One of my favorite things about visiting the Peace Corps office in Georgetown, Guyana, was the library. OK first was the air conditioning. Then the library. It was more like a stuffed shelf, but it held books brought to the country by Peace Corps volunteers, then left and shared again and again.
Until that point, I’d only ever bought books or borrowed them from the library. I shared a few with roommates and friends. But this was a vast and random collection that helped fill quiet nights and introduced me to authors I had not yet discovered. Among the books I inhaled in those two years were “100 Years of Solitude,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Harry Potter.”
I thought of that crowded library last week when people started sharing their favorite books by journalists after I wrote about three I’d recently read. I promise this is not becoming a “books by journalists” newsletter (although I would subscribe to that.) But since I have this collection, I wanted to pass it on in hopes you can find something worth reading from this virtual stuffed shelf of other people’s books.
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