The Big Move

I live in Manhattan now. The biggest, most immediate improvements:
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.

In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.