The Written Nerd

Moving On, Moving Over

2011-05-10T11:44:00.004-04:00

Dear readers of The Written Nerd, if there are any of you still out there,

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted anything here in almost six months. This blog served a great purpose for me for five long years -- from October 2005, when I declared my geeky book and bookstore love and my quixotic intention to open a bookstore. As you know if you've been reading me, that dream has come true. Which means any blogging time and energy I had is now dedicated to the bookstore. And to a degree, it also means that I don't need this outlet for my thoughts about book culture anymore, since I have coworkers and customers and a whole industry with which to explore them. Not to mention that there's a whole new generation of book bloggers who have a lot more interesting things to say!

So I'm officially signing off from The Written Nerd. This means two things:

1) If you are a publicist, please don't send books to The Written Nerd anymore. I get far more books than I could ever read through the bookstore (you can contact me there if you'd like to send me something or get in touch). If I do get books send to The Written Nerd, I'll know you're not actually reading my blog.

2) I'm still reading books, and I'd still like to talk about them, but in a much more low-key way. So I've started a Tumblr blog called A Small Book of Books, after the tiny notebook my first boss and mentor Toby used to record his reading. Feel free to read along.

Thanks to all of you whom I connected with through this blog -- I'm so glad you've been part of my life, and I love where we're all going!

2010 Year-End Roundup, and a Call for Ideas

2010-12-30T19:30:00.002-05:00

Here are all the books I read (that I know of) in 2010, in crude alphabetical order. This doesn't include children's picture books, cookbooks, single-issue comics, magazines, or uh, the Internet. My own personal Best of the Year are highlighted in bold. And thanks to the superquick book search on greenlightbookstore.com (where, ahem, you can purchase any and all of these titles), you get pictures! The call for ideas is at the end.

A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld (reviewed)

Agents of Atlas by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk (reviewed)

Air, Volume 2: Flying Machine by G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Parker (reviewed)

Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly (reviewed)

Batwoman: Elegy by Greg Rucka, J. H. Williams, and Dave Stewart (reviewed)

The Box of Delights by John Masefield: A Christmas book, quintessentially English in a Narnia kind of way, dreamy and eccentric and magical and stiff-upper-lip. Practically perfect.

Cowboy Ninja Viking Volume 1 by AJ Lieberman & Riley Rossmo (reviewed)

Folly by Marthe Jocelyn (reviewed)

Freakangels, Volume 1 by Warren Ellis & Paul Duffield (reviewed)

Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel (reviewed)

A God Somewhere by John Arcudi, Peter Snejbjerg, & Bjarne Hansen (reviewed)

Half Empty by David Rakoff (reviewed)

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt by Mike Mignola & Duncan Fegred0 (artist) (reviewed)

Hellcity: The Whole Damned Thing by Macon Blair & Joe Flood (reviewed)

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch (reviewed)

The Hipless Boy: Short Stories
by Sully
(reviewed)

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (reviewed)

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (reviewed)

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (reviewed)

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly & JM Ken Niimura (reviewed)

I Thought My Father Was God edited by Paul Auster (reviewed)

Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan Howard (reviewe d)

Kill Shakespeare Vol. 1: A Sea of Troubles By Conor McCreery, Anthony Del Col, and Andy Belanger: Hamlet, Richard, Juliet, Othello and everyone else converge in one world, and everyone's trying to get at a wizard named Shakespeare. Bloody and weird, but not too heavy to be lighthearted fun.

Kraken by China Mieville (reviewed)

The Madman of Venice by Sophie Masson (reviewed)

Market Day by James Sturm (reviewed)

The Midnight Folk by John Masefield (reviewed)

The Museum of Thieves by Lian Tanner (reviewed)

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (reviewed)

New Orleans, Mon Amour by Andrei Codrescu (reviewed)

Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars in Brooklyn by Meredith Gran (reviewed)

Odd Is On Our Side by Dean Koontz, Fred Van Lente & Queenie Chan (reviewed)

Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell (reviewed)

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley (reviewed)

The Passage by Justin Cronin (reviewed)

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie (reviewed)

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (reviewed)

Rasl Pocket Book One by Jeff Smith (reviewed)

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly (reviewed)

Scott Pilgrim Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley (reviewed)

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens (reviewed)

Superman: For Tomorrow Volume 1 and Volume 2 y Brian Azzarello (writer), Jim Lee, and Scott Williams (artists) (reviewed)

The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel (reviewed)

Summerland by Michael Chabon (reviewed)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (reviewed)

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht (reviewed)

Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham (reviewed)

Two Cents Plain by Martin Lemelman (reviewed)

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (reviewed)

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (reviewed)

Werewolves of Montpelier by Jason (reviewed)

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (reviewed)

When You Were A Tadpole And I Was A Fish by Martin Gardner (reviewed)

Y: The Last Man, Volume 7: Paper Dolls by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Pia Guerra (artist) (reviewed)

You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe (reviewed)

(plus rereads, not reviewed: Scott Pilgrim 1-5 by Bryan Lee O'Malley, The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright, Take This Bread by Sara Miles)

That's... 55 I think, plus the rereads? Measly. And a ridiculous percentage of those are comics, which while I will continue to insist on their status as literature, do tend to be much quicker reads. Goal for 2011: read more, especially frontlist fiction/nonfiction, so as to be a better bookseller, and to dig deeper into the world of words.

Unlike some years past, I'm refreshed to find I don't feel the need for a soul-searching post about the bookstore project. Greenlight is a solid reality -- as I reflected with a bookseller friend, I'm in the happily ever after. Rebecca and I have plans for growing and making things better, so it's not about to get boring. But it's been a happy year, chronicled mostly elsewhere, and I'm contented to stick to the book talk on this site -- it's still true that "sometimes the best relief from the stresses of working in the book industry is the books themselves."

And now my request for your ideas: not for what to read next (I've already got teetering stacks on my nightstand that should take me through the next six months at least), but about how to keep track of reading. I'd like a better way to note what I'm reading now and write about it when I finish, and have it show up on the various book sites (GoodReads, Shelfari, etc.), and on this blog, and on Facebook/Twitter, etc. Does anyone have a good system, easy enough that you don't get bogged down? Is there an app that works (I do have an iPhone now!)? Does one of the sites push out to all the others? Or would I be better off with pencil and paper this year?

In any case, it was a good year in books, and 2011 promises old friends returning and new surprises awaiting. Thanks to all of you who read and talk about books -- a very happy new year, and happy reading!

All the Rest of the Books I Read This Year

2010-12-07T19:25:00.016-05:00

Okay, so perhaps I was slightly overambitious, or just unorganized, thinking I would write about every book I read this year in order. Even though I felt like I didn't read nearly as much as I wanted to / ought to this year, the pile of read books grew much faster than my time to write about them (or inspiration to do so). So here's what I didn't get to write about before, but did read -- I can't remember any longer which order they went in, and the shortness that this last-minute approach will require does a disservice to some truly wonderful works, but there you go.

To save time and space, instead of including pictures I've added links to the book detail page on greenlightbookstore.com whenever available, if you want to see a picture or read more about the book.

Before the end of this month, I'll post the complete list of what I read this year, highlighting my own personal best-ofs, with links to where I wrote about them. Here goes the last round!

