City dwellers know that one of the perks of urban living is the freebie sidewalk find. A lot of what you pass by is junk, but sometimes you come across real gems. For instance, I inherited my breadmaker after it didn’t sell at a tag sale and was left on the curb.
People move with frequency in the city, and inevitably there are things that just won’t fit into the moving van or that you decide you can live without. And dragging them to the sidewalk is a whole lot easier than taking them out to the Goodwill in the surburbs.
Sometimes what they leave behind are books. Yes, books.
Book piles in a city, reflect its character. Usually what you find abandoned on the sidewalk in D.C. are policy wonk books. Want to know how Jimmy Carter dealt with Thailand in 1977? You’re probably in luck; you’ll find such a tome on many a sidewalk around town.
But I am a book nut and have to check, regardless of how many times I’ve been disappointed in what people think I might want to pick up.
However, Sunday my luck changed. As we wandered to Adams Morgan Day, we took a far less direct route than we normally would have. The fates must have guided our feet because a row of books suddenly materialized in front of us.
Rudi and I glanced down — and realized we’d hit a jackpot.
The person who’d discarded their books?
A knitter.
We found so many books we had to run them back home before resuming our trip:
[Confidential to Sarah: Want the bottom book? I picked it up with you in mind…]
I love to travel, but with the economy the way it is, a get-away summer vacation is not in the budget this year. However, books are very affordable (and libraries add new meaning to the phrase “price is no object”). I anticipate taking many ‘literary’ vacations over the course of the next few months, and I hope you can join me as well.
… You may read any literary genre that you enjoy – provided it allows you to “travel” to a different locale that you would like to visit.
I will be participating in the Beach Bum category, which asks me to read three books by Labor Day.
I’m not sure about which books I’ll pick, but I’m hopeful that Shannon Hale’s adult novel, Austenland, will be amongst them. Other potential locales include a Midwestern dairy farm, a fancy Parisian apartment building, an Ottawa community of Scots, and outer space (DON’T PANIC!).
“So here today I present to you an Unread Books Challenge. Give me the list or take a picture of all the books you have stacked on your bedside table, hidden under the bed or standing in your shelf – the books you have not read, but keep meaning to. The books that begin to weigh on your mind. The books that make you cover your ears in conversation and say, ‘No! Don’t give me another book to read! I can’t finish the ones I have!’ “
I own lots of unread books. Long before I had a stash of yarn, I owned a stash of books, acquired as gifts, souvenirs, and library book sales. After moving to D.C., my job periodically required me to attend the American Library Association’s annual conference, where they give away books — for free. So each time I went, I’d come home with a suitcase full of novels and other books.
So for ease of writing tonight (and for future post fodder), I decided to consult only one shelf tonight. In the reading nook, the following books remain unread*:
The top shelf, which, admittedly, is a bit light on books compared to those below gave me false hope. Only two books hadn’t been read:
The Scotch by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald
The second shelf down, which houses a large portion of my knitting book collection also didn’t look too bad, although only the last item has anything to do with knitting:
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Into the Wild: Warriors 1 by Erin Hunter
The Last Dragon by Silvana de Mari
Subject to Debate by Katha Pollitt
A Woman’s Education by Jil Ker Conway
Thinking Out Loud by Anna Quindlen
No Idle Hands by Anne Macdonald
Third shelf down and we start to see the results of randomly shoving books onto the shelf in a frenzy of cleaning. This shelf is supposed to hold poetry, but now seems to equally hold fiction:
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Reading like a Writer by Francine Prose
The Open Door by Steven Gilbar
The 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith
Rules by Cynthia Lord
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer (I’ve read a couple of the sequels, but not the original.)
The Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine
Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women
Bottom shelf. This is supposed to hold literature compilations, as well as books from college. It seemingly also holds piles of fiction I couldn’t fit elsewhere:
Forgiveness by Jean Brashear (I entered a contest to win yarn on the author’s website and she sent me inscribed copies of four of her books)
Mercy by Jean Brashear
Coming Home by Jean Brashear
Live Is Lovelier by Jean Brashear
The Illustrated Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson
The Bilingual Edge by Kendall King and Alison Mackey (Ummm… I have no idea why I picked this one up at the last ALA conference I went to…)
Foundling by D.M. Cornish
Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer
Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipovic (I started this one but it was depressing and I abandoned it in favor of less warlike reading.)
The Name of This Book Is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch
Making Money by Terry Pratchett (Can I tell you? I looked at the title of the book and thought, “Why in the world did I get a book on that?!?”)
Admit it: aren’t you glad I only tackled one shelf?
Any recommendation for books in the shelves that should shift toward the top of the to be read pile?
* Some of these books mentioned above were gifts from friends that I have yet to read. Please don’t feel that your present was unappreciated. I’m just savoring our connection for even longer than usual.
Maybe one of my goals for July should be to catch up on book reviews. I wonder what it would feel like to be current with my reviews instead of telling you about books I read back in February…
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
From the jacket: “January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’d never met, a native of Guernsey, the British island once occupied by the Nazis. He’d come across her name on the flyleaf of a secondhand volume by Charles Lamb. Perhaps she could tell him where he might find more books by this author. As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, she is drawn into the world of this man and his friends, all members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a unique book club formed in a unique, spur-of-the-moment way: as an alibi to protect its members from arrest by the Germans. Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the Society’s charming, deeply human members, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all. through their letters she learns about their island, their taste in books, and the powerful, transformative impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds there will change her forever.”
My take: Oh. my. god. This book is amazing. I laughed. I cried. I finished it and wanted immediately to begin it again.
Set in the year after the end of World War II, this epistolary novel opens as the English are attempting to rebuild their lives as well as their cities. Juliet Ashton, a writer who had an upbeat newspaper column during the war, is back to being able to write about the topics of her choosing, but she’s unable to settle on a subject that matters.
A letter arrives at her doorstep, forwarded from her previous, bombed-out flat, from a stranger on the Isle of Guernsey. He has come into possession of a book that once belonged to her and, intrigued by the subject, he’s hoping to learn more. Could she possibly point him to a shop in London that would be willing to search out additional books for him? All the bookshops on the island were destroyed by the Nazis and he’s desperate for a new book.
Through their correspondence, she comes to learn more about her pen-pal, his odd group of friends who comprised the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and life under Nazi rule. Could there be a story there for her to tell?
Annie Barrows recently stopped by Politics and Prose to do a reading, so I and a bazillion other fans turned out to hear her talk about the novel. She explained that the book had been her aunt’s, but that when her aunt became deathly ill, Annie, already a published author of children’s books, found herself being asked to flesh out and fill in the story. Mary Ann died before the book came out in English, but Annie sweetly said that she was so glad that her participation in the project had enabled readers to connect with the best storyteller in her family.
And I can believe it. The characters are so well-written that you’ll wish you could time travel to meet them before you remember that they didn’t really exist. The format of the book allows secondary and even tertiary characters to have full and well-rounded back stories and for events to be shared from different perspectives, which I found to be quite rewarding.
Read this book. I found it best book of the year material. Amazing.
Pages: 278 pages
Category: books. There is/are Comments Off on into the stacks: 2009.5.
