Lauren Baratz-Logsted heads to South America in this week’s reading review, which makes me all nostalgic for Uruguay, where Kevin and I loafed around a couple of years ago:

Just when I thought the week was going to be a total washout, reading wise, along comes an amuse-bouche of a novella for bibliophiles everywhere.

The House of Paper, by Carlos Maria Dominguez, illustrations by Peter Sis. The story opens:
“One day in the spring of 1998, Bluma Lennon bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickenson’s poems in a bookshop in Soho, and as she reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.

“Books change people’s destinies. Some have read The Tiger of Malaysia and become professors of literature in remote universities. Demian converted tens of thousands of young men to Eastern philosophy, Hemingway made sportsmen of them, Alexandre Dumas complicated the lives of thousands of women, quite a few of whom were saved from suicide by cookbooks. Bluma was their victim.”

Who can resist?
Certainly not any book-lover I know.

When Bluma’s successor as distinguished professor of Latin American literature at Cambridge receives a package months after her death from Argentina containing a copy of a Conrad novel, he takes off on a quest to find the sender, a journey that ultimately leads him to the novelist’s own Uruguay.

Peter Sis’s illustrations are charming and there is a lot of fun to be had in these pages. E.g., who knew how much the Argentinean publishing industry resembled our own current dismal climate? There is a caveat, however: At $18 and only 104 pages, but with 11 of them illustrations, it’s hard for even me who is always telling everyone to “buy the book!” to buy the book, so in this case I’d recommend everyone reading these pages to buy the book, be careful not to bend the spine or get chocolate on the pages, and then give it as a gift to some lucky soul come holiday season.

Off to read book 322.