A battered secondhand copy of The Third Policeman arrived this week, ahead of Henry Eliot’s June read-along over at Reading Classics. I’ve never read it. I know almost nothing about it, which is how I like to arrive at a book sometimes, especially one I’ll be reading slowly with others.

I hunted down this specific edition because of the Michael O’Shaughnessy’s illustrated cover. There’s a moustachioed policeman on a bicycle, a tiny figure standing impossibly high on a spindly ladder against a washed watercolor sky, a lone bare tree, a small white house in the distance. The whole thing has a flat strangeness of a dream. I love it. While I was looking him up I found a preparatory study he made for the policeman, just the head and shoulders, the face half dissolved into smudge and bruise. It’s wonderful. Looking forward to plunging in blind.