Apologies for the brief silence here at Malvern Books. We thought we’d escape the heat and take a little seaside break. The past few days have been spent paddling, reading, grilling, napping, and Backgammoning. Meanwhile, Operation Build a Bookstore is going swimmingly: the paint is up; the carpet is down; and a zillion books will soon be making themselves at home on our spiffy new shelves. And speaking of bookshelves, our rented vacation spot has a pretty nice set:

A bit of an improvement from the dingy bach bookshelves of my childhood, which invariably contained seventeen Readers’ Digest Condensed Books and a well-thumbed copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear that fell open at the dirty bits. In contrast, the offerings on this beachy bookshelf include Rilke’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare biography, Will in the World; and Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (which she discusses in this NPR interview). Plenty to choose from, then—but it won’t feel like a proper beach vacation until I nod off in a rickety lawn chair with a Michener in my lap.