2018 – New York

For the long weekend in February I made an impromptu trip to New York City to visit two of my dearest friends, friends I made back in 2013 at Oxford. Here I am in NYC, two years later, finding quite a different America than the one I left post-election night in 2016. Upon arrival my friends were kind enough to not only offer me a place to sleep, but also to dedicate their entire weekend raiding bookstores. In 48 hours we visited 10 bookstores, and two libraries (for what my Fitbit calculated a total of 35,000 steps in two days). All these stores were scattered throughout the city and it was a deliberate journey to get to each one. Although I didn’t meet Neil Gaiman on this flight back, I found a first edition of Infinite Jest at the Strand Bookstore’s Rare Book Room. I also left NYC with a copy of Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else, and The Village: 400 years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village by Jonathan Strausbaugh. At the Morgan Library, the main exhibition this time was on Tennessee Williams which was absolutely spectacular.

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