Booking a Room with a View

Confession time: I've had a singular hiccup in my New Year's resolution to not purchase books for myself. No, I didn't go on some spree, unable to stand it any longer, filling three baskets at Barnes & Noble with titles I have the vaguest interest in. No, it wasn't that at all.

Last week, my wife and I were driving around Missoula when I told her: "You know what book, more than any other book, I'd like to see Folio publish? Oscar and Lucinda." When I returned home later that morning after dropping Kelly at work, I checked my e-mail, and there it was: an e-mail from Folio announcing the publication of four new books, including Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, in celebration of the Booker Prize. I couldn't believe my eyes. And because it was this book (one of two on which I wrote my M.A. thesis) -- and after so wistful a thought, an hour prior, that Folio might one day see fit to recognize it for the masterpiece it is -- we decided I should and could be permitted this one wrinkle in the resolution. And so I ordered it the next day.

Reading that e-mail was one of the most unexpected thrills I've ever felt, and ordering the book perhaps the most satisfying book purchase I've ever made. Indeed, I'm all a-shiver with the prospect of owning so beautiful an edition of so beautiful a book.

And now: back to the business of no books.