Opening lines of books we want to read:
The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon Garfield (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24, 9780151013968/0151013969, January 20, 2009
The Perfect Stamp
Little do wives know how much men spend on their hobbies. But my wife is about to find out.
It is almost one o'clock on 22 November 2006, a Wednesday. I'm standing just inside the door of my marriage guidance counsellor's house in north London. I have a stamp album under my arm and I am in all kinds of trouble--emotional, financial, philatelic--a situation I couldn't have imagined two years before.
My marriage is over, but the reasons are still unravelling.
We have drifted apart over the years. I have fallen in love and I'm having an affair. I have developed a passion for someone I loved when I was young, and for something I loved when I was a child. I am forty-seven, and I can't concentrate on anything for very long.
I have built up a stamp collection I can barely afford, and it has brought me to the brink of ruin. The affair and my stamps, the two secrets that have brought me here to a small room in the shadow of Alexandra Palace, are not unconnected, for both are quests for meaning, the classic mid-life dilemma. For my marriage guidance counsellor the affair is a commonplace: a lack of intimacy and honesty with my wife, a beautiful woman who has rejuvenated my days and made me feel attractive, hotel rooms. But the stamps are something unusual.-–Selected by Marilyn Dahl
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Excerpted from The Error World by Simon Garfield, copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.