I don’t know about you, but for me Sundays are all about puttering around alone in my apartment, washing dishes, making grim predictions about my future and casting aspersions on the success of others. Somewhere in there, the laundry gets done. But don’t pity me! Don’t! Today was the Friends of the Cleveland Park Library’s semi-annual used book sale. Semi-annual means it happens twice a year, right? Because that’s what I was trying to say.
Considering I walked in the door six minutes before closing time, I’d say I did quite well for myself. Anybody who is everybody knows that everything in the booksale is half off for the last two hours, so we can pretend my tardiness was actually well-planned strategery. Even considering the lateness of the hour, I got some great stuff:
The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (never actually had my own copy of this)
Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barret Browning (my grandma loved her)
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (he wrote one of the most powerful anti-war poems I’ve read, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”)
A Place called Milagro de la Paz by Manlio Argueta (the author was quite strenuously recommended to me)
The Findhorn Family Cookbook ( lived there for five months. I actually cooked in the Cluny kitchen as my work assignment)
At the last minute I grabbed a copy Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer. Didion is best known (and well-admired) as a memoirist, but this is actually an early novel of hers. It received accolades from Tennessee Williams, which I makes me more inclined to actually read it, but I have admit that the purchase was inspired at least in part by guilt. I had the opportunity to go see Joan Didion when she came to UNC last fall and I totally squandered it. Well, not only that. I went to the reception given in her honor, ate the food, drank the wine, schmoozed like I do (I saw her! She is tiny!) then went directly to a friend’s house and watched Lost instead. I know. I do not deserve to have any good things happen to me anymore.
The funny thing is, this book of hers, which I now own, looks really trashy. The tagline is A story of passion, and the cover shows a woman’s manicured hand, clad in pearl bracelet, holding one of those old-school propane cigarette lighters with a giant, clitoris-looking flame shooting out of the middle. I just cannot tell what kind of book this will be! Sorry, Tennessee, but the fact that you liked it does not reassure me that it is not, in fact, pseudoporn. That’s what we love about you, Tennessee! The good news is, it doesn’t matter at this point what the book is actually like. With a cover like that, I feel like I really can’t go wrong– smutty bathtub read or highbrow literary-street-cred-earning-yawn-fest? Who cares! I am already satisfied!
ohhhhhh owen is a good man.