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography
79. The Brontë Sisters:
79A. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
79B. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
80. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience
81. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
82. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
83. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener
84. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
85. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass,
86. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
87.Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
88. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
89. Henrick Ibsen, Selected Plays
90. Emily Dickenson, Collected Poems
91. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass
92. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
93. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
94. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Castorbridge
95. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
96. Henry James, The Ambassadors
97. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works
98. Sigmund Freud, Selected Works, including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and
Civilization and Its Discontents
99. George Bernard Shaw, Selected Plays and Prefaces
100. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
101. Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories
102. Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
103. William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography
104. Natsume Sôseki, Kokoro
105. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
106. Robert Frost, Collected Poems
107. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
108. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
109. Lu Hsün, Collected Short Stories
110. James Joyce, Ulysses
111. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
112. Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories
113. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
114. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
115. Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night
116. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, Collected Plays
117. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
118. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
119. Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories
120. Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness
121. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
122. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory
123. George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984, Burmese Days
124. R.K. Narayan, The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets
125. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape
126. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
127. Albert Camus, The Plague, The Stranger
128. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift
129. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, Cancer Ward
130. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
131. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
132. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
133. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

25 Mysteries to Die For

That The Name of the Rose makes this list makes it all the more important to me. I’m not a big mystery reader, so help me with these: which ones do you recommend?

1. Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer (1978)
2. A Coat of Varnish by C.P. Snow (1979)
3. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1983)
4. A Dime to Dance By by Walter Walker (1983)
5. Always a Body to Trade by K.C. Constantine (1983)
6. Hindsight by Peter Dickinson (1983)
7. Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley (1984)
8. A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman (1988)
9. Time’s Witness by Michael Malone (1989)
10. Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George (1990)
11. The Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron (1992)
12. Original Sin by P.D. James (1994)
13. Mallory’s Oracle by Carol O’Connell (1994)
14. The Daughters of Cain by Colin Dexter (1994)
15. Coyote Wind by Peter Bowen (1994)
16. The Dark Room by Minette Walters (1996)
17. Going Local by Jamie Harrison (1996)
18. Aqua Alta by Donna Leon (1996)
19. Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay (1996)
20. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosely (1997)
21. Blind Date by Francis Fyfield (1998)
22. In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson (1999)
23. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (1999)
24. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001)
25. Waking Raphael by Leslie Forbes (2004)

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

Slight in Size, Wickedly Funny

The King’s English Bookshop is a obviously a bookstore, in Utah, but it’s also the title of a coffee table book. I have been constructively influenced by the many lists taken out of this book. It is from this interesting category I have culled Le Divorce by Diane Johnson, a book judging by its title, cover, and popularity I would never have otherwise picked up. This list seems ideal for reading on-the-go, for in-flight reading, and for beach read.

25 Slight in Size, Sometimes Wicked, But Funny

1. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
2. Simon’s Night by Jon Hassler
3. Like Water for Chocolate by Laurel Esquivel
4. Household Saints by Francine Prose
5. Loop’s Progress by Chuck Rosenthal
6. Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton
7. The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
8. Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher
9. A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
10. Nice Work by David Lodge
11. Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe by Nan Lyons, Ivan Lyons
12. Goodbye without Leaving by Laurie Colwin
13. The Tenured Professor by John Kenneth Galraith
14. Buster Midnight’s Cafe by Sandra Dallas
15. The Queen and I by Sue Townsend
16. The Treatment by Daniel Menaker
17. Red Eye by Clyde Edgerton
18. High Fidelity by Nicholas Hornby
19. Le Divorce by Diane Johnson
20. The Traveling Horn-Player by Barbara Trapido
21. Chocolat by Joanne Harris
22. Headlong by Michael Frayn
23. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
24. The Clothes They Stood Up In by Allan Bennett
25. The Finishing School by Muriel Spark

I have not heard of most of the titles except High Fidelity and Like Water for Chocolate. Many of the authors, however, are familiar names, especially Muriel Spark, who has two books on the list. Judging by the title and its connotation, some of the appealing ones are Simon’s Night, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Tenured Professor, and Red Eye.

