New York books ...

My notes for this day say:  Pouring rain so sans umbrellas we head for Times Square - tiny - just a set of junctions;  its impact in the tallness of its surroundings. Colour flashing while we stand in puddles, rain in gutter, shiny drains and gridded, griddled covers of the subway.  Others had umbrellas, all to be avoided and several had shed new-bought skins as nylon litter.

Damply we lunched in a Brewery eating place; the sort of room and ambience we had expected (hoped for) of New York.  Copper vats, lots of wood and wallpaper.   Apricot Summer beer and a pile of chicken crispy-wrapped bits, orange sauce too spicy but the white a well-chosen accompaniment.   And, as always wonderful bread.

In the evening another place of the same ilk.  Serious, large b/w photos above picture rail height.

I'd taken Philip Roth's 'Exit Ghost' to read but from the firs three pages I suspected it would depress me.  Soon after my daughter finished Colum McCann's  Let the Great World Spin 'Let the great world spin' - a tale of a tightrope walker in New York, written in beautiful language.
Equally beautifully written, with nastier characters but an eventually positive sort of ending was Vince Passaro's irresistably-title Violence, Nudity, Adult Content: A Novel
Followed this with another  Colum McCann - This Side Of Brightness  picked up, to my surprise in a local charity shop.  This was more harrowing than enjoyable, yet the writing kept me reading. 
And yesterday, at the Tynemouth Station bookfair, a copy of Jesse Kellerman's The Brutal Art