I had only two simple tasks in the evening on my way home:
1. Drop off three library books, of which 2.02 of them were unread, and borrow Bloodletting again, a copy other than mine was available.
2. Read the last 2% of Kitchen Confidential at the nearby bookstore.
What actually happened:
1. It took 30 minutes instead of 15 to leave the downtown peninsula. Thank you untimely construction/narrowing of major downtown streets.
2. Found the copy of “Bloodletting”.
3. And I also found The Birth House, a novel about turn-of-the-century midwifery in Nova Scotia. It is a library “Fast Read”: I need to finish and return the book in a week.
4. Bus ticket about to expire (due to gnarly downtown traffic) so I couldn’t finish “Kitchen Confidential” at the bookstore.
5. Saw Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet on the bookstore bargain table. It was marked down from $25 to $6! My new acquisition is not to be confused with Sky Burial: An Eyewitness Account of China’s Brutal Crackdown on Tibet; still, the setting should make the novel very timely.
For now, I must speed through “The Birth House” (one week) and “Bloodletting” (up to 2 weeks)!
(Incidentally, it turns out that Xinran of “Sky Burial” also wrote Miss Chopsticks, a novel I noticed on a different occasion for a promo excerpt that really rang true to me.”)
Lots of books with Asiatic themes! Yayy!