Cape Cod Journal, Part VI (A Brief Conclusion)
Friday 6/15
The “last day of vacation” strikes with its usual poignancy. The skies are blue, the sun is shining, but we have to head home. This is tough, but on the other hand, my eyes are so irritated from a week of sand, sun, sea, and allergens that I can’t even put my contact lenses in. Add the fact that I can still get just as petulant about being removed from the beach as I did when I was nine years old and it’s probably just as well that we decide to skip the beach entirely, limiting ourselves to one last bookstore run before we hit the road. And where else but the coast of New England do you get to go to great beaches and great bookstores?
This run turns out to be killer. All week long we’ve been driving past a shop just down the road called Isaiah Thomas, located in a large, elegant, clearly “historic,” and spiffily painted old house. So it had already registered as a likely destination, but then last night we read that it had recently been selected as one of the best used bookstores in the region. As much as I like Herridge’s, I see as soon as I walk in that this is in a different league altogether. The place is huge, and every nook and cranny, including the large basement, is stuffed with books. But this is no shabby hodgepodge; the titles have clearly been chosen with care and intelligence, across a great, and rather idiosyncratic, range of subjects and interests. They’re also well priced and mostly in very good or excellent condition. The children’s section is delightful and extensive, sporting a sofa and some very large stuffed animals, including an impressive dragon (if you’ve ever tried to look at books with a kid or kids in tow then you know how important all this is). The browsing is a real lark, and the list of titles actually purchased is only a pale reflection of the fun. I come away with J.H. Prynne’s Poems from Bloodaxe; Ed Sanders’s 1968: A History in Verse; Stanislaw Lem’s Microworlds (a collection of essays); Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (I recently reread Call of the Wild, which is brilliant, but I’ve never read this one); and Theodor Adorno’s Prisms (more essays, priced quite cheaply).
What do the books you buy on vacation say about you? Are they a practical reflection of your real interests or a dream of a different life—the one you try to invent and inhabit during the week you’re away from home? Will you ever get a chance to read all those books? Anyway, Suzanne stocks up on some Judge Dee mysteries, and Nicholas (rather relentlessly guided by us) makes a nice haul of illustrated hardbacks of fairy tales and fables, as well as a good copy of The Wind in the Willows, which is one of those books that Suzanne loved well in childhood but I somehow missed.
Now that I think of it, it isn’t much easier to get me out of a good bookstore (o the possibilities!) than it is to get me off the beach. Nonetheless, we do manage to get on the road at a decent hour and make it home in time to order our traditional Friday night pizza from Pacilio’s down the street. Topped with lobster and clams, of course.
The “last day of vacation” strikes with its usual poignancy. The skies are blue, the sun is shining, but we have to head home. This is tough, but on the other hand, my eyes are so irritated from a week of sand, sun, sea, and allergens that I can’t even put my contact lenses in. Add the fact that I can still get just as petulant about being removed from the beach as I did when I was nine years old and it’s probably just as well that we decide to skip the beach entirely, limiting ourselves to one last bookstore run before we hit the road. And where else but the coast of New England do you get to go to great beaches and great bookstores?
This run turns out to be killer. All week long we’ve been driving past a shop just down the road called Isaiah Thomas, located in a large, elegant, clearly “historic,” and spiffily painted old house. So it had already registered as a likely destination, but then last night we read that it had recently been selected as one of the best used bookstores in the region. As much as I like Herridge’s, I see as soon as I walk in that this is in a different league altogether. The place is huge, and every nook and cranny, including the large basement, is stuffed with books. But this is no shabby hodgepodge; the titles have clearly been chosen with care and intelligence, across a great, and rather idiosyncratic, range of subjects and interests. They’re also well priced and mostly in very good or excellent condition. The children’s section is delightful and extensive, sporting a sofa and some very large stuffed animals, including an impressive dragon (if you’ve ever tried to look at books with a kid or kids in tow then you know how important all this is). The browsing is a real lark, and the list of titles actually purchased is only a pale reflection of the fun. I come away with J.H. Prynne’s Poems from Bloodaxe; Ed Sanders’s 1968: A History in Verse; Stanislaw Lem’s Microworlds (a collection of essays); Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (I recently reread Call of the Wild, which is brilliant, but I’ve never read this one); and Theodor Adorno’s Prisms (more essays, priced quite cheaply).
What do the books you buy on vacation say about you? Are they a practical reflection of your real interests or a dream of a different life—the one you try to invent and inhabit during the week you’re away from home? Will you ever get a chance to read all those books? Anyway, Suzanne stocks up on some Judge Dee mysteries, and Nicholas (rather relentlessly guided by us) makes a nice haul of illustrated hardbacks of fairy tales and fables, as well as a good copy of The Wind in the Willows, which is one of those books that Suzanne loved well in childhood but I somehow missed.
Now that I think of it, it isn’t much easier to get me out of a good bookstore (o the possibilities!) than it is to get me off the beach. Nonetheless, we do manage to get on the road at a decent hour and make it home in time to order our traditional Friday night pizza from Pacilio’s down the street. Topped with lobster and clams, of course.
posted by Steve Shoemaker at 7:28 PM
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