Author Archives: bookdwarf

BEA Report, Sort Of

I said in my post last week that I would be going to BEA in New York and would report all that I saw and heard there. Well, plans changed. I went home Tuesday not feeling quite well. I ended up in the ER where they told me I need an appendectomy. I had surgery on Wednesday and finally got home Thursday. I’ve been at home recovering since then. No BEA for me! I’ve been on the internet but not posting or twittering mainly so I would avoid any percocet-addled writing. That would be embarrassing. One of the disappointing aspects is that I’ve barely even read the last few days. All I managed to do was catch up on New Yorkers!

I also wanted to thank everyone for the kind thoughts and tweets. I expect to be back to normal in a few more days.

Weekend Reading

I did get to read a three books over the weekend. I finished Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell, a very interesting account of how our desire for cheap goods has led to the extolling of convenience over quality. It’s fascinating learning about how and when our perceptions changed. Then I read Await Your Reply by the nice Dan Chaon. I met him last week at a dinner and am looking forward to eating with him again this Thursday. His latest novel investigates what makes up a person. Finally I decided to read Elizabeth Strout’s Pultizer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge to see what the fuss was about. I liked how she used the connected stories to paint a picture of one person. It’s not a long book, but very engaging.

I’m off tomorrow to New York for Book Expo. I’ll be meeting publicists, authors, and of course, other booksellers. It’s always exciting and I’m hoping to post while I’m there. I’ll also be on a panel called Social Media and the Independent Bookseller with several other great folks. That’s on Thursday at 2:30. Come check it out if you’re attending the day of education!

Shelving Fail

At the airport in Atlanta on the way back to Boston, I stopped by a bookstore. I only had one book left and I get paranoid about having nothing to read. It was a large Hudson news I think with a cafe and bookstore. I looked at the small section they have called “Classics” which includes Homer, Shakespear, Paul Auster, and others. Then I noticed this:

shelving-fail.jpg

Can you spot the problem?

On Blogs and the Kindle

Last week, Amazon made it possible for people to read blogs on their Kindles. As Literary Saloon reports, many litbloggers signed up for this. Most blogs cost $1-2, but Amazon only gives 30 percent of that to the blog author. Immediately one flaw became apparent–you could register any blog, one you didn’t control, according to Techcrunch. Supposedly this has been fixed by now.

I’m on record as not being a fan of Amazon. I’m the killjoy always whining about supporting local businesses and the evils of the chains and Amazon. I’m not going to apologize for this. I’m not signing up for this either not just because I don’t post as often as others. I feel like I would be selling out if I signed up for the Kindle service as an independent bookseller. I understand the value of getting folks to read your blogs on e-readers, but I can’t support the Kindle, a gadget made by the company who is putting my people out of business. So there.

{Update} Check out Kat Meyer’s lengthier post about bloggers and the Kindle. She spells out some of the reasons against signing up.

Post Apocalyptic Fiction

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Why do I enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction so much? I read Margaret Atwood’s new book The Year of the Flood (not due out until October–also we’re going to have her for an event!) last week and I finished reading Far North by Marcel Theroux over the weekend. Both imagine the worst, the breakdown of society after the breakdown of the planet in some terrible fashion. Oddly in both novels, a pandemic of some sort causes a cataclysmic failure all over the world. Also weird given the “pandemic” of swine flu we’re supposedly witnessing right now, but that’s neither here nor there. Atwood’s book takes place in a city. People are abundant it seems. Theroux’s book takes place in Siberia–people are few and far between. And whereas Year of the Flood features a large cast of characters, Far North focuses on one, Makepeace, who lives a lonely existence in an abandoned town. They’re both excellent books in their own right and worth reading if you like reading post-apocalyptic fiction.
Why do we read and write about the end of our world? There’s something sordid about imagining our end, but there’s a long tradition of doing it–check out some parts of the bible for instance. Perhaps we need to explore what the human race would do if we had to start over again? Or why the human race has gone so far along a destructive path (nuclear weapons, global warming, continued reliance on machines for food and fuel) that more than likely can’t sustain itself?

There’s a cornucopia of post-apocalyptic fiction out there:

That’s just a handful. Can you give me some others?
P.S. Check out the trailer to The Road, due out October 16th.

Holy Book Bonanza!

I’m so very excited because Steve who runs the Used department here just gave me copies of not only The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen, but her other two books, In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane, as well! I have a lot of reading to do. I suppose I always do.

I liked Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi so much that I picked up a copy of Yoga for People who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. It’s an odd but enjoyable book, hard to classify in a genre. There are some brilliant observations and wonderful sentences. Here is his description of a new friend who had the balcony opposite his:

Nick was from California and I wasted no time in letting him know that I was the author of several books, none of which was available from the English bookshop on Via del Moro. He was teaching English in Rome—but he was also working on a short story, possibly a series of short stories, linked in some way that was of no interest to me or anyone else.

