Notes from the Troposphere......

You'd think A Reader's Respite would learn: a suitcase only has a finite amount of space. And if that finite amount of space is already taken up with trifles like clothes and toiletries, it's probably not a good idea to visit a bookstore.

Nine books later, we ran up against the problem of physics.

stop laughing at me. i mean it. stop.

In the end, clothes had to be sacrificed to bring my new babies home. What books could possibly be worth all that trouble?

Well, we finally found a copy of Colleen McCullough's The First Man in Rome. Weighing in at a whopping 1,124 pages, this tome has been on our wishlist for over a year. (Hint to Mr. RR: next gift-giving occassion, check our Amazon Wishlist please...it's so much easier that way.) It's one of those books that we should have read a long time ago, but somehow never got around to it.



Now we're perfectly aware that this book will probably sit on our bookshelf for at least another year before we finally get around to actually reading it, but if you are a true book connesiuer then you realize that is not the point. The actual acquisition is the goal here.

Then for some crazy reason, we got it in our head that we've been committing a very serious historical fiction faux pas by neglecting author Bernard Cornwell. So when we saw all three of his Grail Quest series sitting there all pretty on the bookstore shelf....well, you see where this is going, don't you?





Then, of course, we felt we were unjustly ignoring the non-fiction section and that's just rude. Imagine our delight when we ran across a heretofore unread Howarth book. Some of you may know that David Howarth is a favorite of A Reader's Respite. He was one of the few historian/authors who could turn a perfectly dry, boring historical event into a fascinating, imminently readable story. The man was a genius.



As it turns out, Howarth wrote a book back in 1969 about the Battle of Trafalgar, so of course this little treasure just had to go in our shopping basket.

Now any sane traveler, assuming book shopping while over 3,000 miles away from home is in any way sane, would stop there. Not A Reader's Respite, though. Oh no, we were a woman possessed. Add to the above treasure trove:

• two more of Susan Carroll's Cheney of Faire Isle series (not sure why, other than our Series OCD took over and demanded we round out this series)
• a Jennifer Roberson novel called Lady of the Glen: A Novel of Scotland (again, no particular reason aside from feeling a little nostalgic about Scotland for no apparent reason), and
• Tim O'Brien's award winning novel about the Vietnam War entitled The Things They Carried (getting a jump start on that War Through the Generations reading challenge)

and we found ourselves with a serious physics problem. That finite space thing again.


We're thinking that there must be a support group for people who can NOT control themselves in a bookstore.