Although I started the summer with some moderate ambitions, things haven’t quite worked out the way I had planned. In my racing, I did fairly well early in the season, but I haven’t finished a race in over a month now. Because of some sort of as yet undiagnosed problem, I’ve been feeling sick and tired and end up in too much pain to ride as hard as I would like. Unfortunately, this tends to happen even when I’m not racing, so I’ve been off the bike entirely for a week now. With luck, I’ll kow soon what the problem is, and I’ll be able to get back on the bike in time for some late summer and fall riding.
Yesterday was beautiful and sunny, and, since I’m not riding, Dorothy and I decided to take a walking tour of Manhattan bookstores. She had found this tour on another blog, and thought it sounded like fun. We skipped the Brooklyn part of the tour, as that seemd overly ambitious, which turned out to be a smart idea: even without the Brooklyn part, we walked something like 7 miles with increasingly heavy backpacks.
Our first stop was a small independent bookstore in the West Village, and then we wandered a few blocks over to a mystery bookshop. After that, we wandered through a street fair near NYU before heading to two more stores in SOHO, one filled with new books, the other with used. Then, we headed north and east, across the Bowery to another small shop.
Here is what I took home:
- The Writing Class by Jincy Willett
- The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
- Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
- The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley
- The Death of a Joyce Scholar by Bartholomew Gill
- Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan
- Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 