Vacation List?

I always strive to find the perfect books for vacation—something that is not impossibly difficult, but at the same time not trashy fluffy. I tried authors whose works I have previously enjoyed, but there’s always a demand for beach read (I never vacation in cold climate) that is not the league of James Patterson. This list, per The King’s English Bookshop again, might answer my call.

25 Novels That Are Easy to Read and Hard to Put Down

1. Tirra Lirra by the River by Jessica Anderson, 1978
2. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty, 1985
3. Rich in Love by Josephine Humphries, 1987
4. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, 1988
5. A Short History of a Small Place by T.R. Pearson, 1985
6. Chinchilla Farm by Judith Freeman, 1989
7. A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Haily, 1989
8. Daddy by Loup Durand, 1988
9. China Boy by Gus Lee, 1991
10. Brothers K by James Duncan, 1992
11. I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots by Susan Straight, 1992
12. Ruin Creek by David Payne, 1993
13. A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin, 1993
14. Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons, 1993
15. Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin, 1991
16. Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler, 1995
17. Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, 1989
18. Range of Motion by Elizabeth Berg, 1995
19. Hanging Tree David Lambkin, 1996
20. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, (Reissue) 1998
21. Armadillo by William Boyd, 1998
22. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire, 1999
23. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, 2001
24. Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, 2002
25. Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos, 2004

A whole new realm of authors and books that I haven’t read or heard of. Elizabeth Berg, Anne Tyler, Gregory Macguire and Sue Monk Kidd—authors I have heard of but never read. Which ones have you read? What do you recommend?

25 Novels That Stood the Test of Time and Stand Out Still

One of the great finds from my pilgrimage to Half Price Books is Dallas that is not fiction is The King’s English by Betsy Burton. Betsy is the owner of the monumental The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City. In the beautiful coffee-table book Betsy reflects the recent story of independent bookselling. Burton and her first partner, Ann Berman, opened the shop in 1977, fueled by an enthusiasm for good literature and a dream of creating a hangout for book lovers in Salt Lake City. Neither partner knew much about running a business, but over time they learn how to negotiate with sales reps, stock inventories, assess and shape the reading tastes of their customers, and thwart the pilfering hands of larcenous employees. The most entertaining parts of the book are anecdotes about famous and not-yet-famous authors who stop by the King’s English on their book tours. Isabel Allende is as colorful and passionate in person as her novels suggest, even during Utah’s winters, and British mystery writer John Mortimer endures a series of miscalculations with the aplomb of his defining literary character, barrister Horace Rumpole. There are even author signings where nobody shows up.

The King’s English caught my eye because of its polished packaging and good page design, and anyone passionate about independent bookstores should read this story. This book also comes with lists of great reading ideas, which I will from now on blog about:

25 Novels That Stood the Test of Time and Stand Out Still

1. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
2. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
3. Shosha by Issac Bashevis Singer
4. The Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer
5. The Second Coming by Walker Percy
6. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
8. Smiley’s People by John Le Carre
9. A Chain of Voices by Andre Brink
10. Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera
11. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
12. World’s Fair by E.L. Doctorow
13. The All of It by Jeannette Haien
14. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
15. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
16. Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
17. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. Possession by A.S. Byatt
19. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
20. Consider This, Senora by Harriet Doerr
21. The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies
22. Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
23. The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
24. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
25. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

I read 8 out of 25 books that have stood the test of time. The last one I just finished is The Blind Assassin. Crossing to Safety has become a huge favorite. Possession never made a deep impression in me, just meh. After The Satanic Verses, I had no desire to further pursue Salman Rushdie. There are so many names on this list that I would like to read: Murdoch, Gordimer, Brink, Hazzard, Doig, and Allende. This seems to be a great reading as most of these books are hardcore literature. That said, I will use this list, along with a few others from The King’s English, as blueprint to my reading this year.

Books on Books, Literary Guides

The unwrapping of presents continues. I know I am a very difficult person for whom to buy books because of my eclectic reading taste and my huge book collection. But my friends have just found the most creative gifts that help me acquire more . . . books.

