I decided to skip weight-lifting today, since I plan to go do yoga later in the
morning and then row the double with Egret this afternoon. We were planning to row
this morning, but realized it might not be a wise move to go out in the dark on a
day when there might be no one else out on the lake.
One day in an
online Chat, several people from my List recommended 84 Charing Cross Road,
by Helene Hanff. I finally found it in the main branch of my local library. The
oddest thing is that Miss Hanff writes exactly like one of the people who
recommended her, or rather, considering chronology, the other way around. The two
women are of similar backgrounds and are even both writers and script-readers. I'm
convinced that either they're related or else my friend read Hanff very early in
the process of forming her own style.
Now I want my own copy of 84
Charing Cross Road, as well as Hanff's later book Q's Legacy. I can get
both from Amazon for under $20 for the pair, but those are paperback editions
(the larger, nicer, publisher's editions, judging from their price, but still). It
just doesn't seem right. I'm going to go to a local used book store and see if I
can get some nice used hardbacks. Maybe they'll even have someone's name on the
flyleaf and faint penciled notes in the margins. That would be much nicer. Best of
all would be to have them bound in antique style, with "thick vellum and creamy
pages", but that's unlikely, and I'll settle for "cardboardy American
covers".
I wouldn't mind a copy of Quiller-Couch's anthology of
English verse, either, though it is available
href="http://www.bartleby.com/people/QuillerC.html">online. My old Norton
anthology, my favorite of all the textbooks I had to spend so much money on in
college, is decrepit.