Rules of Civility

I love the library.  I think going to the library is a lost art form.  I am lucky to live in a town that has a great library.  They typically have a huge selection of books and DVDs, many new releases.  If they don't have what I am looking for or if it is already checked out I can simply request it and they search all of the other public libraries in Connecticut.  Normally within a week or two the requested book arrives in my local library.

I also have a Nook. I love my Nook.  Sometimes though I can drop a lot of money on books through my Nook so I try to trade off going to the library vs. buying on my Nook. 

The book I am going to tell you about today I got at the library. I read about it in O magazine at the gym and was instantly intrigued.  Problem was it was about $10 on the Nook and I already  had about 5 other pre-bought books waiting of me to read.  I felt guilty about getting another one.  Thus, off to the library I went (via Internet) to request the book.  Two days later I was able to pick it up.


Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Description from Amazon:

Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.

The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.

Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come. A love letter to a great American city at the end of the Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy.

This book proves that life plays out by individual choices.  Even when things seems to be going down hill there are opportunities.  I love this book for some many reasons.  Just when you think you know what is to come a new twist turns up.  I was done with 48 hours of starting it.