New York Reflections

I just took a quick six-day Thanksgiving visit to New York. Not much book news to report, but there were lots of interesting things I saw:

There are two dominant styles in evidence on women all over Manhattan. One is to wear straight-legged jeans and tuck them into boots with fur trim. The other is to wear a mini, mini skirt over dark black leggings and boots. May I acknowledge that neither style works for me.

The Daily News and The Post are still in hand-to-hand combat. Each day they try and outdo one another with provocative headlines. The recent police killing of a man just hours before his wedding provoked shock and outrage in New York’s black community and those feelings were splashed all over the front pages.

The weather was better all week in New York than in San Francisco: mild and mostly sunny,

I didn’t have a book for the airplane so I ducked into this adorable books store on Madison Avenue and 93^nd Street called The Corner Bookstore. It is small, with hand-selected literary and high-brow non-fiction titles. All the big fall books are out and I can’t say I found any I was eager to buy. I was most attracted to Decca, the letters of Jessica Mitford, but not for $35. What did I buy instead? Wendy Wasserstein's latest, Elements of Style. I figured it was chick lit and would be easy to read on the plane. I figured wrong.

The hottest clothing store in Manhattan is called Uniqlo. It’s a Japanese version of the Gap with prices like H & M. Very clean lines, lots of maple and glass. There are hundreds of these stores in Japan and the first one opened on Broadway in Soho on Nov. 10.

I have a new editor at St. Martin’s Press. I get a thrill every time I go to visit the publisher because its offices are in the historic Flatiron Building. I walk in and wonder just who has paced those hallways.

The Christmas windows at Macy’s were better than those at Saks Fifth Avenue. At least I think so. The sidewalks were so crowded I could barely see. That’s New York at the holidays for you.

My friend Monica gave a baby shower last week for Laura Bennett, one of the finalists in the recent Project Runway. Laura is about to have her sixth son and all the women dressed up in red wigs and black clothes in imitation of her. All the party favors were still hanging around Monica's house, so my daughters got to pretend they were there. We brought a bunch of blue gum cigars home with us.