The Nature of Things

It was one of the best kinds of afternoons - hours spent browsing through book stores followed by a wonderful late lunch at a favorite restaurant. All with my favorite person. It's one of those pleasures that may be fading away in the future as book stores struggle to stay open in the age of Internet book buying. But today at least we still found a couple of them open and full of books. Full of books that I just had to have. I had a mental list of books that I wanted for my "to be read" list and I found several of them, but then I found another book that I didn't know I wanted until I picked it up. It was Good Poems, American Places selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor. I picked it up and the book fell open to this poem: Baseball by John Updike It looks easy from a distance, easy and lazy, even, until you stand up to the plate and see the fastball sailing inside, an inch from your chin, or circle in the outfield straining to get a bead on a small black do...

There is a new bookstore in my neighborhood. It is called Bookworms. It has actually been open several weeks now but today was the first chance I had had to visit. There are few things more hopeful than seeing a new bookstore opening up. It's a sign that someone has enough faith in the literacy and the culture of this area to risk their money, effort, time and dreams in such a venture. I wish them well. The bookstore is small and it deals mostly in used books, although allegedly it carries new books as well. The only ones that I saw today all appeared to be used. It doesn't have a very varied stock, yet, and it has all its fiction together in one section, so lovers of specific genres have to wade through everything else to find what they want. Moreover, it has a lot of books by authors that I had never heard of, but it also had a good selection of books by some of my favorites and by others that I had been intending to read. I left the store with books by Anne Tyler, Lo...