It's Sunday, So This Must Be Barnes & Noble - Part 3

(I swear there were really lots of other customers around.)

Barnes & Noble had an unusual feel this morning, and it took me a few minutes to figure out why that was: around 80% of the customers in the store were adult males.  Now that's not something you see every day in a bookstore.  And these were not grown men herding their kids to the children's section of the store or trailing their wives as they moved from section to section. Most of these guys were on their own. The only downside to the mix was that I had to wait my turn to get at some of the books that caught my eye because some guy was already standing there looking at a copy.

But that only slowed me down for so long, and I ended up placing several new books on hold at the library anyway before I left the store (you didn't hear that, Barnes & Noble guys):

The Lost Girls of Paris is a fictionalized account of some brave women who were sent from London during World War II as secret agents into occupied Europe where they served as couriers and radio operators for the resistance. Twelve of the women disappeared, and when an American woman finds their pictures in a lost briefcase in 1946 New York City, she is determined to learn their stories and what happened to them. 

You will notice a theme in the other three books I added to my list; bookstores or libraries play a prominent role in each of them. That's not at all unusual for me, because I'm a real sucker for this kind of fiction.  The Bookshop of Yesterdays is about Miranda Brooks who inherits a bookstore from the man who was her favorite uncle when she was a child. She has no idea why he became estranged from the family, but via a scavenger hunt her uncle set up inside the store before he died, she is about to find out.

What's even better than a bookstore? A well stocked library does it for me.  The Library of Lost and Found is about a librarian who feels perfectly fine around books, but not at all comfortable around people - and she worries about it.  But then she receives a gift at the library that draws her out of her shell, a book of fairy tales dedicated to her by her dead grandmother. Is Zelda, her grandmother, really dead? Maybe not, and Martha is determined to find out for herself.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted is set in a rural town in 1968 Australia where Tom Hope meets Hannah Babel (there's obviously a plot tip in those surnames).  Tom does not know why Hannah (an Auschwitz survivor) wants to open a bookstore in their tiny town, but he feels a connection with her from the moment they meet and she hires him to build the shelves for her new store.  The question is can a man who admits he's only ever read one book in his entire life successfully court a woman whose entire life centers around books and readers.

These four bring my current hold list up to twelve, but I did finish a couple of books earlier today so all is not lost. Appropriately enough for this Memorial Day, one of the books I finished was a World War II history by Adam Makos called Spearhead. That one is all about tankers and their tanks, and it covers the final push into Germany during the last year of the war. Believe it or not, the reunion between an American gunner and a German tanker that takes place at the end of the book is likely to bring tears to the eyes of most of its readers (me among them).  This is a touching story that shows how the humanity in man can survive even the worst moments in history. More on this one later.