Last weekend, I want to Madison with one of my best friends for a day away from Beloit/studies, and we hit up a few bookstores in town. J and I are the kind of people to spend hours in one store (which was a relief for me, since I've been known to wear many people out in my prime... wink, wink), so I was able to nitpick basically most of the stores.
(left to right: Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon - Jane Austen; Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger; The Defense - Vladimir Nabokov; A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole; The House of Spirits - Isabel Allende; Before the Throne, Khufu's Wisdom, Palace Walk (Cairo Trilogy #1) - Naguib Mahfouz)
J and I went to two bookstores: Paul's Books and A Room of One's Own. I've been to Room maybe four times so far, and I love it; there are rooms on rooms on rooms, and tons of books to go through. Sometimes it's a little frustrating because I can't find something I'm looking for, but while they're sometimes hard-up on popular classics, they have a great supply of new, quirky, under-the-radar books.
Example: I was browsing one shelf, looked up, and was face-to-face with like seven Naguib Mahfouz books. I know he isn't an unknown author or anything (I mean, he's won the Nobel Prize for Literature), but I had only heard of him for the first time three weeks ago in class. I wanted to pick up another book of his, Children of the Alley, but I decided to cut my expenses short.
I picked up the non-Mahfouz books at Paul's Books; Confederacy is something I've been looking for for a bit, and House of Spirits was something that I decided to get on a whim. The Defense I decided to get because the only Nabokov I've read is Lolita, and he's another one of those authors I feel like I should read more of.
Franny and Zooey and the Jane Austen books didn't come from Madison, but I ordered them from Powell's a week ago, and they just got here in the mail, so I decided to include them in this post.)
Once I finish the two books I'm working on now, I'll hope to work on Before the Throne and I'll let you all know what I think!
What's on your reading list? Have you read Naguib Mahfouz before, or are there any authors who you've recently discovered?
-M
No comments:
Post a Comment