A Good Book Day
I finally finished Can’t Buy Me Love (review coming after the holiday) and can stop lugging those 650 pages around wondering when we would get to 1969 already.  Heading out on errands after work, I spotted The Inhabited Woman by Giaconda Belli on the E Train downtown.  Those errands took me to Borders in the Financial District.  I love this time of year because I can justify buying books for other people and thus spending lots of time lurking in the stacks.  Then, on the R Train headed home, the professorial gentleman across from me was unable to stifle his laughter at Winner of the National Book Award – I thought it was a compilation of pieces by winners, but

Love on the Subway
Caught this on the platform at Atlantic/Pacific yesterday: Apparently Craigslist wasn’t working for her.  I like that she’s the literary type – and it looks like she might have a couple interested fellows.  The notice was gone today, so I hope this wasn’t the only one she had, unless she’s adament that he be headed southward on the evening commute.

Flawed Dogs: The Novel: The Shocking Raid on Westminster by Berkeley Breathed
This was an odd book.  When I first saw it on the R Train, just after finishing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I only saw the bright blue of the cover in the hands of the twenty-something guy next to me.  My first thought was that it was one of those “thug-life” novels that gets advertised on the subway,  but after I saw the man flip past a full-page illustration, I realized it was something I might be willing to read. It turns out Flawed Dogs is from the Young Readers imprint at

New Books
Last night, started reading Flawed Dogs by Berkeley Breathed (his first novel) on the way home from work.  I hated it (review coming next week) and about 50 pages in, started looking around for something else to read.  The N train is usually slim pickings, whereas more than half the people on the R usually have a book in hand, but I spotted Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America across the car.  I’ve put a hold on it at the library and, until it arrives, I’ll be sticking to The New Yorker.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
This book is absolutely enchanting.  It spoke to me on so many levels that I ripped through 500 pages in just 5 days of commuting.  It also feels apt to have been prompted to read it by seeing it on the subway. Betty Wehner Smith was born in 1896 and her heroine,  Francie Nolan, is a few years younger than her author, making her only a half dozen years older than my own grandmother, who also grew up Irish and working class.  Like Francie, she and her siblings left school to work and she was a young woman in the war years.  Reading the novel made me feel connected to my grandmother, to the clothes she wore (with hats! and gloves!), to the shows and the dances she en