'Living in a Ghost Story'

As usual when I visit Kaboom Books I leave with a stack of books I have already read. I’m a reader, not a collector. To find by serendipity a previously unknown book worth reading (which means reading at least twice) is rare in my experience. For many, a book is like a Kleenex – use it once and dispose of it. When I buy one, new or used, I’m virtually guaranteed to read it again. Saturday’s haul: Elias Canetti: The Human Province (1973; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Seabury Press, 1978). Elias Canetti: Notes from Hampstead: The Writer’s Notes 1954-1971 (1994; trans John Hargraves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). I’ve been reading Canetti since my freshman year when I stumbled on his novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) in the library stacks. I have spent the subsequent half-century urging people to read his work, without much success. The same goes for my other purchase: Undertones of War (1929) by the English poet Edmund Blunden. This is the first American edition of his Great War memoir,…