The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

Several years ago, when I was in graduate school, I had a job that involved going to Seattle to coordinate a conference every January. This was not a task I enjoyed--in fact, it's accurate to say that I hated it--but it was a job and it provided me with health insurance while I was in school.

The conference was always held on a weekend and it was two full days. We would start at 7:00 in the morning and go until at least 9:00 PM on Saturday, but on Sunday we'd usually be done at around 5:00. One year, after all the conference events were over, I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the Elliot Bay Book Company so I could pick up something gentle and soothing that would allow me to unwind on the flight home. I ended up with 84, Charing Cross Road. Shockingly for a book lover I'd never heard of this book before I stumbled on it at Elliot Bay, but it turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. As soon as I got back to my apartment, I sought out a used copy of the sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. For some reason--possibly because I was afraid it wouldn't live up to my expectations, or possibly because I wanted to be able to keep looking forward to reading it--it's languished on my TBR shelf. When I was trying to figure out which book I could read quickly for the Books I Should Have Read by Now challenge, this one practically leapt off my shelf.

It's been so long since I read 84, Charing Cross Road that I remembered very little about it other than the fact that I thought it was wonderful. This was probably an advantage because if I'd remembered more, I think I'd have been constantly comparing the two.

As it was, I think Duchess was slightly less charming than 84. It was still a wonderful read and hard to believe it's a journal of Hanff's trip to London because some passages seem almost too good to be true: in one entry, she writes about a failed attempt to go to a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She says she "would have given a week of [her] life for a ticket," but alas, it is not meant to be. The next day, she receives a letter from an English fan, whom she's never met, inviting her to see the play with some other friends. It's hard to believe this wasn't plotted!

The people Hanff meets, and the way she portrays them in her journal, are charming. An airport employee, the Colonel, offers to meet her at Heathrow to help her through customs and becomes a recurring character throughout the book. At one point he is driving her to visit Stratford, where they will stay overnight.

As we drove, he told me a long-winded story about a window he knows who fell in love with a man and was invited to his villa in Italy, and when she got there she found she had no room of her own, the man actually meant her to share his BEDroom, d'ye see, and Well-I-mean-to-say, aid the Colonel, she wasn't aTALL that sort, and it was a shock to find the Bounder wanted only One Thing. I wondered why he told me the story since he didn't figure in it--and then it dawned on me that it was his tactful way of assuring me he didn't expect me to share his bedroom in Stratford.

This was a short, gentle, easy-to-read book and I think it's worth reading as a follow-up to 84 Charing Cross Road. However, I don't think I'll be in a hurry to read the last book in the trilogy, Q's Legacy.