Who knew we were so close to science fiction? Okay, I’m sure a lot of people did. Reading this article on the Phoenix Lander, I couldn’t help but wonder how close we are to Kim Stanley Robinson’s vision. After a nine month journey, the Lander is set to land on Mars sometime Sunday and perform a few lab experiments.

But first, it must survive what its developers call the final “seven minutes of terror” to reach the surface.“There are many, many risks and uncertainties,” said Dr. Edward Weiler, associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration science division. Since the start of planetary exploration, 55 percent of spacecraft sent to land on Mars have failed, he said.

I don’t know. Maybe if we spent more money on the space program than on say, unnecessary wars, we’d have landed on Mars by now? Just a thought.

I’m officially sick of Winter. Cold days begone! The buying season is almost over for me. I’m waiting for my last sales rep right now. This is the end of my very first buying season as the Head Buyer. I think it went well. It’s hard to tell since not many of the books I’ve bought have shown up yet.

I got some great galleys in the mail this week:

• Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar
• Missy by Chris Hannan
• The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer
• The Red Prince by Timothy Snyder
• Temporary People by Steve Gillis
• The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang
• The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia

There are more of course, but I felt sort of blessed or something I guess for getting so many good books in the mail in the spate of a few days. I get a lot of galleys. Loads. Too many, and so many that I don’t want to read frankly. I’m looking forward to a weekend of reading.

Why Boston loves its ice cream so much is beyond me. You’d think that in a city that’s below 35 degrees for a good portion of the year, we’d favor hot chocolate or something (though Burdick’s hot chocolate is treasured by many). Toscanini’s has been making some of the city’s best ice cream for a while and it came as sort of a shock to find them closed to due to nonpayment of taxes. Never fear, they’re back in action. Even the New York Times noticed. We can now get our cake batter flavored ice cream again.

This time the silence is not my fault. I haven’t been able to access the server since I got back from Louisville on Sunday night. I’m still not sure why but it magically fixed itself last night. I think I had a very successful trip to Louisville. Met up with a lot of old friends and made some new ones. Downtown Louisville is odd—there’s no one around and not a lot of businesses. It reminds me of Huntsville, AL where I grew up. We managed to find some restaurants and bars in which to entertain ourselves until the wee hours of the morning (booksellers are an investigative lot). The focus of this educational weekend appeared to be shopping locally and going green, which tie together when you think about it. I back now with a million new ideas that we’ll hopefully be able to implement over the next few months.
I ended up bringing along K.J. Parker’s Devices and Desires anyway. I didn’t want to wait until Monday to resume reading it. Now of course, I have to read the other two just as big books in the trilogy. I came back from Kentucky with an even longer reading list. On the plane back, I started Tony Horowitz’s forthcoming book A Long and Strange Voyage: Rediscovering the New World. Horowitz realized that he’s forgotten a large chunk of American history. We all learn 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue (not to mention he never stepped foot in North America), Jamestown, and the pilgrims, but what about all the other explorers? What do you know about Coronado and de Soto and the Vikings? He sets out to journey to the places they encountered and see what sort of legacy they left. If you’ve read Confederates in the Attic, his account of exploring the Civil War’s mark on the South, you’ll remember that Horowitz is at his best when describing the people he meets along the way. I’m about two thirds of the way through and have already learned some interesting factoids.

From a review of The Deep by Claire Nouvian, a beautiful book from the University of Chicago Press on the creatures who live in the deepest parts of the ocean:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. It’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish–seemingly all fangs and gape–with a “fishing rod” affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for his description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea–until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is the loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to an action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

Next time you are in a bookstore, go find this book. It has the most amazing photographs of these mysterious fish.

One of the things my store prides itself on is our high level of customer service. This means that if you come into my store with only one or two pieces of information about a book, we’ll try our hardest to figure out the answer. Every now and then, we get some rather silly requests, such as the person a few holidays ago who called on Christmas Eve and asked in a strange, high voice for books on “Monkeys? Monkeys doing things like humans”—turns out he wanted photos of monkeys having sex. I had a friend who worked at a Borders in Braintree who said that they had a customer say they knew the title, but not the author and could they help them? “The title is Dante’s Inferno.”

When the floor staff can’t figure it out, they usually call me to play what we call Stump the Bookseller. Today it was a book that had been on our front nonfiction table within the last few months, subject is something like Africa and economic development, and was reviewed in the Economist. Well, then. I threw out a few suggestions, none correct. Hung up, went back to work for a few minutes, then it came to me. Of course the customer had already gone by then, but I raced down to the floor just in case. I love the challenge of figuring these things out, like a test of my memory.
Oh, the book I think they were looking for was The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier.