The Friends of the excellent Rochester Public Library have a very good used book store (though I must say that the Friends of the Woodbury Public Library have a bigger and better, if less elegantly housed, one), and we went in to browse the other day. We came away with a grocery bag full of “traveling books” (paperback mysteries and historical novels), but I also made two big scores: Tony Judt’s Postwar, and Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge. Big expensive books when new, I got them both for well under $10 total. Bliss.
I took the Judt book out of our library months ago, but life intervened and I never got into it (must have been too busy blogging). The Branch book is the final entry in his “America in the King Years” trilogy covering the career of Martin Luther King. The first two, Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire were superb. (P of F was one of my personal bests of the year—though I can’t remember now which year!)
Speaking of Woodbury’s own Friends bookstore: before we left I snapped up two paperback Alan Fursts for the trip. In one of them, Kingdom of Shadows, he writes about “the ecstatic gray light of a rainy Parisian morning.” It reminded me yet again of why I love his books. He can write.
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