People had mentioned the Friends of the Library book sale as one of the great perks of living in Ithaca; an annual springtime ritual. But I was nonetheless surprised to arrive and find a line extending down the block! It felt kind of thrilling to be in a long line for something fun — remember concerts? People ahead of us were chatting (masked, from 6 feet away) about how long they'd been waiting, rumors flew about how much time it would take to get in. We quickly realized that we weren't able (or in the mood) to wait a few hours and decided to come back early the next day.
I'm a little embarrassed at the size of these stacks, tbh. I definitely went overboard. But what a haul!! Some highlights I'm especially excited about:
I was reasonably into the Wrinkle in Time series as a kid, but as a teenager I discovered L'Engle's books for adults, and those, I really got into. I haven't read either of these, and I'm very curious what they'll be like.
Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Joseph Roth are authors I'm completist about — steadily amassing and reading everything they've written.
I read Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other when it won the Booker, and liked it, and then randomly picked up The Emperor's Babe (it was on a semi-decorative bookshelf at a bar and they let me have it) and enjoyed that too. Blonde Roots imagines a world where Africans enslaved Europeans. I tend to hate this kind of fantasy alternative to historical atrocity stuff, but I'm curious what she does with the premise.
I read Kitchen in January and people came out of the woodwork to tell me about their high school obsession with Banana Yoshimoto. So I'm clearly overdue.
Will I actually tackle Marguerite Yourcenar's Abyss? It's rather dauntingly long, and I imagine it to be the same kind of dry, bejeweled, slow burn sort of experience as her other works. I feel so overwhelmed with work right now that it's hard to imagine having the time to sit and sink into this, but someday... Surely summer is precisely when one finds time for such things? The Elizabeth Taylor and Rebecca West novels, and The Makioka Sisters, too, seem like the quintessential summer read — sprawling sorts of stories best read on a towel or blanket outside... (I was just saying on twitter that I don't quite understand the category of the beach read).
Second Skin by John Hawkes and Woman at Point Zero are the only two of the novels that I really know absolutely nothing about, and picked up entirely out of whim (I did a quick check of goodreads and saw that Chad Post had liked Second Skin, so boom, sold. Goodreads is good for stuff like that). All the others, I've either read something else by the author, or have had them, or that book, on my radar for awhile. The poetry I'm much more random about — I flip through it and read a few, and if it calls to me, I take it home.
But now I really, REALLY, should not buy any more books for a good long time. Except Ali Smith's Summer when it comes out in paperback next week, because I randomly decided to read each of the books in the quartet in their season, and thus started on Spring last night because jeeze, summer is almost here!
But after that, really, nothing for a few months. Really!