A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
by Josh Neufeld
This falls in the "why did it take so long for me to listen when everyone I respect raved about this book" category. Neufeld's research is amazing, his characters compelling, his pictures of New Orleans before, during and after Katrina are cleanly, simply drawn but dead-on accurate (the ALP and I did some real-life comparisons to a couple of French Quarter bars), and I came out of this with a better understanding of the events of 2005 than I'd ever had before.

Agents of Atlas
by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk
The ALP tossed this one on my lap recently when I needed bedtime reading. A great little "superhero team" adventure comic, with some unexpected twists and an Asian American hero -- great fun, especially if you're familiar with the Marvel Universe.

Cowboy Ninja Viking Volume 1
by AJ Lieberman & Riley Rossmo
The premise is high concept ridiculous; the plot is nigh incomprehensible. But you cannot resist. One man; three personalities; three fighting styles; an evil corporation that trained him to kill; endless silly banter; crazy (literally) fight scenes. Awe. Some.

Half Empty
by David Rakoff
I felt as though my brain were getting sharper taking in Rakoff's wit and insight, at the same time I was melting with laughter. One of my favorite nonfiction books of the year, with Rakoff's cutting yet deeply compassionate take on everything from Rent to the Disney "Innoventions" house to his own cancer. And he is the nicest man in the world in real life. Read it!

Hellcity: The Whole Damned Thing
by Macon Blair & Joe Flood
I've been waiting for this since the first half was published years ago by an itty bitty indie comics company. It's a noir set in Hellcity (which resembles New York in August, except with more demons) and Heaventown (which resembles Bedford Falls or some other imagination of Upstate New York in the spring). It's got rock and roll, battles between good and evil, love, redemption, and getting slapped with fishes. It is one of the best undiscovered comic books I know.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword
by Barry Deutsch
Hooray for this book! I've never read fiction set among Orthodox Jews so insightful and entertaining. Eleven-year-old Mirka's troubles with boring chores and conflicts with her (ultimately nurturing and wise) stempother, as well as her epic knitting battle with a troll and the trickster move she learns to defeat it, feel both universal and unique. Great stuff in the world of appropriate-for-kids comics.

The Hipless Boy: Short Stories
by Sully
I thought I understood this book when I thought it was autobiographical short cartoon pieces; upon finding out it's fiction I find it kind of rambling and unfocused, and frankly odd. Clever and sometimes poignant, but not exactly my thing. (And I find it kind of annoying when characters who have art-star friends and hang out in lofts complain of their lack of hipness. Like whatever.)

The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
Holy cow.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
by Suzanne Collins
Oh my gosh it gets better/worse.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay
by Suzanne Collins
Do not read this entire series in a weekend, like I did, unless you want to be utterly wrecked by the end. The "kill or be killed" games of children against children are a great metaphor for adolescence, but this is also about war and freedom and truth and propaganda and compromise and survival and the horror of violence, even if it's necessary, even if you win. Deserves every iota of hype it got, and more; reminded me of Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy in the amount of big philosophical stuff going in a completely addicting fantasy.

I Kill Giants
by Joe Kelly & JM Ken Niimura
So darn good. This is a kids' comic, but it's dark -- the darkness at the center of it isn't revealed right away, so I won't spoil it. It's about a weird little girl who is a D&D dungeonmaster, and has a powerful named weapon that lives in her purse, a brutal wit, and a hard time making friends. It's about the friend she makes and the giant she encounters. The drawing is wild and sketchy and perfect, and makes for a wonderfully odd and satisfying story.

I Thought My Father Was God
edited by Paul Auster
A collection of the real-life stories Auster collected as part of an NPR project, this is part StoryCorps, part Moth Story Slam, part very weird Chicken Soup for the Soul. Because the things that happen to people that they remember are very, very weird. Many are tragic in the grandest and awfullest sense of the word. Some are funny or romantic or delightful. A lot are just coincidences. At their best they are like the kind of story someone tells you in a bar, or at a family Christmas party, and you never forget.

Johannes Cabal the Detective
by Jonathan Howard
I loved the steampunk-supernatural-carnival-serial oddity of Johannes Cabal Necromancer, so of course I was going to read the sequel. This one finds our misanthropic but oddly appealing hero fleeing angry folks again (necromancy doesn't make you popular), and pulled unwillingly into applying his weird-science-attuned brain to solving a murder mystery, alongside the antagonistically ethical girl from the first book. And it's mostly on a blimp. If you are a genre lover like me, what's not to like?

Kraken
by China Mieville
Ooh Kraken. The titular sea-beast, literally disappeared from the museum, is about the least weird thing in this very Mieville-y weird book. Imagine a London full of religions and magic cults, each predicting a slightly different apocalypse, any or all of which might occur. There is a hapless hero, a villain who is a living tattoo and one who is made of ink, a protective imp in an iPod, a sort of board of magicians and the coppers who police them, and Goss and Subby, two of the most truly terrifying villains in ages. It's hard to keep up, but the scenery is never boring. If you have a long plane ride ahead of you, this would be a good bet for a book you will not look up from the entire time.

The Midnight Folk

by John Masefield
This is a very old-school English children's adventure story, in the vein of Narnia or the Wind in the Willows or Five Children and It. Young Kay has a nasty governess and an sea captain ancestor who lost a treasure; how these things get solved involves a lot of people coming out of pictures on the wall, talking animals, seven-league boots, and other strange doings. It is dreamlike the way that an imaginative childhood is, and often funny, and quite uniquely wonderful. It would be great to read aloud, if you are the kind of family who does that sort of thing. I'm now reading Masefield's other book about Kay, The Box of Delights, which is a Christmas book and completely delightful.

Moonwalking with Einstein
by Joshua Foer
I picked this galley up because we're hosting the author in the spring when the book comes out (and yes, he is the brother of Jonathan Safran). Secretly, I was hoping to get some tips on how to remember the names of customers and publishing industry acquaintances who always seem to remember my name; it's a horrible failing that I seem to forget names as soon as I've been introduced. Foer's book has some tips for name remembering, though not a fix-all; most of the venerated tricks of memory he learns from "memory championship" circuits -- which they learned from the ancient Greeks -- involve really paying attention when the information is first presented. But there are lots of other tricks involved too -- as my bookseller friend Carol says "fun facts to know and tell on every page" -- including the fact that our highly evolved visual/spatial memories can be put to use in remembering more abstract data by using the elegant and ancient technique of the Memory Palace (and often, inventing some absurd or dirty associations, since we're also really good at remembering jokes and sex). I had a great time with the eccentric characters Foer encounters and his reflections on the evolution of memory in human history, from the Memory Palace to the codex to the internet. Good stuff.

New Orleans, Mon Amour
by Andrei Codrescu
I bought this in a tiny bookstore in Pirate's Alley, and read it listening to a trumpet player in Jackson Square, and eating rabbit jambalaya, and wandering through cemetery cities. I fell completely in love with New Orleans myself, so it was wonderful to have a fellow outsider as pithy and eloquent as Codrescu describing the city's morbidly festive charms. Reading essays written over 20 years all at once, they do start to become a bit predictable, and Codrescu is a bit of a dirty old man; still, these pieces were evocative and illuminating, highly recommended for anyone who knows what it means to miss NOLA.

Odd Is On Our Side
by Dean Koontz, Fred Van Lente & Queenie Chan
Why do I read these Dean Koontz manga adaptations? The art is generic, the plot unbelievable, the characters and morality simplistic. I simply cannot help myself, and I eat them like particularly artificial-tasting candy.

