The only new releases where I actually count down the hours before I can finally see them on my Kindle are mysteries by Elizabeth George.
The fresh one will drop at 2 am tonight, which blows because tomorrow is my busiest day of the week. I get to be on the constant move from 7 am to 8 pm. Even the usually slow office hours will be populated tomorrow.
I love books.
I’m much older that you. I was born in 1952 in St. Louis. I grew up there, mostly in a borderline black / white area (please excuse the vulgar shorthand but by now you know what it means). In reterospect, I’m shocked (but grateful) that my parents would put their nine kids into that dangerous melieu. When I first went to Europe as a tender 27 year old, I thought “where is all the threat and aliented, anti-social behaviror?” It may have been there, but it was no St. Louis. I could see that and I was shocked.
My parents were staid Catholics, not hippies. The were kind people, who came of age during WWII (Dad was a 21 year old bomber pilot), bourgeois and flummoxed by the social upheavel but unable to comprehend it. They were 19th century Irish peasants in a tumultuous 20th century America.
One summer, my pals and I traveled frequently to a college campus across the Mississipi for outdoor music concerts. I would smooch with my girlfriend in the crowded open bed of a pickup truck rolliing along under the summer sky. A hundred years later I went to work for the guy who designed that college campus, flawed as it was. For me, it was associated with my girlfriend, who had run off to France. Myself, I had run off to a hundred places, and jobs, and adventures. I became an architect by accident, and worked in Miami and San Francisco and Seattle and Fairbanks and New York.
Where I live now, in Brooklyn, it’s all Russian that I hear on the subway and on the constructions sites.
When I first came to NYC all I did was pedal (10K miles) and read books which I had neglecteded in my ADHD early adulthood. Among a lot of other writers, I read most of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. After a few hazardous but thrilling years on the streets, I abandoned pedaling and took up Flamenco. I spent last summer at a Flamenco school in Sevilla. I much appriciate your insights into contemporary Spain.
I wish to thank you for making the United States your home and thank you for your contribution to this difficult experiment we Americans have undertaken. And I have great hopes that your children will find opportunities aplenty throughout their lives. Like I have.
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What a beautiful comment! Thank you so much. I’m glad you are finding something of interest on this blog.
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Imagine if they had physical book drops in stores at 2am for mysteries…:p. Of course, at least you’d be wearing comfortable weather appropriate clothes.
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I’m glad they don’t because I’m crazy enough that I’d go.
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I’m not into Harry Potter, but bookstores like Barnes & Nobel used to have a midnight release for the new novel in the series and the stores would be open at that time to sell it.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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