A Sport and a Pastime

Summary from Goodreads:
Twenty-year-old Yale dropout Phillip Dean is traveling Europe aimlessly in a borrowed car with little money, until stopping for a few days in a church-quiet town near Dijon, where he meets Anne-Marie Costallat, a young shop assistant. She quickly becomes to him the real France, its beating heart and an object of pure longing. The two begin an affair both carnal and innocent.

Beautiful and haunting, A Sport and a Pastime is one of the first great American novels to speak frankly of human desire and the yearning for passion free of guilt and shame.

Firstly, thanks to Rebecca Schinsky (currently of Book Riot and late of The Booklady's Blog) for pointing me towards James Salter.  A thousand times, thank you.

Secondly, yes, Virginia, there are some people who can write good sex scenes in the literary fiction genre.  And that man is James Salter.

A Sport and a Pastime has an interesting structure.  We begin by travelling to Dijon with the narrator but when the narrator meets Phillip we really no longer stay with the narrator, we follow Phillip.  It's as if the narrator is obsessed with Phillip.  At times the interest seems fatherly, at times friendly, at times, even, romantically.  This is a very voyeuristic book as the narrator imagines/becomes omniscient during the love scenes with Phillip and Anne-Marie.  There's a lot of very frank sex talk which is interesting because it opens a window on how not only a 1960s privileged college male views sex without marriage, we are also privy to the ways in which a young French woman might view sex (although filtered through Salter's taste, but Salter-as-author seems to be very neutral, almost journalistic in tone).  Salter even plays with the reader's understanding, at one point telling us that nothing that he wrote was true.

An excellent book.  Also one of the first I've read using the Oyster subscription service.  Highly recommend that, too, for it's extensive backlist.

Parnassus on Wheels

Summary from Goodreads:
I imagined him in his beloved Brooklyn, strolling in Prospect Park and preaching to chance comers about his gospel of good books.

"When you sell a man a book," says Roger Mifflin, the sprite-like book peddler at the center of this classic novella, "you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life." In this beguiling but little-known prequel to Christopher Morley's beloved Haunted Bookshop, the "whole new life" that the traveling bookman delivers to Helen McGill, the narrator of Parnassus on Wheels, provides the romantic comedy that drives this charming love letter to a life in books.

I recently purchased a subscription to Melville House's Art of the Novella series and one of the first books I received was Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop.  I was going to read it right away but then I read the flap copy and it mentioned Parnassus on Wheels...oops!  Maybe I should read that first.

Well, I didn't have one on hand (obviously) but I had also just started subscribing to Oyster, a subscription-style lending library for ebooks.  It has a beautiful iOS app UI and a huge selection of backlist from HarperCollins, HMH MacMillan, and, you guessed it, Melville House.  A quick search brought up Parnassus on Wheels, with its accompanying information tidbits, so I settled in for a quick read.

Parnassus on Wheels is narrated by Helen McGill.  She keeps house for her brother Andrew on their family's farm and, well, she's beginning to get a tiny bit dissatisfied.  One day Roger Mifflin, having heard that Andrew is an author, shows up to sell him the "Parnassus on Wheels" - a horse-drawn caravan-cum-travelling-bookstore - because he wants to retire.  Helen seizes the opportunity and buys the Parnassus herself, determined to have a little adventure before she ages from middle-age to old-age.  Off she goes, after a bit of coaching by Roger, and certainly does have an adventure!  In the end, Helen and Roger fall in love - which is made all the better because, to mis-paraphrase Jane Austen, neither would have ever expected to play the part of romantic hero or heroine.

Throughout, Roger keeps expounding on his love of books and why books and reading are essential to a happy, well-rounded life.  His enthusiasm is infectious.  Parnassus on Wheels is a lovely little book for booklovers of all stripes.  Highly recommended for an evening with a blanket, some tea, and a cat or dog.

Dear FTC: I read this book on my Oyster app.