Parnassus on Wheels
by Christopher Morley
I love books, bookselling, and Brooklyn. I am the target audience for this book. I was so delighted to discover Melville House had reissued it, years after I read the sequel, The Haunted Bookshop. I was also delighted to discover that this 1917 novel has a bit of feminism in it: though the fiery bookseller Roger Mifflin is in some ways the hero, the narrator is a 40-year-old "angel in the house" who strikes out on her own as a bookselling entrepreneur after years of unappreciated baking. Immensely fun, with some very quotable quotes, especially for those of a bookselling persuasion.

Postern of Fate
by Agatha Christie
Weird -- a sort of bad Agatha Christie novel. It not only has my least favorite detectives (the fussy bourgeois couple Tommy and Tuppence), it was written near the end of Christie's life and career, and feels oddly circular and repetitive. I guess it's good to know that even the master didn't knock 'em out of the park every time.

Rasl Pocket Book One
by Jeff Smith
Remember Bone? This is like that except kinda the opposite. The sexy, morally messed-up hero, the science (time travel, parallel universes, etc.), the difficult-to-follow plot, the mysticism... did I mention the sex and the science? It's fascinating and gorgeously drawn, but definitely NOT for kids. I'm intrigued by where he's going with this... it may be years before we find out, but it's worth it.

Revolution
by Jennifer Donnelly
A rich feast of a YA novel -- achingly sad and authentically adolescent, chock full of local color and telling details in Brooklyn and Paris, with a French Revolution parallel plot to blow you away, plus a love story, plus some nice class/race/ethics analysis of French and Brooklyn culture. It's not perfect (the author does a sort of supernatural and/or dream thing 3/4 of the way through that I found totally uneccessary), but it is immensely satisfying and thought-provoking. And is there any better metaphor for adolescence than the French Revolution?

Summerland
by Michael Chabon
This is an epic American fantasy -- a rich stew of our national mythologies from Paul Bunyan to Babe Ruth -- and a fantastic adventure story. It's Chabon's first and only YA book, and I remember it being kind of a flop in terms of Chabon novels, but I found it completely compelling -- added to my own personal pantheon of larger-than-life tales. I read it in the summertime, and finished it looking out at the Statue of Liberty from Red Hook -- one of the most perfect reading experiences of the year.

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
Deeply satisfying and yet entirely unexpected -- a universal story of outsiders, of growing up, of family secrets and cultural misunderstandings, but also a picture of a fascinating and little-known part of the world. Tea Obreht's childhood in the former Yugoslavia, among family stories and traditional legends, informs this story of a woman in an unnamed post-war country who delves into her grandfather's childhood to understand his death. The stories she uncovers -- of an escaped tiger, a man who cannot die, and the coincidences and ironies of a region almost constantly in a state of war -- make for a novel with the suspense of a thriller and the resonances of a myth. An incredible work from an incredible young writer, The Tiger's Wife marks the beginning of the career of a writer to watch.
[cribbed from my own writeup for the NAIBA holiday catalog]

Two Cents Plain by Martin Lemelman
Interestingly, Pantheon published this in a format that makes it look like a traditional book, rather than a graphic novel. It's a story that will likely have the most fans outside of comics lovers: a memoir of a childhood in a 1950s Brooklyn candy shop, with a dysfunctional family and the shadow of the Holocaust looming on one side and 1970s urban blight on the other. I like the concept slightly more than the execution -- Lemelman's drawings of people get kind of mushy and indistinguishable -- but it's an interesting addition to the world of New York nostalgia books as well as graphic memoirs.

What Was Lost
by Catherine O'Flynn
How am I NOT going to read a book recommended by David Mitchell as one of his favorite young authors? And the connections to Mitchell's work are clear: it's a compassionate and realistic world, tinged with the supernatural in a way that enriches rather than cheapens the story. O'Flynn is the only writer I've ever encountered who has really examined the strange tragedy that is the contemporary indoor shopping mall; her evocation of the bleak lives of the employees, the artificial "shopping experience" so carefully preserved with smells, music, and security, and the very old-fashioned sacrifices made to christen the new development, is chilling and familiar. The main characters are believably, hopelessly human, and their redemption is both surprising and inevitable. Can't wait to read more by this young Welsh writer -- and I wish more authors would write about retail culture like this.

When You Were A Tadpole And I Was A Fish
by Martin Gardner
A random impulse purchase from the strand, this is a wonderfully random collection of essays on topics from God to poetry to politics -- always reasoned, never pedantic, though sometimes a little irritated at encountered stupidity. The author, an Oklahoma mathematician who writes for Scientific American, is someone I look upon with great respect, and would love to have a beer or a cup of tea with.

You Were Wrong
by Matthew Sharpe
This is the book I feel worst about failing to review earlier -- because it is an amazing, strange, and incomparable small novel, and more people should read it. It was sent to me by the author, whom I know slightly as a bookstore customer (his novel The Sleeping Father was a sleeper hit), and who enjoys a sort of indie cult following. You Were Wrong is a sort of an indie love story... and sort of a mystery... and sort of a country song... and sort of a horror/suspense novel... and sort of a comedic romp... and sort of an exploration of race and family and exploitation and class... and sort of campy... and sort of surreal... and sort of earnest... and it has the best closing paragraph I have read all year. You have to read the whole book to get to it, though, and if you think you can guess how the twists and turns of the plot will go... well, you'll be wrong.

BBC Top 100

2010-11-25T20:23:00.002-05:00

Aw, thanks, Russel. Now obviously the ALP and I had to test our mettle against this list. Next, I hope to post a list of this year's books.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses...

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen JSB, MJB
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien JSB
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte/b> JSB, MJB
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee JSB, MJB
6 The Bible JSB (MJB)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte MJB
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell JSB, MJB
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman JSB
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens JSB, MJB
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott JSB
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller MJB
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare JSB, MJB
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier JSB, MJB
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien JSB
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger JSB, MJB
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot JSB, MJB
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald JSB, MJB
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens MJB
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams MJB
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh JSB
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky MJB
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck MJB
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll JSB, MJB
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame JSB, MJB
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy MJB
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens MJB
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis JSB
34 Emma – Jane Austen JSB, MJB
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen JSB, MJB
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis JSB, MJB
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere JSB
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne JSB
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell JSB, MJB
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown MJB
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins MJB
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery JSB
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood MJB
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding JSB, MJB
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan MJB
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen JSB, MJB
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon JSB
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens JSB, MJB
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley JSB, MJB
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon JSB
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez JSB
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck MJB
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov MJB
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt MJB
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold JSB
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas MJB
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac JSB, MJB
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding JSB
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville JSB, MJB
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens MJB
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker JSB, MJB
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett JSB
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath JSB
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome JSB
78 Germinal – Emile Zola MJB
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray MJB
80 Possession – AS Byatt JSB, MJB
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens JSB, MJB
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell JSB
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro MJB
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert JSB, MJB
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White JSB, MJJB
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle JSB, MJB
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad JSB, MJB
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery MJB
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks MJB
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams MJB
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas MJB
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare JSB, MJB
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl JSB, MJB
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Hey, Joe.

2010-09-02T09:21:00.002-04:00

Joe Drabyak died on Friday. Long live Joe Drabyak.

