book it

With the 30% discount coupon available in Thursday's Life! (and another taken from a copy at the office) I made a quick stop at Borders on Saturday afternoon before meeting a friend I hadn't seen for more than six months for coffee, which ended up as a flat white and then a latte for me. The almost-forgotten friend had two cappucinos and a bruschetta which came on brown bread as the ciabatta had run out.

But at the crowded bookstore, I searched once again for Bill Granger's cookbook. And ended up with the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion to add to my obsession with baking cookies. With the rest of the books in the cooking section not as tempting, I made a quick browse at the fiction section before picking up Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul.

I had been enraptured with a piece by Pamuk, published in Newsweek some issues back. Can't remember precisely but it might have been an excerpt from this book. I still do have a copy of Snow which of course I haven't read, as I'm still currently reading Seven Types of Ambiguity by Australian writer Elliot Perlman. It's a powerful book. I never really understood what critics meant when they used the word 'powerful' but now I do. It's powerful. It makes me want to devour the book whole and yet I find myself being restrained, because at the same time I feel a need to sit and think about how it's written. And essentially one man's actions have set off a chain of events, and the pov is carried from one character to the next as the story unfolds. I also love how Perlman seems to effortlessly vocalise all the thoughts that are going on in his characters' heads. He makes them so real, so believable.