City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider’s Guide Robert Kahn. This book fuses my love for reading and travel. City Secrets guides are charming companions to the world’s most fascinating destinations—London, Paris, Rome, and more, from cities to movies, offering discoveries from internationally renowned authors, artists, and historians. Books takes this intimate, insider’s approach to literature, featuring 200 brief essays and recommendations by 150 esteemed figures in the literary world, including authors, writers, journalists, scholars, and critics.

The Rough Guide to Classic Novels 1 Simon Mason. Get the lowdown on the best fiction ever written. Over 230 of the world’s classic novels are covered, from the 17th century to the present, with fascinating information about their plots and their authors—and suggestions for what to read next. The guide comes complete with recommendations of the best editions and translations for every genre from the most enticing crime and punishment to love, sex, heroes and anti-heroes, not to mention all the classics of comedy and satire, horror and mystery and many other literary genres. This book makes me want to re-read some of the classics and discover unheard-of titles.

Don’t Know Much About Literature: What You Need to Know but Never Learned About Great Books and Authors Kenneth C. Davis. This is a fun book of quizzes on history’s most influential literary works and writers. It doesn’t offer a brief review of the classics and their authors and why they were important to literature like the two previous books do but makes a great companion to literary trivia.

Classics for Pleasure Michael Dirda. To call myself a fan is an under-statement. I’m an admirer of Michael Deirda—his insights, wisdom, and writing. This book is a treat for myself. The book offers a wealth of personal takes on works of fiction, poetry, drama, and other nonfiction prose that have come to be regarded as classics and thus, he fears, are generally thought of as “difficult, esoteric, and a little boring.” It is Dirda’s conviction that “great books speak to us of our own very real feelings and failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions.” I love how he arranges these titles in nontraditional categories, like Playful Imagination and heroes of Their Times.

[142] The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop – Lewis Buzbee

Buzbee said: “I’m not here just to buy a book, though. Much of my excitement at being in a bookstore comes from the place itself, the understanding that I can stay here for as long as need be. The unspoken rules we’ve developed for the bookstore are quite different from the rules that govern other retail enterprises. While the bookstore is most often privately held, it honors a public claim on its time and space.” [3]

Matt said: Half the fun about bookstore is the scouring, to negotiate the deep canyon of bookshelves, to pull out books that for one reason or another catch my attention. The bookstore does honor a public claim on its time and space, for every single visit to the same bookstore is unique to me. Just imagine a book that has been sitting on the shelf for ages waiting to be picked up–by me. A bookstore is for hanging out, often for hours.

Buzbee said: “Part of the allowable leisure in a bookstore comes from the product it sells. Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.” [5]

Matt said: That’s the reason why we’re living in such an adverse time for books and reading. Everything–food, clothing, media, and even politics, are consumed in bulk. Quick consumer culture not only has diminished our quality of living but has also silently eaten away our language proficiency. Books are meant to be read slowly and quietly, over a pot of tea or a cup of coffee. Unfortunately anything takes requires such concentration and time is in loggerhead to this fast-pace society where literally everybody is running around without their head. Bookstores always seem outlandish, and otherworldedly to me (and I don’t mean Borders) in the sense that it’s where time is frozen.

Buzbee said: “For the last several days I’ve had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I’ve stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I’ve looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge.” [9]

Matt said: It’s not as if I don’t have anything to read; there’s always more than a tower of perfectly good unread books (classics pile, general TBR pile, vacation pile,…) on my night-stand, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I’ve been meaning to tackle. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as uet unknown. What is it? I’ll know when I see it! I no longer try to analyze this hunger, this lust that has afflicted most of my life!

Buzbee said: “It’s a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was_______years old when I happened on a novel called_______, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as________.” [37]

Matt said: I was thirteen. Nicholas Nickleby. Charles Dickens.