I'm having a hard time getting my head around this. I sat next to Joe at a dinner in April. We compared notes on the appetizer. Everyone said he looked a little skinny but he brushed it off. That was only four months ago.

Forgive the maudlin bits for a moment. I can hear exactly how Joe said the phrase "Noir Bar." I can hear the way he would start a sentence hesitantly, as though it was just coming to him, and then deliver an idea so fluid and articulate it was clear he'd either just rehearsed the whole thing in his head, or he'd known exactly what he thought for a long time.

He presided over the meetings of the NAIBA board in a manner that was truly presidential: that is, he listened to everybody else. He was the voice of reason when things got heated. He wasn't afraid of new ideas, but he was a great respecter of everyone's concerns.

One of the ideas he supported was Emerging Leaders. He was a natural mentor to me and a lot of younger booksellers (as others have expressed), so the idea of providing a network for their education and support must have made sense to him. But that didn't stop him from teasing us about it. He wouldn't stop referring to himself and other over-40 booksellers as "Declining Leaders," despite my embarrassed protests.

What I'm sure he knew, despite his characteristic jokiness, was that that's not how we thought of him. He was an Established Leader. He was what we aspired to. He wasn't a store owner, he was a masterful professional bookseller, embodying everything we hoped to become.

He always joked, though. I think he joked most when things were serious. His emails after his diagnosis had us cracking up through our tears. There were a lot of groaners -- bad puns and silly costumes. That was part of the style. It must have been what made him such a good handseller on the bookstore floor -- he was like an old vaudevillian, making himself look goofy and winning everyone over.

I want him to be the Quizmaster for literary trivia again. I want him to be able to read all the book he ran out of time for. I want to ask him about the book that changed his life, about why he became a bookseller, about what he thought about on his solitary smoke breaks, about why he wasn't afraid. I didn't even know him that well.

I know what he wanted, though. He wanted to be Joe. And he is.

Someone who lives a life in books can hardly deny that some characters, some creators, live a long time after their deaths. Joe Drabyak put too much of his exuberant life in too many places for him to disappear. He helped create a new generation of booksellers. He taught us ideas and practices that will take on lives of their own. Not to mention his name lives on attached to characters in more than half a dozen mystery novels. I can imagine him twinkling about that, another great joke.

Hey, Joe. We miss you already. I hope we can live up to what you offered us.

Long live Joe.

A Pitch to Booksellers: The Fall Conference

2010-08-12T10:31:00.006-04:00

We interrupt our sporadically scheduled book reviews to bring you this highly personal pitch, from me (Jessica/Book Nerd) to the booksellers of New York City and the mid-Atlantic region.

I have to advocate for things I am passionate about -- if you're a bookseller you can probably sympathize. I wanted to make sure that you know all about the Fall Conference, this September 21 and 22, hosted by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA). Like a mini-BEA or Winter Institute, the conference brings together booksellers and publishers from the mid-Atlantic region for professional education, networking, and book buzz to prepare us for the fall season in our stores. The cost is membership in NAIBA, which is $100 per store for a year, plus meals and hotel; discounted hotel rates are available (the conference is in Atlantic city, a cheap bus ride away). You can get all of the details about the conference here.

I went to my first NAIBA conference when I had worked in a Manhattan bookstore for a couple of years, and it literally changed my life. The experience of being a part of the professional community of booksellers, and learning the best practices of the industry, as well as encountering publishers and authors face to face, gave me a new perspective on the work that I was doing. I wasn't just a retail clerk and shelver who loved to read -- I was part of a larger profession, and I had the potential to build a career and contribute to the industry conversation. I went back full of ideas for my store, and with some new thoughts about my future career.

Not every frontline bookseller who goes to the NAIBA conference will want to go on to start their own store, but every bookseller has the potential to get something valuable out of it -- for their bookstore's success, their own career, and the future of our business. The education sessions we have lined up for this year (yes, I'm on the NAIBA board) are both inspiring and practical. And the opportunity to talk to other booksellers and publishers always leads to revelations about what we're all doing well and what we could be doing better. It's a great opportunity for store owners to get rejuvenated, and possibly an even better opportunity for staff to pick up new ideas that will make them better booksellers in the long term.

I know it's a challenge to find the time, dollars, and scheduling flexibility to go to a two-day conference (we're sending three booksellers from Greenlight, and it has been logistically kind of tough.) So I want to tell you about three things that might make it a little easier, whether you're an owner or a frontline bookseller.

1) Publishers are offering a total of 4 scholarships for frontline booksellers, which will cover all of the event/meal tickets for the conference. It's a random drawing, so drop your name (or a staffer's name) in the hat -- details here.

2) NAIBA has changed its bylaws to allow professional booksellers whose stores are not members of NAIBA to join the association with a $25 membership. If you are a bookseller who would like to be part of this professional community but your store is just not into it, you can now take things into your own hands and come to the conference on your own at a reduced rate. Email NAIBA's executive secretary Eileen Dengler to learn more.

3) If you are coming to the conference and you want to split hotel costs with someone, email me and I will try to hook you up with a fellow bookseller to share a room. No promises that things will work out, but we're all in this together and we can do our best to make it work.

Okay, pitch over. Feel free to comment here or email me if you have questions, objections, thoughts, or ideas. I hope to see many of you at the Fall Conference, as well as in our stores this fall!

July comics roundup

2010-07-28T17:54:00.008-04:00

There is a disturbingly large and teetering pile of books on a chair in my kitchen. They are books that I have read in the last couple of months, that I hope to one day get around to writing up for this blog. Many of them deserve lots of thought, ideally before I forget the reading experience. Also, maybe 50% of the pile is comics -- because I read them faster than straight prose, or because my reading is getting decadently image-dependent, or because it's summer and comics are my beach reading, I don't know. Anyway, despite the fact that several of these are serious books that could totally justify their own post, I'm throwing them together in a roundup, in the interest of getting them off the stack and saving the legs of my kitchen chair.

Superman: For Tomorrow
Volume 1 and Volume 2
By Brian Azzarello (writer), Jim Lee, and Scott Williams (artists)

The ALP, a much more serious comics reader than I, is of the opinion that this one-shot Superman story is about how scary Superman could get if Lois Lane wasn't around for him to care about -- which would explain why some villain hasn't actually offed her, since no one could deal with the destructive power of a Superman unhinged by grief. I'll take his word for it. While this one had some good moments (especially one mind-bending moment of moral complication when Superman admits he could cure someone's cancer, but won't) I found it whizzed by pleasantly and at the end I wasn't sure how the problem (lots of people have disappeared with no physical trace) actually got solved -- it just always does get solved when it's Superman, dunnit? It's fun to read a superhero comic with a beginning and an end, but this one was a bit forgettable for my snobby literary tastes.

A God Somewhere
by John Arcudi (writer), Peter Snejbjerg, and Bjarne Hansen (artists)

While this book is about the closest thing to a true masterpiece I have read in comics in ages, I will hesitate carefully before recommending it to readers. That's because it's also the most disturbing comic I have read in a long time -- the violence is bloody and has consequences, and the sheer existential chaos is unsettling, like reading about Columbine or Rwandan child soldiers. I actually thought about Columbine a couple of times while reading it, because the "why" of the horrors that happen is so unanswerable, in such a terribly familiar way. The premise: a happy-go-lucky, kind of slackerish dude finds that a catastrophic accident has left him with Superman-like (or God-like) powers; at first he performs some dramatic rescues, but the religious language he uses to describe his mission of good starts to sound a little crazy and he's acting kinda weird... and then he really snaps, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The narrator is the super-person's lifelong friend, an African-American journalist who covers the whole weird story; his character arc is rich and interesting too, a welcome human-scale drama running parallel to the sickening cosmic tragedy of the main story. Not for the squeamish, but I'd guess this book is going to become part of the conversation about "realistic" superheros, about the iconography of power and desire, and about the potential for what comics can do.

