Well, it looks and feels like we’re back to the usual Washington, DC summer weather. It was a nice break, those few breezy, cool, no humidity days, but we’ll soldier on a little sweaty but certainly not surprised.

I do have something surprising to tell everyone, though. We’ve lucked into some signed copies of Khaled Hosseini’s breath-taking new novel A Thousand Splendid Suns. The stock is limited, but we have copies at all of our stores. It’s the perfect hardcover addition to our Penguin Paperbacks Buy 2, Get 1 Free Sale going on now through July 26th. You can pick up a copy of The Kite Runner and a couple of Penguin Classics that you’ve always meant to read and you’ll be set for all your summer reading needs.

On another topic altogether, don’t you love it when you read two books at about the same time and find that although they don’t seem to bear any resemblance to each other, they complement each other? A couple of weeks ago I was talking about Powell’s Out of the Book project that resulted in a short, thoughtful film about Ian McEwan’s latest work On Chesil Beach. Well, I forgot to mention then that I’d read the book and enjoyed it quite a lot.

I picked up On Chesil Beach while I was reading Haruki Murakami’s most recent offering After Dark. At first glimpse they have very little in common. McEwan’s excruciating journey through the first night of Edward and Florence’s marriage is a fascinating exercise in pace, control, and language. After Dark is an ethereal journey through the night. While Mari, a young denizen of Tokyo, wends her way through the late hours, drinking coffee at Denny’s, meeting a cast of night owls; her sister lies in a bed in an entranced coma-like state.

What linked them for me was the slow, intense build of their stories all under cover of night. They’ve both created wonderful mood pieces. McEwan and Murakami play with time, speeding it up and then slowing it down to an achingly slow pace. Murakami does this with Mari experiencing the night as it unfolds at its various intensities, while for her sister time is creaking along, if moving at all. McEwan builds a precarious tableau out of Edward and Florence’s courtship that unfolds in excruciating second-by-second detail.

I highly recommend both of these novels. It was a pleasure to read them both additionally heightened by reading them alongside each other. Well, I hope you all get a chance to read some good books over the next week. It’s the perfect weather for lying out and reading while the pages wilt in your hands.