If you’re searching for the silver lining of your “self isolation” you could do worse than finding it in a good book. We have plenty here at the store, so put on your hazmat suit and come visit! Or better yet, give us a call and we’ll drop something in the mail.

For inspiration, check out Buzzfeed’s list of 44 Books To Read Over Spring Break If Your Travel Plans Are Canceled on which #18 is Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay, written right here in 624 Pirate’s Alley. Here’s what our Proprietor Devereaux Bell has to say about it:

“This novel was Faulkner’s first. It was the book that introduced us to one of America’s greatest novelists, while happily subverting the writer’s dream of becoming a poet. It was written in 1920s New Orleans, in the bohemian French Quarter, in the very room that is now our bookshop. Like so many other stories at the time, it’s about a soldier coming home, about the world he comes home to — which makes it deeply relevant even today, nearly a century after its publication. We are, like Faulkner, quietly aware of a far-off war and the soldiers it sends home, often broken and lost. Faulkner’s soldier is Donald Mahon, who returns to his small Georgia town after World War I, to a place where ‘time and space had stood still.’ He is scarred — both figuratively and literally (his face mangled by machine-gun fire). The town’s characters — all vividly drawn, with that exquisite independence of voice and perspective and voice that became Faulkner’s trademark — are jolted by Donald’s return. They had mourned him as dead, and moved on — even his own father. We see them in the midst of their wants and needs and hopes and dreams, a menagerie of paths consistently misaligned. Like all of Faulkner’s great novels of the postbellum South, Soldier’s Pay is at heart a story about bitterness and disappointment in the wake of war and change, told through the stale intimacies of ordinary lives.”