Octopus Pie: There Are No Stars in Brooklyn
by Meredith Gran

Hooray, comics about Brooklyn! I admit I was a leetle nervous that Octopus Pie would be too scene-y for my tastes (I think I remember picking up an earlier edition in an unbearably hip Williamsburg shop and putting it down again)... but this time around, it was funny and authentic and I was hooked. It's got that classic odd-couple charm: uptight, slightly surly Eve finds herself the housemate of superchill stoner entrepreneur Hanna (they were friends in kindergarten and their moms set them up), and wacky hijinks ensue. But, as ("Mr. Scott Pilgrim") Bryan Lee O'Malley observes about author Meredith Gran, "her jokes are actually funny," both verbally and visually. Cranky organic food buyers, the trauma of a stolen bike, a Renaissance fair (really), and a long, unpredictable storyline about ice skating are just some of the gems packed into this baby, which collects the first two years of the ongoing indie comic. It's a little "Dykes to Watch Out For," a little "Real World: Brooklyn" (okay, maybe not, I never watched it)... anyway, I kept laughing out loud and quoting parts to the ALP, which I feel is a strong indication that there's some good stuff going on here. Also, we went to the release party at Bergen Street Comics and bought the character pint glasses. So there. Even if you are not a Brooklyn booster (Meredith, sadly, has now moved to Portland), it's good cartooning and good storytelling with a compelling cast of side characters, a little foul-mouthed, a little tender, and very funny. (Look for the mantra about ducks and bread - priceless.)

Batwoman: Elegy
by Greg Rucka (writer) J. H. Williams, and Dave Stewart (artists)

So... in case you're not a hardcore DC Comics reader: the new Batwoman is a lesbian. A very lipstick lesbian, as you'll notice if you can make out this cover, and there are all kinds of debates, especially among female comics fans, about whether this is liberating or exploitative or what. I saw what I felt were examples of both in this particular comic, though what's almost more ridiculous is that crazy flowing red hair -- is that practical, when you're fighting crime with a secret identity, seriously? (To be fair, this comes up in an exchange with Batman, and it kinda makes sense.) All that aside though, I found this an actually pretty impressive comic. The villainess is apparently under the impression that she is Alice in Wonderland, which makes for some delightfully insane dialogue amidst the kicking and punching, and the relationship between Batwoman and her dad and stepmom is interesting and touching. What's really impressive though, is how much work the art is doing in telling this story -- the visuals of the chapter headings, especially, offer huge foreshadowing clues about the story's Big Reveal, which isn't hinted at in the dialogue. It was fun to go back and see the significant details after I knew the ending; if I were a more observant... observer of comics art I might have noticed them sooner, but I thought it was an awesome way to tell the story. Slight fare, perhaps, but a very satisfactory and well-executed cape-and-cowl comic.

Market Day
by James Sturm

This book has, deservedly, already been highly praised in high-falutin' literary publications. James Sturm is one of the most serious literary writers of comics out there, and his previous stories about baseball, the frontier, and Jewish and African-American experiences constitute a body of rich, intelligent historical fictionI don't think any contemporary cartoonist has even attempted to match. And I like his visual style a lot: a thick, clean line almost reminiscent of the Tintin comics I grew up on, an old-fashioned, muted color palette, an interest in all kinds of faces and bodies. That said, I respected this book more than I actually liked it. The story is that of one day in the life of Mendleman, a rug maker -- young, married with a baby on the way -- taking his wares to sell at market, where he discovers his usual buyer is out of business and has to scramble to find some other way to unload his painstaking, artistic creations; on his way home an odd encounter with some vagabonds leaves him hungover and questioning his entire life. Now that I think about it, it works as a pretty good metaphor for an artist hewing to an old-fashioned standard in a changing world (Sturm wrote a column for Slate about giving up the internet.) But I'm not sure I understood quite what happened in our young rug maker's head at the end, and the 19th century Eastern European color palette is exhaustingly dreary, even when Mendleman is imagining his innovative designs. Maybe I'm just not a rug fancier, or I need to read more Russian novels. This may be a book I come back to later with greater appreciation, but I prefer Sturm's odd and tragic American stories to this one.

Ghostopolis
by Doug TenNapel

Doug TenNapel is not nearly as well known as his Bill Watterson-influenced art and insanely creative fantasy epic stories deserve. This may be partly because he is a Christian and somewhat right-wing, and very explicit Christian metaphors find their way into nearly all of his work; on the other hand, his humor is often scatalogical and his characters foul-mouthed, which means the Christians don't necessarily embrace him either. So I am one of a small contingent who will read anything Doug TenNapel writes, though some are more successful than others. Ghostopolis is one of the more successful, I think: the story of a sort of ghost truant officer who accidentally sends a live boy to the underworld and then tries to rescue him, while the boy meets up with his long-dead grandfather and a host of other denizens of Ghostopolis. The Christ figure in this one is a mysterious Tuskegee airman, who built Ghostopolis eons ago but is now in hiding from its tyrannical ruler. It's a world of good and evil, though not always simply divided; characters learn and grow and make mistakes, while dodging giant insects and zombies and bone animals and animate buildings. It's a romp with moments of seriousness, and even a love story, and it's the kind of thing I love Doug TenNapel for.

Werewolves of Montpelier
by Jason

Jason is like the Buster Keaton of comics. His animal/people characters have that deadpan expression most of the time, with only an occasional eyebrow wrinkle to express emotion, and yet their stories are often hilariously funny and/or heartbreaking. This one has a built-in gag that's never discussed: when dog-people turn into werewolves it's very hard to tell the difference. But everyone in the story knows one when they see one, and when our protagonist impersonates one he falls afoul of the real werewolves and adventures ensue. The power of the story, though, is in his relationship with Audrey, the girl in the apartment next door, who is doing her best Holly Golightly impression at all times; their thwarted desires and real friendship are affecting in that same deadpan way. It's not my favorite Jason comic ever (though the ALP thinks its his best in ages), but it's a great one to add to the library.

And a drumroll please...

Scott Pilgrim Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour
by Bryan Lee O'Malley

You do remember how I feel about Scott Pilgrim, right? The last few weeks have been a pleasant agony of anticipation of both the release of the final volume and the movie (which I was prepared to dislike because I wasn't sure neurotic loveable loser Michael Cera could play happy-go-lucky loveable loser Scott Pilgrim; but all signs indicate that the director of Sean of the Dead isn't going to let us down. The ALP and I have plans on the evening of August 13, thank you.) So I picked up my copy at Bergen Street Comics*, and the book is... entirely, eminently satisfying. I mean, how you gonna pull all this stuff together, unless you are an O'Malley level pop art genius? The unresolved feelings for Kim, the fact that Ramona literally disappeared at the end of issue 5, and the band broke up, and Scott has no motivation, much less the skills, to face down Gideon, the Final Boss Man (in video game parlance, which is what the structure of this fight-the-seven-evil-exes story is obviously modeled upon). I, for one, am not going to spoil it for you. I'll just say that everything gets resolved by fighting -- because the whole book almost is one big fight scene, and every issue that's ever come up gets dealt with decisively. Probably I will now go back and read all six volumes just to get the whole picture, because they are that fun and it takes about a day to get through them. So just get all of them already, and enjoy!

