If you want your local bookstore to prosper...

A word of advice: if you want your local bookstore to prosper, a good tip might be to give me a gift certificate for it. I regard gift certificates as licence to spend twice as much as usual (naturally-- one wouldn't want to look cheap). I was fortunate to receive a gift from Nicholas Hoare recently, and so yesterday we made a journey out of walking there and back. (I like long long walks. I regard them as licence to eat cake en-route.)

When we arrived at the bookstore, Stuart settled down on a couch with a book of interest to wait out my selection process. (Which is to say that Stuart has come a long way since our trip to Paris's Shakespeare and Company in April 2003 which was the scene of our very first fight.) And I chose very carefully: I am deeply interested in reading Arlington Park and A Celibate Season, but neither was in stock. However I found eight others, and then narrowed the pile to five, and then three.

What won out in the end were Claire Massud's first novel When the World Was Steady, Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Each of these writers have wowed me with their more recent works, and I am excited to be venturing into their back catalogues for more.