I’ll never read all the books I want to read. I won’t even come close.

I group these books in four levels of priority. First is a list I keep of titles recommended by   good friends and respected colleagues. Next are literary prize winners (especially the National Book Award and the Booker Prize) and titles strongly recommended by my favorite critics. Third is a list of “best” lists: the best novels, scientific and business books, essays, short stories, and poems. And finally, there are the thousands of books I have impulsively purchased over the years for all sorts of reasons.

The books in this last group do not have the advantage of being included on any of my lists, but they do compete for my attention. In virtually every room of every one of the dozens of rooms that I walk through almost daily, hundreds of titles call out to me as I pass them, like sirens to Odysseus.

Looking for a book to read on my trip to Nicaragua, I decided to choose one from this group. Standing inside the book-lined walls of K’s office in the Delray Beach house, I closed my eyes and pulled out two thinnish volumes.

The first was Blue River, a novel by Ethan Canin, an author I remember having read before (short stories, I think) and admired. I’d wanted to read something else by him.

The second volume, a bit thinner than Blue River, was titled Peacocks and Commas: The Best of the Spectator Competitions.

 I loved the title – though I had no idea what it meant. As to the subtitle, I was familiar with The Spectator, a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. (There were always copies in the lobby of Pickering & Chatto, a boutique publishing company we acquired years ago.) I remembered it as smartly conservative, but with a sense of humor.

I opened the book and looked inside. It appeared to be a collection of small literary bits. That was promising. But I was puzzled by the author: Joanna Lumley. I recognized her photo on the back of the book jacket. She was an actress. I’d seen her in maybe half a dozen movies. So what was she doing as the author of a book like this?

The inside flap of the jacket said: “Joanna Lumley was born in Kashmir in 1946 and educated in Malaysia and Suffix. After three years of pretending to be a model, she turned to films, television, and, a little later, theater. At the moment she is being a writer as well as an actress. She has one son and a washing machine.”

I liked it!

I did a quick calculation and figured I could read both Blue River and Peacocks and Commas in about six hours.

Perfect! It takes about seven hours, door to door, from our home in Delray Beach to our house in Rancho Santana. I’d spend my travel time enjoying these two books.