Me & Barnes, We Think Alike

I've been on a hunt to find A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, our 3rd official UL selection. I wanted to take Mme. M's suggestion and get it from the library, but, if you can believe it, the New York Public Library only has 36 copies in circulating in all of their dozens of branches that spread across 2 boroughs. And, of course, they were all checked out. Go figure.

So I walked a couple of blocks north and found a Barnes & Noble (as ubiquitous in NYC as Starbucks) and went to search for the book. To my delight, no searching was required because I ran smack dab into a table marked "Summer Reading," that not only displayed our selection, but lots of other books that are on our To-Read lists like The Stranger by Albert Camus (it's on the Strand 80), To Kill A Mockingbird (which we want to eventually read alongside The Secret Life of Bees), and other classics like The Slaughterhouse-5, The Bell Jar (our first read) and Things Fall Apart.

(Note: You can see A Tree in the picture above, it's in the center, right under the R in Reading, on the front row.)

I walked away from the table with A Tree and Things Fall Apart (my copy from high school has long gone the way of the birds) and walked smack dab into yet another display, this one with a few first-time authors. I'm a sucker for a good book cover and I immediately went to grab a few before I remembered that they run about $20 each and can quickly add up. Plus, I'm currently reading 3 books simultaneously and I fear that adding more will fuel a combustion. But, I would like to eventually read these titles:

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace: Big Fish was a pretty cool movie (although I never knew it was also a book), so I feel pretty comfortable in the hands of Daniel Wallace.









The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

I love anything by Amy Tan and completely fawned over Memoirs of a Geisha (book, not movie), so I'm not surprised that I was drawn to this elegant, simple story. Definitely on my To-Read list this summer.






Nicole finished one of her summer reads, Mademoiselle deviated a little from her list, and I'm steady adding to mine. What about you?

Whitney