Imagine my delight when the hollyhock that I thought was done for the season produced a surprise flower! Fall often brings little surprises like that. There’s a single balloon flower that just opened up over in the memorial garden.

We got back on track this morning and took a walk. It’s cooler today, thank goodness. A number of trees that have turned color in the past week and I see golds and reds scattered among the the trees that are still green. It’s rather lovely.

On the 22nd, we raised a glass to Don’s father, Lee, on what would have been his 100th birthday. And on the 28th, my dad would be celebrating his 96th birthday. We miss our dads so much – it never goes away.

Other than that, after Don’s very busy weekend and my semi-busy weekend, we enjoyed a day yesterday of just hanging around at home (after buying groceries for the week.) Don practiced his guitar and read, we did some laundry, I read…it was lovely.

I’m about 150 pages from the end of I am Pilgrim. It’s 607 pages long and it’s riveting – a spy thriller for the new millenium. Some spy novels can be rather dry, but Terry Hayes is a wonderful writer and his writing is anything but dry. I recommend it highly.

Here’s my story about this novel: It was originally published in 2014. I had just received my Kindle and it was one of the first books I downloaded because I’d read such great things about it. But I never got to it. Those were the years where I was reading a lot of books for review and it never made it to the top of the list despite my best intentions. About 2 years ago, I was in McNally Jackson – a great bookstore in NYC – and I saw that it had come out in paperback. Still feeling some regret that I hadn’t managed to read it yet, I figured that having the physical book in hand might spur me on. It still took 2 years to get to it, but there’s a truth in there. I don’t turn on my Kindle –  I’m not even sure where it is in the house – and I rarely use the Kindle app on my iPad. The last time I used it was when we traveled to Europe last year and that was simply for the convenience of packing/flying. To me, there is no comparison to the reading experience that I have with a physical book in my hands. None.

That being said, I certainly acknowledge the convenience of eBooks and the ability to change font size and have all your books on one device. No judgments here. I’m just saying that for me, the actual book is everything. The smell of the paper, the look of the page, the dust cover/cover – all of it makes me swoon a little. Of course, I, like most people, run out of shelf space, but I’d much rather have the problem of having too many books than not enough. And, as you know, I periodically go through my books and donate those I feel somewhat neutral about to my local library. It’s a win-win.

And, thankfully for books and bookstores, all the predictions about eReaders eventually taking over, leading to the demise of books and bookstores have been proven wrong. If anything, physical books are more popular than ever. Isn’t that nice?

So you see, I am Pilgrim  has been a part of my book consciousness since it was first published. And I’m finally reading it. Maybe it was a good thing to have this delayed pleasure? It certainly is leading me to look again at the unread books on my shelves and to remedy that situation.

Happy Tuesday.