* Note: because of the peculiar nature of comics publishing, comic shops had their Scott Pilgrims on July 20; regular ol' bookstores will get theirs on August 3.

June YA Roundup

2010-06-18T09:28:00.004-04:00

If I wrote these things more often I wouldn't have to cram multiples into one post, but my blogging is falling so far behind my reading I need to diminish the stack a bit. And I realize I've had a number of great YA reading experiences lately -- it's a category I don't read super-often, but that I tend to enjoy (if perhaps with an occasional smirk of superiority/relief that I am no longer a teen.)

Folly
by Marthe Jocelyn
(Wendy Lamb Books, May 2010)

This book and the following one I read "on assignment" -- I was asked to take part in a YA brainstorming conference call by our inimitable Random House children's book rep Lillian Penchansky, and these two books were our homework for the call. It was kind of a delight to plunge into something that I could read in a day, and the two works, while both historical fiction, were very different. Marthe Jocelyn's Folly was the better of the two -- the story of a 19th century British servant girl who gets knocked up by a dashing soldier (when that was both common and enough to ruin your life), it's told in first person by various characters whose dialects are both defamiliarizing and believable. The backstory of the book is fascinating too: Jocelyn found out that one of her ancestors grew up in a "foundling hospital" like the one in the story, and imagined his life and his mother's from there. Reading this led to a bunch of conversations about how of course, in whatever era you're born, you're a teenager and you're filled with desire, but in this era there's no sex ed and no birth control and no safety net -- in the case of a servant far from home, not even family or friends to take you in. I loved Mary Finn, smart and kind and resourceful but still screwed over; and I loved James, the boy in the foundling hospital whose story intertwines with hers -- his internal monologue contained some meditations on the lived experience of history that I wish I could quote (I gave my galley to a certain bookseller who is said to resemble the girl on the cover -- have to remember to ask her whether she liked it too.) And even the "cad" soldier, Caden, is sympathetic -- he's just a teen as well, and totally clueless about what to do. Though it's got no creatures of the night (as way too many YA novels seems to these days), this book is dark in the way real human life is dark -- recommended for the brave reader of any age, Folly is moving and eye-opening.

The Madman of Venice
by Sophie Masson
(Delacorte Books for Young Readers, August 2010)

This book, while a charming adventure story with some resonant historical detail, reinforces my theory that YA is just where romance novels have migrated. Reading it had the slightly guilty pleasures of a historical romance: the dialogue is dramatic but not especially believable, the heroine is plucky, the hero is brave but tongue-tied about his passion for her, and it takes some life-threatening adventures to bring them together. Nevertheless, the context gives it some added weight: the British boy, girl, and chaperone are on a mission in Venice to thwart some pirates and find a missing girl, who happens to be a Jew from Venice's infamous Ghetto. There are echoes of Shakespeare's Shylock here, of course, and some not-too-heavyhanded analysis of what it meant to be a Jew in pre-Modern Europe. And yes, there are escapes by Gondola, fights in Venetian castellos, and enough twisted plots that the entire last chapter is devoted to explaining them. Great for a kid interested in this particular place and time, who doesn't mind some mushy stuff in between adventures.

The Museum of Thieves
by Lian Tanner
(Delacorte Books for Young Readers, September 2010)

This one is my favorite of the lot -- the kind of fantastic adventure I loved as a kid, that can still keep me glued to the couch on a beautiful weekend day, dead to the real world and immersed in the much more convincing world of the novel. I was invited to an author dinner for Lian Tanner -- which turned out to be a lovely affair, and Tanner the most charming New Zealander, just the kind of person you hope should make their fortune from writing a great yarn. I thought I should glance at the book before the dinner out of politeness, and ended up reading the whole thing in a day, and raving about it like a geek that evening. Set in a town where children under a certain age are kept chained, to their parents or glorified babysitters, the Blessed Guardians, "for their own good," the story's hero is the impatient and irritable Goldie Roth. When the ceremonial Separation Day -- a coming of age that involves literally cutting the cord -- is canceled because of what is essentially a terrorist attack, Goldie in despair breaks her bonds herself and becomes a fugitive. And it really is a dangerous world she lives in, though the danger is not where she has been told. Finding her way to the city's Museum, she comes under the protections of its keepers and discovers that her less-than-legal predilictions make her a perfect candidate to join the ranks of those caring for the weird contents of the building, which is bigger on the inside than on the outside (one of my favorite fantasy tropes, as it rings true metaphorically about so many things). I won't say more about the plot because I don't want to spoil too much of this splendid reading experience -- but the themes of the novel are obviously the tradeoffs of freedom and security, the claims of the official and the illicit, which resonate both politically and for every teen or pre-teen testing the boundaries of the allowable. This is the first of a trilogy (another of my favorite things about fantasy), and I can't wait to pick up the story again -- I definitely recommend this journey when the book comes out in September, whether you are under 18 or not.

The Princess and the Goblin
by George MacDonald
(Random House Books for Young Readers, January 2010)

This inexpensive little hardcover is part of the Looking Glass Library series, which reissues classic children's books with introductions by contemporary writers. I'd always meant to read George MacDonald, who I knew was a huge influence on C. S. Lewis -- and his story inspires the same kind of slightly mixed affection for me as an adult reader that The Chronicles of Narnia or even Tolkien's Middle Earth does now. The story of the child princess who is targeted by the kingdom's enemy goblins, and the miner's son who helps to save her, is a masterfully written fable, and also a theological metaphor, masquerading as a children's story. It's all about doing what you know is right, believing in what you know is true even if you can't see it or others don't believe you. The Princess' mysterious grandmother is a God-like figure, and MacDonald's theology of selflessness and a calm faith in the good is one that resonates for me. But his depictions of the goblins can seem kind of... racist. Yes, they are mythical creatures, and so you can make them as nasty and stupid as you want -- but sometimes it seems their very ugliness is held against them, as if having a weird face means that you're a bad thing. In a book clearly intended as allegory and instruction as well as delightful adventure, the lesson of disdain for the ugly and odd is absorbed right along with the lesson of devotion to duty and truth. It's a complicated little morality tale, much like the Victorian era from whence it comes -- in craft and sweetness definitely worth reading, but perhaps with a grain of salt for a modern ethical sensibility.

Whew -- now to get my nose out of the books and go play outside...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2010-06-07T17:34:00.004-04:00

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
(Knopf, June 9, 2010)

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Reading this book was a little like starting a conversation out of general politeness, and discovering that you're talking to someone you passionately want for a best friend.

Jennifer Egan -- full disclosure -- is a friend and customer of Greenlight Bookstore. I'd hosted her before for events at other stores, and chatted with her and her kids at Greenlight, but to my own detriment I had never actually read any of her fiction. (Even though, as often seems to happen, it seems in retrospect like obviously the sort of thing I would like: the smart but not overtly political feminism of Look At Me, the Gothic nested stories of The Keep, etc. -- good storytelling in the service of big ideas, or vice versa, without sacrificing the one for the other.) It seemed like now would be the time to pick her up, though, since we're hosting her launch party for the book on Wednesday. So I opened the intriguingly titled A Visit From the Goon Squad earlier this spring.

