Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Ryan and I got a bite to eat at the local pub last night, The Whig and Courier, and the people at the table next to us were talking loudly about The DaVinci Code, both film and book. One guy said he was listening to the audio version "...because every time I start to read a book I fall asleep." Heh. I looked across the table at Ryan and tried to keep a straight face. I thought back to my day off on Thursday, which I spent glued to several books, for hours, and at one point on Wednesday night I was actually trembling because I almost couldn't bear to finish the book I was reading, it was so good. It was not The DaVinci Code. Oh all right, I'll tell you - Embers by Sándor Márai. I picked up a copy at the library sale last weekend, and had to read it when I read the London Times blurb inside: "A classic. Magnificent. A spellbinding piece of narration driven by intense passion." Now that's a blurb! And my lord it was true I could not put the book down. The tension builds throughout the book slowly and inexorably, relentlessly, toward the conclusion. The book reminds me of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Proust, but distilled, better. I'm still thinking about it, and I may re-read it right away to see how it's put together, how the author created that sense of tension, now that I know how it ends.

So books do indeed keep me awake! Another bit of book gossip I forgot to mention from last weekend - as we were waiting for the library sale to open, we were lounging around on the massive granite front steps, and saw a bit of good graffiti scraped into the base of the antique-style light fixture: "Reading is f***ed up" (with a little heavenward-pointing arrow instead of the word "up") and right next to it someone else had scratched something along the lines of "Educate yourself," with another arrow pointing to the first graffito. Gave me a chuckle.