My longtime partner Denise and I were in New York for Christmas visiting her family in Manhattan and Long Island and seeing the sights of Manhattan. In between gorging myself at a Christmas Eve pasta dinner, a French toast brunch on Christmas morning and checking out some of the more famous local eating places, I did make it to a few book-related venues too.
First we stopped off briefly at the New York Public Library to visit the decorated lions Patience and Fortitude and where I picked up A Book Well Read desk calendar.
Later in the week, Denise's friend Linda took us to one of her favorite bookstores, Book Culture, located near Columbia University. Not only is this area known for being the external shot for the famous Monk's restaurant in Seinfeld (shown here), but it is also just a few blocks away from the Cathedral of St. John of the Divine, one of the largest Christian churches in the world, which is still not completed. It is worth the visit just to see the cathedral, which has several spaces dedicated to poets and writers tucked away near the main sanctuary.
To add to the New York ambience, I was continuing to read Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, which is set in the city just before 9/11. But that didn't keep me from picking up a short stack of books at Book Culture, which is a great bookstore if you enjoy browsing through shelves and tables of possibilities (shown below). I picked up two books by one of my favorite authors Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010) and her A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005). I also picked up the novel Ceremony (1977) that was recommended by Sherman Alexie in The New York Times interview as his "favorite work of Native American Literature" written by Leslie Marmon Silko. ( I read the review on the plane trip to LaGuardia.) To top it off Linda gave me a copy of a Nelson Mandela biography written by Anthony Sampson in 1999.
Looks like my reading list is getting in shape for 2014 even if I am not.
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