Linkage for laughs

On Monday, I was part of an amazing panel discussion as part of NYU's Summer Publishing Institute. It was inspiring and thought provoking, and I plan to write up some notes and thoughts that came out of that soon.

But not today.

Today I would like to point out two things that made me laugh out loud in my bathrobe, and caused the ALP to shake his head at the wonder and ridiculousness of it all. They involve two of the things I love the most: books and Brooklyn.

First, Shelf Awareness linked to the Green Apple Core, the blog of the amazing Green Apple Books in San Francisco. It seems Green Apple has a fantastic program wherein they recommend one book a month, guaranteed good or your money back. And every month, they shoot a two-minute video promo for the book -- every one of which is freaking hilarious. This month's book is Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless, but my favorite video (I watched them all) is for Little Bee.



This cracks me up. What's most awesome is how much fun the booksellers are having making these -- their goofy enthusiasm is infectious, and I can only imagine leads to sales of the featured books. I may have to steal this idea for Greenlight Bookstore someday.

Second, this weekend, as everyone knows, marks that important occasion: the Coney Island hot dog eating contest. The irrepressible Gersh Kuntzman of our beloved local rag The Brooklyn Paper helps to psych us up for the showdown by rocking out with "The Bard of Coney Island" singing that American classic, "Hot Dog Time." (Warning: this is very silly, and if you are not in New York may be totally uninteresting to you. But it is kind of catchy -- I think I may have it stuck in my head all day.)

The Handsell: The Good Thief

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The Good Thief
by Hannah Tinti (Random House, $25.00)
This novel contains an orphan, a con man, a giant zombie, a mad doctor, a dwarf, and a sinister factory. If that laundry list excites you with prospects of strange and uncanny adventure, or reminds you of childhood afternoons curled up with Robert Louis Stevenson, this is the book for you. For me, it's a reminder of when I was very young and my mom used to read "chapter books" to me before bedtime, chapter by excruciatingly suspenseful chapter. Now, my husband and I have been reading The Good Thief aloud to each other. It's the first time as an adult I can recall saying "please, just one more chapter."

It takes a pretty incredible writer to write a 19th century boy's adventure story with a wry 21st century sensibility. Hannah Tinti gets everything right, sketching scenes with the smallest of telling details, letting the character's moral evolution reveal itself in their actions. The orphan Ren is a conflicted hero for all time, and Benjamin Nab is a confidence man whose stories are as satisfying as they are implausible. Highly recommended for smart, suspenseful summer reading for all ages, and especially for sharing with like-minded adventurers.

Linguistical musings: Bookish, Bibliophilic, Literary

It's sometimes illuminating to work in a neighborhood where a large percentage of our customers speak languages other than English -- that is, SoHo, a major shopping destination for European tourists. (Why they buy books in English when they don't seem to speak it fluently is something I've always wondered -- but we're not complaining.)

Recently I noted, not for the first time, the tendency for Spanish speakers to call the bookstore a "library" (leading to a certain amount of confusion since there is a New York Public Library around the corner). This makes sense, though, since the Spanish word for bookstore is libreria. The word for book is libro, and -eria is where an item is sold (zapateria for shoes, tabaqueria for smokes, etc.) The Spanish word for library, on the other hand, is biblioteca -- which also sounds familiar and logically related to books, for its similarity to bibliophile or bibliography.

So what, I asked the ALP (Adorably Literate Partner), is up with the split between libro and biblio? And where does the word "book" itself come into all of this? Surprisingly, he didn't know the answer off the top of his head (he often does), but the trusty internet revealed a backstory both logical and suggestive.

Liber, we find, is a Latin root word meaning "to peel." The reference is to the tree bark first used as a writing surface -- the pages which made up the first scrolls and books. Literary is also Latin, from littera, meaning a letter of the alphabet.

