After spending our first night in New York at a hotel near LaGuardia Airport - a useful approach if you're arriving in a foreign city late at night - Karli and I experience an excruciatingly slow airport shuttle trip into Manhattan. To be fair, it's not really the fault of the shuttle company, LaGuardia is being rebuilt from the ground up, and construction has slowed traffic to a literal crawl around the airport - it actually takes us longer to get from LaGuardia to downtown Manhattan than the flight from Toronto to New York.
Having finally arrived at our destination, and settled into our charmingly decorated Lower East Side Airbnb apartment, we decide to check out the neighbourhood, get some lunch, and perhaps do a little shopping.
Although our street is perhaps a little more, ah, colourful let's say, than we expected, our lower Manhattan pied-à-terre is perfectly located, close to two subway lines and within walking distance of several of our planned activities for the trip, including the Strand Bookstore on Broadway, where we make the first stop of our orientation tour.
Shopping at the Strand is a bit like drinking out of a fire hose, and as such I don’t attempt a scientific approach to perusing the closely-spaced 10-foot tall bookshelves of the Science Fiction section (which, to be honest, don’t lend themselves to casual browsing anyway – I’d be curious to see statistics that correlated shelf placement with sales figures). However, a few interesting choices catch my eye, and it doesn’t take long for me to reach my self-imposed cutoff of buying only as many books at a time as I can grip in one hand.
First into the stack are Red Seas Under Red Skies and The Republic of Thieves, the second and third books in Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard sequence. I read and enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora, the first in the series, in 2014, but for some odd reason I wasn't able to find the next two books together, so when I spot them here, I instantly add them to my handful of books.
I always try to pick a random book on trips like this – this time it’s Version Control by Dexter Palmer, which is apparently a novel about causal violation (or, as the rest of the world calls it, time travel).
A used copy of Good Neighbours and Other Strangers, a 1972 hardcover collection of Edgar Pangborn short stories, catches my eye next. Pangborn, best known for his 1965 post-apocalyptic novel Davy, was an accessible humanist author whose work was driven more by emotion than science. I have another collection of Pangborn short stories at home: Still I Persist in Wondering, published two years after his death in 1976 - I'll have to revisit that after I read this collection. (Come to think of it, I haven't read Davy for a long time either. So many books, so little time...)
I finish out my handful of shopping with China Miéville’s fantasy novel Kraken, which won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. I've already read it digitally, but I'm happy to support the publishing industry by purchasing a paper copy. Kraken is characteristic of Miéville's unique and dark creativity, but with more of a whimsical feel than his other writing - I look forward to a re-read.
Surprisingly, I don't see the one book that I do look for: Joe Abercrombie’s new book, A Little Hatred, which is the first book in a sequel trilogy to his memorable First Law series. How strange, I'm positive it's been released - I wonder if it's on a new release display table someplace...no matter, I've already reached my quota.
However, now I face a bit of a moral dilemma – if we happen to pass by the Strand again before we leave nine days from now, is it breaking the rules to buy a second handful of reading?
- Sid
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