For the Bookshelf

When I knew that I was going to move permanently to Mexico, I started building up a collection books purchased from a local used-book store.  Every time that I would take a trip to Mexico, I would haul some more books in my suitcase.  By the time I made the move, four shelves of the bookcases in the office were filled.  After living here for over two years, I still have lots of books to read.  However, I have made a sizeable dent in the collection.

Before the move, I was not sure how readily available books written in English would be.  Of course, I could read books in Spanish (and I do have a number of Spanish-language books on the shelves), but for casual reading I prefer English.  And please don't suggest that I get a Kindle.  I'm a dinosaur, and I like the feel of a book in my hands.  Besides, I spend enough time as it is looking at a screen.

Anyway, last Saturday when Alejandro and I went downtown to pick up my eyeglasses, there was a Gandhi Bookstore on the ground floor of the building where the optician was located.  Gandhi is one of a several chains of bookstores here in Mexico City.  It is nice to see that, unlike the United States, bookstores here continue to flourish.  I suggested to Alejandro that we go inside and look around.

I asked one of the employees if they had a section of books in English, and she showed me two bookcases of books.  It certainly was not the kind of selection that I had at the "Half Price Books" back in Ohio. (I used to easily spend an hour or more browsing at that shop.)  But I did find several books to fill some of the empty spaces on my shelves.

The small book to the left is an abridged edition of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexander Dumas.  The original version of the classic novel is well over 1000 pages long.  Like many novels of the era there are pages upon pages of verbose descriptions.  Hopefully this edition, abridged down to 550 pages, will be easier to digest without sacrificing the storyline.

Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" is a modern classic which I have never read.  It tells of a society in the future in which books are prohibited.  (451 degrees is the temperature at which paper burns.)

I have read a couple of Ernest Hemingway's novels... "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but I have never read "The Sun Also Rises".  It is considered one of his greatest novels.  It deals with a group of ex-pats who travel from Paris to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.  Hemingway is the opposite of Dumas in that his writing style is very spare without a lot of description.

The fourth book is a novel by Amor Towles entitled "Rules of Civility".  I have read two other novels by Towles... "A Gentleman in Moscow" and "The Lincoln Highway".  I enjoyed both of them very much, so I am hoping that this one will also be a good read.