It’s a fine book, a gripping history and biography, covering in full something I only knew a tiny bit about. “It is destined to be,” I thought, and immediately bought it. A new book about Seneca, the Roman senator and Stoic philosopher! Fate had actually put this book in my hand. Then I saw what the book was: Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm. I was confused for a moment, because it looked like the cover had ripped, but it hadn’t, the rip was printed. A young woman and I both leaned over to pick up the books. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I do that?” she said in a thick local accent. While I was standing near a table in the main aisle on the ground floor an older woman carrying some bags passed behind me and accidentally knocked some books to the floor. Westlake and got Get Real, the last of the Dortmunder series, and mostly set in the Lower East Side. I wanted to read something set in New York so I looked first at Lawrence Block’s books and got The Burglar in the Closet, which opens with Bernie Rhodenbarr sitting in Gramercy Park, which I’d just passed by on the walk down, and then at Donald E. I wandered around a while and got some things I’d been wanting. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, and I went to the Strand Bookstore, that multistory heaven of used and new books.
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