Tuesday afternoon...

Not a lot to report. Just returned from the neighborhood Barnes and Noble, which has been reopened for a week, and is incredibly cool (air cooled that is). Not very crowded this afternoon; I had plenty of time to browse and to pick books that I might possibly want to buy. Was tempted by many---an interesting book about the last year of the Civil War, Philip Roth's Letting Go (parts of which I have read many times) Auster's Invisible (have already read it twice, but it calls to me) Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (have never read it---really should to complete my vision of Shakespeare) and finally, The War of the Roses by Derrick Jones---I have read many books about that conflict and also Shakespeare's four plays that cover it---but it constantly fascinates me. Even though I am aware of the many sequences of  changing power, I still love reading about it. Oh, and book by a critic named Emma Smith which analyzes about 20 plays by Shakespeare---from the little that I have looked at, her essays should be quite illuminating.
   And yet I left with nothing, only clutching the book that I had already brought into the bookstore, the indefatigable Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. Is it possible that at some point I can actually finish that novel and go on to something else.? Making headway---only slightly more than 100 pages to go. It's not that I hate that book--there are some very likeable things in it, but I feel frustrated by all the minutia about Boarding School life that the author brings into it. Did it have to be that long? And does the heroine have to glory in her passivity? Still, I am challenged to finish it---the next book that I already have in my apartment is a mystery by Agatha Christie---that should keep me occupied for a while after Prep, at least that is the plan. But the weekend should be long (and hopefully not arduous).
Maybe I can find it within myself to pay for at least one of the aforementioned books to keep me company while the superficial fireworks go off. I am hard on myself financially---otherwise I would have bought at least one of those books by now.
  Actually the one book that I really came for, but was not there, was the first on my list. It is called: Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City, and it is the five days that followed after the murder of Freddy Gray, as experienced by eight different citizens of Baltimore, and edited, and I assumed tied together by Wes Moore and Erica Smith. That book I would pick up in a second, and
gladly shell out the 30 something dollars that it probably costs. No waiting in the library for that one.
  So that is the story. When I was thinking earlier today about the content today's post, I thought I would talk about how yesterday my stomach was giving me trouble, but today it is calm. But you would rather hear about books, yes? Me too.