SPRING COMES.

Well we may have had our snow of the winter. Forecast for today is high 30’s, the traces and slush ruts will melt, and it is March 1st.  It will not only feel like Spring, it will BE Spring, meterologically speaking.  Could one ask for more?   This makes going to Maine seem all the closer, which means I am now busy sorting through clippings and reviews from this winter’s reading to amend my list of books to buy for the bookstore.

A Maine picture for most seasons transfers Summer's joy to early Spring.

A Maine friend liked Henry Kissinger’s book, On China, and White House people are busy reading it, among others, so I’ll order it when it comes out in paperback. I know for sure that two Roseledge Books regulars do business in China and several others travel to unusual places and like to know more about where they’ve been. Besides, it’s a big fat book which is often a plus for readers on vacation, especially near a glorious ocean. I wish I liked Kissinger more, but he’s smart and I think he got more right about China than about Vietnam.

I just read an article about Bell Labs, innovation hub for much of my life thinking about library and information issues, and Jon Gertner’s book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, is due out soon.  Articles about China and Bell Labs beg the question, when do you need to read the whole book to gain the learning? It probably depends on what you want to know or how much you already know or care or on how contentious is a related argument or how much time you are willing to give and in what spurts or how able is the author as investigator, thinker, and writer.

Choosing a book is a tricky proposition, especially choosing a book for another, as there are as many reasons to read a book as there are readers, but choosing is the real pleasure of having a bookstore. Roseledge Books is every year an ongoing accumulation of my best guesses and the books you choose to buy are my yes! moments.  So the joy of choosing begins again.

In their spare time, the Chinese read novels about work.  (See New Yorker article, “Working Titles” by Leslie T. Chang, 2/6/12.)  Oh my.  I don’t think this is a go for Roseledge Books, although one could argue that good police procedurals, e.g. Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, or Henning Mankell, have a fair amount of workplace activity involved.

How do I miss Maine? Let me count the ways, the days, the rocks and buoys.

I have a new pacemaker which, like so many of my encounters with the health care system, needed a second try to get it just right.  My too mellow heartbeat just got a boost, so expect more energetic bursts and fewer nod offs from now on.  Felicia Carparelli’s Murder in the Library is testing my newfound impatience.  I am only on p.26, but I already want her to know more about libraries than I suspect she does.