Recent literary endeavors

My wife and I recently celebrated our three year anniversary, and had a mini-vacation scheduled for the occasion. We were going to head up to Stillwater, Minnesota and stay for two nights at some B&B's while exploring the town. For those who aren't aware, Stillwater is an official "booktown"--an accolade originating in the small village Hay-on-Wye, in Wales.  Furthermore, Stillwater is home to Loome Booksellers, something of a Mecca for theological (and particularly antiquarian) booksellers on this side of the Atlantic.   

Unfortunately, we had serious car trouble just before the trip and didn't know whether we'd even have a car, so we canceled at Stillwater.  Instead we stayed closer to home (and did end up getting the car fixed).  We revisited the inn where I took Tricia to dinner and proposed to her, and spent a day and a half looking around Geneva and St. Charles, by the Fox River in Illinois.  We were, however, able to spend some time at a smaller independent bookseller in St. Charles.

Town House Books was a lively place with a cafe attached.  It wasn't huge, but had a pretty impressive selection of literature for its size.  The people on staff seemed to be acquainted with most of the customers coming in, and they were discussing what books had been read and what new ones should be gotten and digested.  I was listening in on a conversation with an older man, and the staffperson told him that their summer stock was already being bought out pretty quickly and that he was getting ahead of them.  This didn't stop her, of course, from giving him a stack of four or five books to work on.  The exchange struck me as exactly how a small bookstore should run itself-- a modest, nimble inventory that adjusts itself to seasons and readership, quickly turning over its stock and always aware of the reading habits of its patrons.

Normally I judge a bookstore by its philosophy and religion sections, but I was determined not to do so here.  This sort of attitude works on 57th St. in Hyde Park, when I'm less than a mile away from the University of Chicago and can expect a well-maintained academic collection.  But in a small bookseller in a small town on a river outside of the city, different standards should apply.  I didn't go to Town House looking for theology books.  Quite the opposite, I was determined to come home with some literature.  I am constantly reading for research projects, which usually means reading technical work in philosophy, theology, and history.  I had already promised my wife that I'd finish one novel this summer (haven't made good on that promise just yet!), and I wanted to devote this trip to literature.

After looking through the shelves for a while, I settled on a book of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Second Space.  While published posthumously, I don't think this book was put together after Milosz's death... I think this is actually a collection he put together and simply didn't see into print.  I was vaguely aware of Milosz's name and work, and thought it would be good to familiarize myself with him.  Tricia, on the other hand, was going in the opposite direction and decided she needed to work on her non-fiction.  She bought Soul Survivors: Stories of Women and Children in Cambodia. 

Tricia and I were talking over lunch about the value of literary culture for a free and critical society, and I confessed that while I would affirm the importance of such a culture, I'm not often very good at engaging with it myself.  I'm one of those people for whom my research interests are a veritable joy... which is good, but probably presents some risks of letting my academic career consume my life.  Theology readily overtakes my free time, my hobbies, and my pleasure reading.  I'm trying to remedy that a bit, and right now struggling to figure out how to actually read a book of poetry.  It seems like there should be a proper way of doing it in order to gain the most from the experience, but I'm not sure what this would entail.  I imagine I'll botch this first attempt, though it will be good practice for future literary endeavors.