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 
[…] Update: You can find out what Hobgoblin bought here. […]
Oooh, Snow Crash! I loved it — even though it took me forever to get through it (on audiobook). So much to think about in that book, along with a rolicking story!
What a fabulous selection of books! I love the Morleys, especially “Parnassus on Wheels.”
I don’t know anything about The Book of Air and Shadows but I like the title.
Annie Dillards, Living by Fiction. Swoon.
Sounds like a great trip.
Sounds wonderful – hough it’s too bad you didn’t have your Garmin with you – that would have made for a nice route map!
Hope you feel better soon
I heard about Christopher Morley years ago–thanks for the reminder…off to Amazon to put them on the list.
Sounds like a wonderful bookstore tour!
I really like Gruber – and what a great title for a book! I read Valley of Bones…I need to get Tropic of Night next! I hope you feel better quickly…is this side effects from the lyme disease?
I’m late to find this post, but I do hope I find you in much better health. And having worked your way in satisfactory manner through some of that wonderful book loot.