Used (DOG EAR)
Used (DOG EAR)
erailed. It’s a book by James Siegel which I picked up out of a bin in front of Sanford’s Maya Used Books. It was a hot day, I was flipping through their sidewalk bin of hardbacks, caught on the name (I’m a train fan), read the flap, noted the price (a buck) and added it to my stack.
It sat next to my bed (in the pile of potentials) for over a year. I think, twice, I must have moved it to get up the dust and cat hair.
And finally, between other books, I read it.
Wow.
I won’t tell you anything about it (that’s for the review coming up) but I really enjoyed this. It had punch and a twisty-turvy story. It kept me up at night. I read it over solo dinner on the way to Jim T’s ops. And I just finished it while waiting around the house for a root canal job I gotta go to.
What a book.
Worth every penny.
All one hundred of them.
And that’s the thing – if you are a reader of any level, a casual page flipper or a wood-chipper reader such as myself, you owe it to yourself to check out your local used bookstore. While pages might yellow, stories don’t age. You can flip through dusty stacks and find treasures, even modern day thrillers such as this (and I don’t do too many modern day thrillers). The thing is, unlike online shopping where you are only going to see what you are looking for or what Amazon thinks you will buy (not like, buy), a used book store allows you to explore possibilities. It’s like a shelter for books, a place you go to interact with each one, seeing if you like it and it likes you before taking it home. You might pick up something you never would have gotten in that straight-n-narrow sell-sell-sell screen Amazon grinds at you.
Like City of Widows, that Western I picked up as a free book (buy three get one free!) from B & L Books up in Altamonte Springs. Did I wake up thinking I’d buy a Western that day? Nope. But that’s the power of used book stores, the possibilities they represent.
So find your local used bookstore, set aside an hour or two, and browse…