Rainy days are for books

It is cold and raining and I am without an umbrella, having left mine at Lolita Bar after the Columbia Journal's launch party there last week.

This morning, braving the elements, I donned rain boots and a hooded sweatshirt and trudged to the public library, where I reluctantly paid $4.75 in fines to the Mulberry St. branch catchpole.

Freed from debt, I headed to the smallish fiction section in the basement to begin stockpiling novels for blissful summer reading. I selected:

• Candace Bushnell's One Fifth Avenue, because I had a hankering for something junky and far-removed from my own life;
• Henry James's Washington Square, for the 19th-century equivalent of the above;
• Grendel (John Gardner), because it's been on my list for years.

I read at the Think on Mercer for a while, cozy with a mug of Earl Grey and a mediocre parmesan and sun-dried tomato scone, before heading to one of the abandoned upstairs study rooms at Bobst library. During the semester it's impossible to get a seat there, but now that it's summer, I was able to snag a big table near the windows overlooking Washington Square.

Before heading home, I walked through the drizzle to meet Ian for a slice of pizza. He threatened to come home early today, having gone in early yesterday. We're to make something with spinach.

I'm now about a third of the way through One Fifth Avenue, snug in the mouse house, listening to Django Reinhardt and to the wind outside. We should ditch the spinach and eat something with gravy.