Biblio, on the other hand, is the Greek word for book (hence Bible, etc.) If you want to go even further down the wormhole, one online etymology dictionary suggests the word is

originally a dim. of byblos "Egyptian papyrus," possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece. The port's name is a Gk. corruption of Phoenician Gebhal (modern Jbeil, Lebanon), said to mean lit. "frontier town" (cf. Heb. gebhul "frontier, boundary," Arabic jabal "mountain")

Book, on the other hand, is pure barbarian Old English. It's also from a tree word, "bōc", which is similar to the Slavic words for "beech" -- probably the kind of tree most often used as a surface to carve or write words. I feel you can hear Old English it in the sound of the word -- the blunt beginning and hard ending, the weird two letters to make one sound in the middle. It's not as elegant as the Greek and Latin, but perhaps more down-to-earth.


So when we talk about literati, bibliophiles, and booklovers, or libraries, bibliographies, and bookstores, we're drawing on the entire rich mongrel history of the English language and its Latin, Greek, and Germanic ancestors. We're talking about trees, ports, and mountains; peeled bark and carved codex.

For some reason, I love this so much it almost makes me choke up. Think how long we've been talking about books, in how many languages, and how many different things writing and reading have meant and been to us. Think of all the weird unlikely clashes and interminglings of culture that gave us these many options to talk about these items and how they work and how we interact with them. Think of the roots of abstract ideas in the ancient, physical world.

What a story (Latin) there is in words (Old English).

The Handsell: Lake Overturn

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Lake Overturn
by Vestal McIntyre (HarperCollins, $24.99)

This book was put into my hands by one of my mentors and favorite booksellers, Toby Cox at Three Lives & Co. It took me a couple of weeks to get to it, but when I did it proved the rule that you should always trust your local indie bookseller when they tell you you're going to love something. This is the best straight-up novel I've read in a long time. No fantasy, nothing meta, no structural trickery or experimentation -- just character, story, place, metaphor, incredibly well-observed and perfectly described, so that you sink deeper and deeper into the author's world, and your heart aches for the story's people long after you've left them.

Vestal McIntyre is a contemporary George Eliot (this book reminded me more than once of Middlemarch), capable of capturing the truths about a community and an entire society in individual moments and interactions. McIntyre understands each of the characters that populate Eula, Idaho so intimately it's sometimes startling to get so close. Adultery, race and class relations, infertility, drug addiction, child abuse, autism, homosexuality, fundamentalist religion -- there's hardly a contemporary issue that isn't seething underneath the surface of this small place. But somehow, it all feels universal and brand-new and quietly powerful. This is the kind of book that makes you look at your fellow human beings with new interest, and new compassion.

The Handsell: Chicken With Plums

I have two reasons for starting a new series of The Handsell today.

1) I have less than a month left as an employee at McNally Jackson, so I feel I ought to poach my own staff picks from the store website before I'm no longer a MacJack (as we call ourselves in uninhibited moments).

2) If you're like me, the situation in Iran at the moment is incredibly compelling, filling us with hope and fear. Marjane Satrapi is, I'll admit, the one Iranian writer I really know, and she's been involved in speaking out for the opposition movement. It seems like a good time to revisit her work.


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Chicken With Plums

by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon, $12.95)

I waited a long time before picking up the newest work by the author of Persepolis, fearing she was just cashing in on her fame with a fluff followup. But it's wonderful, of course; I actually think this book is even more nuanced, moving and illuminating about Iranian life than Marjane Satrapi's original memoir. It's the half-mythologized story of Satrapi's uncle Nasser, a musician who decides to die for reasons that are simpler and more complex than they seem. It moves quietly, but it will break your heart.

The images are simple but eloquent, in Satrapi's heavy-line style, and evoke both the absurdity and pathos of the situation. I don't want to say more about just what happens, because the small revelations, circling backward and forward through time and perceptions, are what give this book (novel?) its power. It's now out in paperback, and highly recommended if you feel like immersing yourself in Iranian culture on a small scale, or or if you appreciate stories of the strange specifics and inescapable universality of human romantic and family life. I'm thankful for these kinds of stories.