Books, botany and discarded Valentines.

June 30, Ashland.

Thanks to Bérengère I discovered a used bookstore a few blocks from the circus. It's called the Bookwagon, we walked there on Wednesday, and so far I'm on my third visit. I bought a total of fourteen books, some looking as if nobody had ever read them, for the price of three or four new. Good thing I don't live here or the store would be depleted in a month and/or so would my bank account.
Someone who's been reading the blog was kind enough to recommend some books they had enjoyed, but I didn't find them there. Here's what I fished out instead (not in any kind of order):
- The Best American Travel Writing, 2003
- The Best American Short Stories, 2003
- The Best American Short Stories of the Century
- To the Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf (a Master's degree in English and yet no reading her)
- Mrs. Dalloway, ibid.
- Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth (another gaping hole in my literature education)
- The Counterlife, ibid.
- Open Secrets, Alice Munro
- Women and Ghosts, Alison Lurie
- Empire Falls, Richard Russo
- A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
- Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
- and finally, Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis (I've wanted to read this book since I was very young, my Mom talking about it with passion, somehow it looms big, maybe because of the classic movie.)
Some of the books have annotations in them or names at the beginning. In one of them, The Best of American Travel Writing, 2003, there is an inscription written in an elaborate hand and different inks, the lines jumping to form a puzzle of sorts: "To my dear Matt (with a red heart in the a), Happy Valentine's Day, I hope you enjoy these stories & will be inspired to follow your heart. I love you very much! Marion, 2004." Another discarded Valentine?
On the way to the bookstore there is an elementary school that you'd just as much miss because it's hidden behind a front yard that has been turned into a deliciously overgrown and just-so messy botanical garden, with a sign pole that says "Que la paz permanezca en la tierra (may peace be on earth)" in four languages. Walker Elementary School exhorts its students to "Read, swim, see a green show and imagine..." for summer fun. The usual tame school fare (albeit not a bad program) but what got me was the green show part. Dylan would be at home in a school like this one, surely, getting into fights among the daisies and the ferns.