Interlude

We went to Powell’s last night, and being in those aisles almost brought me to tears. The Blue Room! The literary magazine rack! The Cavallini notebooks! I picked up two travel books by Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk and Video Night in Kathmandu), a used hardcover, in excellent condition, of Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi’s A Season in Mecca, Coetzee’s memoir Youth, and a few other titles for fall. Few places give readers so much opportunity as Powell’s to explore and try something different. I don’t know what I’m going to do without it.