Great stuff.

Currently Reading

I had such good luck pulling the two year old Kate Christensen ARC off my shelves, I went back to look around for more hidden gems. I had almost forgotten about Socialism is Great by Lijia Zhang, which came from Atlas & Co in hardcover.

In Socialism is Great Zhang tells what it’s like to work at a missile factory in a job given to her by her mother. She hates her job and struggles under China’s stifling state system. At the time China was undergoing a transformation of its own, opening up its borders and making reforms. Each chapter is sort of a vignette. She details how people tattle on one another to gain favor with those higher up and how the younger generation discovers music and literature as a gateway. The whole thing makes me so glad we’re not communist or at least their version of Communism. All the piddling rules—hair must be a certain length, the standard outfits, etc–make me cringe. And how they expected people to believe the party line. It seems like such a stupid system, just nonsensical. I know it’s more complicated than this, but the whole things just makes me want to roll my eyes. Zhang works hard taking extra classes and learning languages to get out of her cookie cutter life. I’m not finished with the book but I like how she goes against the grain. She rebels against the status quo as much as possible. I’ll see how it all turns out in these last pages.

More on Kate Christensen

I finished The Great Man and also read Trouble over the weekend. Unfortunately, we’re out of Christensen’s other books at my store! Now I have to wait to read them. Both books are fantastic. I’m not sure if I like one over the other–they’re very different. Trouble is more subtle and had a more traditional one person perspective. But then again The Great Man wouldn’t have worked as well without the various narrators. I’m eager to read the rest of Christensen’s books.

Meanwhile I’ve started Wolf Totem because I wanted to read a Chinese bestseller. Supposedly it broke all sales records and earned “the distinction of being the second most read book after Mao’s little red book“. Set during the Great Leap Forward in 1960s China, it depicts the dying culture of the Mongols through the eyes of a Beijing intellectual who has traveled to live among a small nomadic group. It took about 20 pages for me to get into it, but the descriptions of life in Inner Mongolia grabbed me.

Discovering New Authors

I’ve had a galley of Kate Christensen’s The Great Man since before it came out in hardcover in 2007. Each time I’d clear my office shelves of galleys I knew I’d never read, I kept it for some reason. Now I’m glad I did. Fellow bookseller Michelle Filgate of RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH kept talking about how much she loved Christensen’s writing on both her blog and on Twitter. After reading a fairly fat book (Sarah Water’s forthcoming Little Stranger which is a departure from her previous books and definitely worth reading) I wanted something a little slimmer. I finally pulled The Great Man off the shelf and started reading it on the train ride home. Wow! I’m liking it so much that I want to read all of her other books. I have a copy of Trouble which is coming in June, but I want to everything!

It’s rare to find an author that makes you want to read their entire body of work. It hasn’t happened to me since reading Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom a few years ago. Sometimes a book pulls you in so strongly that you can’t put it down, but how often does it make you wonder how the author crafted it and how does their writing evolve over time? Has this ever happened to you? What authors have you absolutely had to read all of their works?

Literature’s Labyrinths

I recently finished reading The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a young-ish Colombian writer. I had never heard of him before, but with the popularity of Bolano, publishers are looking to South America for more literature. The book follows Gabriel Santoro, a journalist living in Bogota, over several different periods in his life. First, he makes up with his famous father after years of not speaking. Santoro had written a book, A Life in Exile, about a family friend who emigrated from Germany right before the war. His father wrote a damning review which caused the breach. When his father has open heart surgery, he comes back to his father only to lose him several months later in a tragic car accident on . After his father’s death, he investigates his father’s last days finding hidden secrets going back 40 years. The entire book looks into the dark secrets of Colombian history.

Now, I have to admit here that I knew very little of Colombian history. I turned to the internet and read up on the colonization followed by independence led by Bolivar, the various civil conflicts including La Violencia, and especially what happened right before and during WWII. Apparently Austrian and Germans who opposed Hitler were treated the same as Nazi sympathizers, but once President Santos sided with the Allies, the Nazi sympathizers were interned and had their property confiscated. This plays a large role in the plot of The Informers. What’s also interesting about this book is how not just this piece of history but what happened after the war, Colombia’s years of violence between two political parties, also influences the story. Vasquez doesn’t tiptoe around it. He wants to explore how a country’s dark history influences its citizens.

I also found it embarrassing how little I knew about South American history. I knew nothing about Colombia until I read this book and though you don’t necessarily need to in order to read it, it certainly helps. The 1994 assassination of Andres Escobar in Medellin for example was mentioned in the novel as a huge event in their history, something that left everyone glued to their televisions for information. There are several theories about why he was killed but regardless this moment lives large in the Colombian mind, at least according to this book, and yet I knew nothing about it. It’s funny how a novel can make you follow these paths.