The Sewickley public library has a quarterly book sale. It runs three days and I’m usually only able to wander over on the middle day, Saturday. Many gems presumably are gone, but many more remain. Is this the devil coming as an angel of light to distract me from finishing my non-fiction book list from January 2019? Perhaps.
I promised myself I would remove at least one book from the piles accreted from previous book sales but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even the culling of the herd itself felt like a distraction from the mission to finish a preset list. I’m already being pulled to political books that didn’t make the cut and had started reading Teddy White’s Making of the President 1968 when I saw White’s America In Search of Itself, which looks to be a composite of his four MotPs.
Franzen’s Freedom I reluctantly finished a few years ago but couldn’t get through the Corrections despite capable individual scene portraits. Why am I buying Purity? I’ve never read a le Carre, and probably should start with better known works. There are already other crime and spy writers ahead of him, but this book-hording compulsion (it’s only $2 for a hardback, it’s for the library!) was not resisted ther.e Pears is fabulous and I haven’t read The Dream of Scipio in a long time. Faust I’m queing up for a Civil War book run maybe after the ’19 list. The Latin book…that’s just pure self-torture.
A Passage to India at least as a intended recipient other than me – my daughter. It was another sign since I had just recommended the book to her yesterday. Surely this was a sign from the Gods, Passage just poking it’s head above the crowd, a cute puppy among the many still in kennels waiting to be adopted…
In the political halcyon week between Iowa and New Hampshire, other political books are piling up on the shelf and kindle as well. I may have to schedule two different non-fiction reading times.
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