A satisfying library excursion. Kal needed to pick up some books she'd reserved and I went along for the walk. I borrowed a few books I knew about--two Philip Roths, Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America for next month's bookclub; Julian Barnes's Arthur and George; Douglas Coupland's Eleanor Rigby but not J-Pod--and one whose title suddenly surfaced in my head after not even being on my lifelist, Michael Frayn's Headlong, and two I hadn't heard of, Peter Ackroyd's The Clerkenwell Tales (I'll read anything by him and if it's faux Chaucer, all the better) and Margaret George's Helen of Troy (I loved the last's Autobiography of Henry VIII and another Tudor gossip novel about Mary, Queen of Scots). Helen of Troy fits in well with my Iliad guilt and Mary Renault love.
All these great books have a return date, though, so despite the Mary Renault love, I must interrupt paperback The Friendly Young Ladies, which I began yesterday. In case I forget later, it reminds me I Capture the Castle for its dank, frigid setting, and Death of the Heart, for foiled love in late adolescence.
And tonight I plan to go to the Tattered Cover to hear an old DU pal read from a newly published book of poetry, and while there I almost certainly will pick up Lemony Snicket's Beatrice Letters, and so we see that library books do not always precede owned books in the bedside stack.