2 Novels Bestowed by Fate

Dear readers,

This dates me, I guess, but I don’t like to leave the house without a physical book. It makes me very anxious to be stranded without reading material — what if I’m trapped in an elevator, or the bus hits traffic, or my friend is late? And while devices are a good backup, e-books just don’t bring the same sense of security. Even my smallest purses have to be capacious enough to hold a paperback.

Because I live in an apartment building with a lively lobby-book trade, when I’m between reads I often leave it to chance (or whichever neighbors are cleaning out their bookshelves) and pick something up on my way out the door. This might mean James Patterson on some days; on others, Kierkegaard. It’s added real depth to my reading life! Here are a couple of recent hits.

—Sadie

“I Hotel,” by Karen Tei Yamashita

Fiction, 2010

I’d been meaning to read “I Hotel” ever since Paul Yamazaki, the legendary buyer of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, recommended it in an interview. So you can imagine my excitement when it appeared on a lobby radiator last January: It was fate — or maybe that nice woman with the sweet terrier mix who lives on 4.