Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Cooler weather has arrived and with it my thoughts turn to winter days spent with books in the rocking chair by the woodstove. Of late my reading has been haphazard - although really, when has it been otherwise - and I find myself craving one of my annual attempts at a more sustained reading project. Multi-volume or multi-part, engrossing, new-to-me but a classic to everyone else, something looming on my life list like a rare bird spotted once in a lifetime. In recent years: Montaigne, Pepys, the Iliad and Odyssey. Winter brings out an aptitude for sustained concentration in me and I don't want to let this go to waste, good yankee that I am. So this year? Certain names loom large, both on my bookshelves and in my imagination. Such as Proust. Last time I attempted Proust, I made it through most of volume two. I actually loved the dreamy prose but couldn't stick with it somehow and want to try again. What about Anthony Powell's massive series A Dance to the Music of Time? Which I own in hardcover and paperback and have never cracked open. Or some of the Giant Famous Russian Novels I've never read? They're supposed to be really good, I hear (War and Peace, etc). Or maybe Dante's Divine Comedy? How about an extended foray into the writers of ancient Greece and Rome? Or the entire oeuvre of some author I've always meant to read but never have (Woolf - besides Orlando, Faulkner)? Good choices to have to make. I'm enjoying mulling it over. Suggestions welcome.

I visited two libraries this week, in different nearby towns, because each one contained something I dearly wanted to find out about. Something which was not available on the internet. How often can you say that any more. Did my heart good, call me old-fashioned.