Buzbee said: “Nor is the shoe box the only shape for bookstores. A bookstore can, and will, be crowded into the most ragged of spaces, a constant battle between rising rents and lower profits, and some of the world’s great bookstores—Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and City Lights in San Francisco are two that spring to mind—occupy spaces that twist and turn like mazes out of Wonderland.” [68]

Matt said: Great minds do think like haha! These are the two bookstores that come to my mind when Buzbee talks about ragged space. I love getting lost in the warrens and tunnels and tiny, odd-shaped rooms of old bookstores. Green Apple Books, which he also mentions later in the book, has this little surreptitious staircase linking the mezzanine to the back room housing the travel section at the back of the store. Bookshelves line the ragged space of the building and extend up to ceiling. Creaky floor adds to the soundtrack of the pages turned. Today’s superstores that occupy flat, cake-box, mall spaces whose floor plans are often identical to every other branch in the chain do not impress me at all. Too much space in between shelves has inevitably stripped the bookish feeling that should make a great bookstore.

Buzbee said: “If the shelf is tight but has some give between Bulgakov and Buzzati, the bookseller can make it work. The best method is to pull the last Bulgakov and the first Buzzati halfway out, then slide the new book between them, and gently nudge.” [140]

Matt said: He even mentions Bulgakov! Bravo!

Buzbee said:”Or the book might be a gift. Books do make perfect gifts, but by their very nature, books can also be a problem as tokens of affection. The delay factor is huge. Ask any of my godkids or nieces and nephews. Oh, look, they’ve been heard to say, another book from Uncle Lew, gee, what a surprise, thank you. I can’t help myself, I have to give them books. You can thank the gift giver for the gesture, but true thanks for the books have to wait until it’s read.” [143]

Matt said:I usually don’t give books as gifts unless I have a fairly good grasp of the person’s reading taste. Nor do I expect gift of books from anyone. Anyone. It’s always dicey choosing that gift book, too. You may have loved it, but your close friend, unbeknownst to me, don’t find books about Russian literature that exciting. I make recommendation but not give them as gifts. This is something akin to giving a sweater that is the wrong size, except that there are 4 million sizes to choose from! Those to whom I give books as gifts are really special people.

Books on Books, Gearing for Read-A-Thon

Eva’s post reminds me of a book that has been sitting around for so long that I have yet got to it: Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee. It’s a memoir, a book on the love for book and bookstores. I remembered buying a few copies of the hardbacks and gave them to friends as gifts when it was first released. It’s not a chunkster of a book–a little bit shy of 200 pages–but describes the thrill of his bookstore experience most bibliophiles would share. How he walks into a bookshop and feasts his eyes on the walls lined with stock, and gravitate to the tables and racks stacked with new and notable books. Woven into these personal essays is a tangential discourse on the history of bookmaking and book-selling, from the ancient Romans and Chinese to the modern era. I’m saving this one for the upcoming 24-hours read-a-thon.

Along the same tangent with Buzbee is Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer. Mercer, a former Ottowa Citizen crime reporter, finds himself at Shakespeare one gloomy Parisian day in 1999, in his late 20s, with not much money and no plans for the future, trying to evade some angry newspaper sources back home. With little fanfare, he is taken into the store by its owner, George Whitman, a kindly yet scatterbrained man, and begins working as an eager unpaid employee, running errands, acting as a referee between the writers who hang out there and ringing up sales. I have seen this one a while ago but have forgotten about it, glad I’ve found it again at Books Inc., which features the book on the wall. Another choice selection for the read-a-thon.

During my a-bookstore-a-day visit (where I usually have to fight the temptation of buying a book everyday), a book cover caught my eye. The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley is about the predicament faced by Kate Flynn, a brainy and forbidding beauty with delicate bones, “Nefertiti eyes” and a mean tongue, who has quit her professor’s job in London and returned to her grand but crumbling childhood home in Wales to care for her 83-year-old, increasingly forgetful mother. The boy next door, son of a friend, begins to hang around the house–he has a crush on the 43-year-old professor. I decided to get the book at the revelation of Hadley’s observations of the ebb and flow of female desire and frustration, which are reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, but she taps sensual undercurrents where Woolf wouldn’t have dipped her toe. Has anyone heard of this book?