And found a new addition to my personal author pantheon.

As I wrote for our recent staff picks email, A Visit From the Goon Squad is ostensibly (and quite effectively) about the world of rock music, and the intersections of the realms of commerce and creativity (and the dysfunctional folks who inhabit both). But it's really about life on Earth, in all its heartbreaking and maddening and rich and loveable complexity. It's about the mistakes of each generation, about being young and growing up, about adventure and domesticity, about interconnectivity and isolation, and (especially) about the brutality and kindnesses of time.

And it doesn't hurt that it is structured in my favorite form: the novel as interlinked stories (cf. my pantheon authors David Mitchell, Charles Baxter, Joan Silber, and others). Some of those were published in the New Yorker -- trust me that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, though each story has its own poignant and complete miniature arc. One of them perfectly evokes being a young and foolish professional woman in New York City (ahem). One is written flawlessly from the perspective of a very young gay man, one about a record exec, several about the intersections of children who have grown up too fast and adults who are not very grown-up at all. One is composed of a series of PowerPoint slides and is alarmingly literate and moving. San Francisco, Italy, and Arizona make appearances, as do the 1970s, the 1990s, and a near-future that is the most believable I think I've ever read (wait till you learn what a "pointer" is). The meaning of the title is illusive, but when it hit me it hit hard, and shaped my understanding of the project of the novel in the way the best titles can do.

And did I mention the damn thing is funny, too? Apparently Jennifer Egan is one of those rare authors who can quite literally do anything.

I have already seen Jennifer post-Goon Squad reading, and gotten out of the way my mumbled fangirl admiration. Luckily she seems as delighted at how it came out as her readers will, and is in fact the sort of kind and smart and idealistic and charming author that you hope to find at the other end of your favorite novels.

So, obviously, go out first thing tomorrow morning when it goes on sale and get yourself a copy of A Visit From the Goon Squad. Then, come out on Wednesday night and drink wine with the author. If these heights of happiness are not feasible for you, just get your hands on the book as soon as you can, and then find me so we can talk about it. In the meantime, I'm going to need to go back and read everything Jennifer Egan has ever written.

The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

2010-05-17T09:01:00.004-04:00

The Singer's Gun
by Emily St. John Mandel
(Unbridled Books, May 2010)

Full disclosure: Emily St. John Mandel lives in Brooklyn and I often run into her at literary events; she is an extremely likeable person and has been wonderfully supportive of Greenlight. And Unbridled Books is, in my opinion, one of the best of the crop of new independent publishers who are figuring out the best way to make this old-fashioned book thing work in a new economy, on a sustainable scale, building on the relationships between customers, booksellers, and publishers. So I was predisposed to like Emily's second novel, especially given the embarrassment of riches of bookseller quotes included in my galley.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, like it I did -- but that doesn't mean the book itself is not an astonishing surprise. I read it one day when I was so sick I actually did have to spend most of the day in bed, so my memory of the reading experience is a little like a fever dream -- though that may not be entirely due to my state of health. Mandel has managed a heady, indeed dreamlike mixing of a sort of literary soul-searching amidst the ennui of modern Everyman life, and a rich and strange, violent and dangerous and globe-spanning storyline. If the tone is reminiscent of the post-Franzen and McSweeney's school of alienation and drift, the story is almost a boy's adventure novel, or one of the darker practitioners of thriller writing (Vachs or Connelly). It's disorienting and haunting, addictive and thought-provoking, and it doesn't go away when you're done reading.

I like the way I summarized the plot on the Greenlight website, so I'll repeat it here: "From the sinister warehouses of Williamsburg to the soulless shining office towers of Manhattan to the sun-kissed ennui of the island of Ischia, Emily St. John Mandel traces the fortunes of would-be ex-criminal Anton and his associates through moving and astonishing interludes." Anton is one of those anti-heroes you find yourself almost unwillingly drawn to, in spite of his seeming inability to actually do what he wants or care for those he cares about. The fact that he finds something resembling a happy ending is perhaps the novel's biggest surprise, and it's not without its own attendant complications.

But for me the most powerful thing about Mandel's second novel are the odd, very dreamlike images that have stayed with me. A shipping container full of scared Russian girls sitting in a circle, waiting for someone to let them out. A basketball on a dirty, glass-strewn Manhattan roof, surrounded by those shining office buildings. A white hotel looking out on the beach at Ischia. A warehouse in Williamsburg full of salvaged treasures. And of course, the image in the title, which is such a huge and weird and unexpected plot point that I didn't realize its significance until I finished the book and turned it over to look at the front again. I'm not going to steal from you the shock of that discovery -- you'll just have to get deep into Mandel's strange and haunting and very real world and find out for yourself.

Note: Emily St. John Mandel reads at Greenlight Bookstore tonight, May 16, at 7:30 PM. You can RSVP on Facebook, or just show up.

April Comics Post

2010-04-30T11:14:00.008-04:00

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day, when fine comic shops nationwide will be giving out samples of the good stuff to all comers. In its honor, today's post is a flying tour of the comics/graphic novels I've been reading in the last few weeks and months.

Y: The Last Man, Volume 7: Paper Dolls
by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Pia Guerra (artist)
I've been working my way through Vaughan's magnum opus slowly for a while now. By Volume 7 the plague that killed (almost) every male mammal on earth is old news, and the implications of a women-only society are playing out in unpredictable ways, while Our Hero Yorick Brown tries to find his girlfriend and help find out how to bring back the other half of the species. Despite the occasionally annoying fact that in an all-women world the hero of the comic is still a dude, Vaughan's writing and Guerra's art always make for good adventure storytelling, and a bit of food for thought afterward. Imagine the implications for Israel, for example (women soldiers) or the Republican party (few women leaders but lots of political wives) or the Catholic church (no women in power but lots and lots of nuns). I'll add my voice to the chorus that says this is one of the seminal graphic novel series of our time. And it's often funny, too.

Air, Volume 2: Flying Machine
by G. Willow Wilson (writer) and M.K. Parker (artist)
This series was hand-sold to me by Amy at my great local, Bergen Street Comics, and it's a winner. With a unique premise (the technology for flight powered by thought, developed by the ancient Mayans and sought after by all kinds of powers) and a cool heroine (Blythe, perky enough to be a believable stewardess despite her fear of heights, and brave and bewildered enough to be a believable heroine), not to mention an affecting romance/mystery and a resonance for anyone who's ever been nervous on an airplane, it's got a lot of cool, original stuff going for it. I liked the first volume a bit better than the second (as the concept of "hyperpraxis" flight gets explained it becomes a bit less believable), but I'm on board (get it?!) for this series, and delighted to find a new creative team with such great storytelling mojo.

Freakangels, Volume 1
by Warren Ellis (writer) and Paul Duffield (artist)
Another Bergen Street Comics purchase, this one was actually a result of reading Ellis' comic serialized for free online. There are superpowers, yes, but the kids holding them are unlikeable and screwed up to varying degrees, and they seem to have brought about the end of the world and also be preventing it somehow. The British dialogue is cheeky and evocative, and while the Freakangels are sometimes kind of scary like a group of teenagers on the sidewalk, I'm intrigued by the post-apocalyptic Steampunk vibe and the potential for this story. (And yeah, I prefer reading it in book form.)

