I headed across the state to Harrisonburg for a workshop and left early enough to have time to stop into the Green Valley Book Fair. Off the beaten path, this warehouse is a book lover’s dream…sprawling shelves and tables with a wide variety of books. It is only open for several weeks at a time and you can find deals everywhere. I limit myself to one basket of books and walked away with a nice stack.
The two by David Baldacci–Stone Cold and Divine Justice–would not normally have interested me, but I started listening to The Collectors as I drove and was happy to discover this is a series. Two more–The Best of Virginia Farms and Self-Sufficiency–will be added to the farming shelf. I really don’t need another book that tells me how to do everything as Self-Sufficiency promises, but I opened it right to an easy recipe for strawberry jam and with strawberries coming in very soon, it just seemed destiny. I added Bernard Cornwell’s The Burning Land, the 5th books in the Alfred the Great series, which means I still have 3 to go before I can read it. (The Pale Horseman is waiting on my Nook once I finish this post.) And, finally, a new edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, will join the southern writing shelf.
I LOVE this part of Virginia. The landscape reminds me so much of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. The hills roll a bit more but the dairy farms with their silos and neat farmsteads are similar. When I left the bookstore, I chose the third route suggestion on my map app as it took me over the dirt roads rather than putting me back on Route 81. I was rewarded with gorgeous views of farms and cloud-filled skies.
