The first fresh breeze of Fall is here today. The oak trees rustle heavily, the water ripples offshore (toward Harts Neck across the harbor), and the Queen Anne’s lace, past its prime but still willing, waves with the goldenrod. I haven’t seen a stand of blue asters or red sumac yet, but I haven’t driven 131 lately to check the ditches. All of this affirms that change can be beautiful.
Great conversation with bookstore visitors about medical diagnoses and misdiagnoses, how one becomes the other, especially over time, and what to do about it. Arrogance, denial, preconceptions, conclusions vs. hypotheses, no or too few consultations, too little continuing attention to other options were all in the air. With different backgrounds, we had read Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think and were browsing Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live In a Post Fact Society. I would not sell my copy of Manjoo because it was in hardcover (uninsulated Roseledge Books sells only paperback*) and because I was still reading it. “Is a bookseller a bookseller if she doesn’t sell the books sitting on the table?” It’s a question for the ages, surely.
Fig. #35. I love this reuse of granite bricks. Like a good book well read, the worthy applications are many.
Why read? Well, readers know more than people who don’t read. This means that readers have more options, that they have more interesting and more useful conversations, and that, with multiple perspectives at hand, they are more likely to have a sense of humor — all of which lead to a better life, says this bookseller, too smugly.
Now that I finally realized it was stalled for twelve days, the webcam is back on and aimed away from the window for an even better view of heaven.
*I do have Goodnight Bush (by Erich Origen and Gan Golan) in hardcover on my desk (Who can resist this “unauthorized parody?”); but it is not for sale either.
, and created a new genre: dysfunctional family chick lit.
is our favorite Jack Reacher novel.
) and Reacher make comparisons difficult. Thinking fast of other edgy detectives who chafe at working “inside the box,” I was shouting “How about Ian Rankin’s Rebus (e.g. 
), or C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett (e.g. 
)” as the boaters were escaping down the walk. They shouted, “Next summer,” and waved.
is better than 
because First-mate Chase’s report was self-serving.
.
, a trade paperback, a one-handed fight with flopping pages. And Daniel Silva’s 
is a page-turner which makes looking up to watch the tide and the incoming sailboats a problem. So now I’m inside.
(chosen from the family exchange) and is the second person to recommend it for Roseledge Books. Good water-travel book, great tsunami. She’s also reading Julia Spencer-Fleming’s 
, the late August book club choice.
which is about deciphering the puzzle in the pattern of a centuries-old garden in Italy. I love it when a book makes me look differently at something I thought I knew enough about. There’s always time for Judge Deborah Knott’s North Carolina adventures in Margaret Maron’s latest, 
. In the wings are Per Petterson’s 
(it has a Norwegian voice, says my Norwegian friend who liked it a lot) interspersed with Daniel Silva’s latest Gabriel Allon adventure, 
that has additional stories titled “The [something] of Betsy Lane” and “Town Poor.” Roseledge Books has three editions of CPF (our locally-claimed classic), but none worked. He’s off to a St. George Historical Society potluck and talk about the Poor Farm of St. George. Maybe SOJ used as a model that very (now defunct) Poor Farm behind the handsome, renovated farm house across from George the Potter’s.
Banville, John. 