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt
by Mike Mignola (writer) and Duncan Fegred0 (artist)
I love Hellboy. (So much so that I always stock Mignola's comics in the bookstore, even though almost no one seems to buy them.) He's a working man's hero, doing his job well with a foul mouth and shoulders sagging with fatigue, and always trying to transcend his origins (i.e. as the son of Satan). And Mignola's depth of allusion to world mythology makes for both great, accessible storytelling and something you could spend years mining. This stand-alone volume tells a couple of stories related to the recurring legend of the hunt in the sky (for a stag, giants, a herd of cattle, whatever) and how Hellboy gets mixed up in them, and what they may imply for the future of his world. It's dark and moody and heartpounding, and I read it twice.

Jack of Fables #44
by Matthew Sturges & Bill Willingham (writers) and various artists
My love of the original Fables series by Sturges and Willingham has extended to this spin-off, where the ne'er-do-well but lucky hero of many fables, Jack, sets off on his own and has very weird and funny adventures. The series has now left the original Jack behind for a while and is following his son, Jack Frost, a more heroic (i.e. less selfish and amoral) character, which is kind of a relief -- but it's also still silly, which is nice. I wouldn't recommend starting here -- the Jack series has started to comic out in trade paperback form -- but this is one of the few series I buy in the $2.99 single issues whenever it comes out.

Cowboy Ninja Viking #1
by AJ Lieberman (writer) and Riley Rossmo (artist)
Come on, tell me you could resist buying a comic with a title like that?! It's a ridiculous but inspired premise: a shady organization has recruited dudes with multiple personalities, and taught each of them a different martial art. The dialogue is cleverly rendered with icons for each of our hero CNV's three distinct personalities, as he wreaks havoc and tries to figure out who is on his side. I'm not sure whether it will end up paying off as a story, but I'm in at least for issue two, when CNV takes on PGO -- Pirate Gladiator Oceanographer.

That's my comics reading lately. What comics have you been reading that you'd recommend?

The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

2010-04-01T09:41:00.003-04:00

The Sheriff of Yrnameer
by Michael Rubens
(Pantheon, August 2009)

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In a bit of a cheat today (come on, I've got to get outside in the sun!), I'm pasting this review in its entirety from an email I sent to a colleague in the book industry. I read it more or less concurrently with Old Mr. Flood, and it provided an entirely different set of pleasures.

I read The Sheriff of Yrnameer on my lunch break at the bookstore over the course of several weeks. To be honest, I picked it up because I eat lunch in the back room with the galleys, and it had that funny name and a brightly-colored cover. Lucky me that I picked up the one book from the piles likely to keep me enthralled in small doses for so long (and sometimes the lunch break ran long if I was at a particularly exciting bit.)

The Sheriff of Yrnameer reads like The Magnificent Seven as written by Douglas Adams, with Han Solo as the hero. It punches all the right buttons for a space opera / romantic comedy / postmodern sitcom / satire on commercial culture. The recurring gags become like inside
jokes with old friends, and the ending, though I expected it to be enjoyably predictable, was genuinely (and enjoyably) surprising. It also shares with my favorite book of last year, The Gone-Away World, an underlying critique of inter-galactic corporations that is pleasantly affirming to a small indie business owner.

Though I did once or twice rue the wisdom of reading it while eating (some lunches are not made to go with descriptions of insectile bounty hunters), I was thoroughly delighted to make such a discovery: a book both warm-hearted and irreverent, morally high-minded but not above the appeal of the gross-out, silly and sexy and secretly serious all at once. And the author is a Brooklynite -- of course. I can't wait for the paperback (which comes out in August of this year) so I can handsell the heck out of it to everyone who asks "Don't you have any FUNNY books? With a happy ending?"

Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell

2010-03-26T12:29:00.005-04:00

Old Mr. Flood
by Joseph Mitchell
Foreword by Charles McGrath
(MacAdam Cage hardcover edition, April 2005)

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A wise bookseller once taught me that right after reading something really, especially good, it's a good idea to read something completely different, as a sort of palate cleanser. After The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Passage, I felt the need to read something that was definitively not a big fat novel of an unfamiliar world. Luckily, my hand trailing over the unread riches of my bookshelves landed on Old Mr. Flood. As a small collection of three short semi-nonfictional pieces about a downtown New Yorker, it was exactly what I had been wanting.

For some inexcusable reason I had never read Joseph Mitchell before, though he's one of those authors you feel you know all about without reading him (the same way I thought, mistakenly, that I knew what Michaelangelo's David looked like before I saw the real thing). Apparently he is the sort of writer other writers go back and reread when they need to remind themselves how this whole business of stringing words together ought to work. This volume came into my possession at a launch party at a bar for MacAdam Cage's reissued edition (I was the offsite bookseller), where I heard Eli Wallach read Mitchell's words in a precisely appropriate grizzled, humorous old man sort of way.

The cover is a photograph of an old man at the remnants of the Fulton Fish Market, where the pieces about Mr. Flood are set; it's natural to interpret this as a representation of the title character, but in fact the photo is of Mitchell himself. As Charles McGrath points out in his illuminating introduction, Mr. Flood is not only a composite character of men Mitchell had talked with at the fish market, but also "an alter ego, who has countless things in common with his creator", including a fondness for drink, a graveyard sense of humor, and a love of seafood. (Despite his derision of "goormys", aka gourmets, I kept thinking Flood/Mitchell's sense of what's good to eat has a lot in common with contemporary foodie wisdom: he's not interested in vitamins or processed bread, just food as fresh and natural as he can get it.)

Mr. Flood, a retired demolition man who has taken up residence in a hotel near the fish market in the early 1940s, is very old. The subject of imminent death is one often discussed or irritably avoided. But he's also irrepressibly full of life, somehow immortal -- much like the fish market and the New York harbor life itself, which was on its way out even as Mitchell wrote about it. The stories should be depressing, but I found myself laughing out loud quite a bit, and tugging on the ALP's sleeve to read him the good parts. The writing is quite astonishingly good, even as it effaces itself in service of the textures and details and talk and tools and mannerisms of its subjects. I've since been seeking out more of Mitchell's pieces, which are thankfully now readily available, and observing the world with his eyes and thinking in his language -- which is a sure sign that a writer has really gotten to you.

I'm going to take the liberty to quote in full my favorite passage, which I read out loud to the ALP -- I'm hopeful that Mitchell's publishers and estate won't take it amiss. It's got a bit of all the good stuff that the book delivers: humor, dialect, the texture of details, and good food writing. One warning: I gave up eating any meat for Lent, but this bit made me crave oysters something fierce. As soon as Easter comes, I'm going in search of a place that serves oysters just like this. As a cure for a lingering cold or a spell of bad weather or the uneasiness of mortality, it seems you could do worse.

Mr. Flood snorted again. "Oh, shut up," he said. "Damn your doctor! I tell you what you do. You get right out of here and go over to Libby's oyster house and tell the man you want to eat some of his best oysters. Don't sit down. Stand up at the at that fine marble bar they got over there, where you can watch the man knife them open. And tell him you intend to drink the oyster liquor; he'll knife them on the cup shell, so the liquor won't spill. And be sure you get the big ones. Get them so big you'll have to rear back to swallow, the size that most restaurants use for fries and stews; God forgive them, they don't know any better. Ask for Robbins Islands, Mattitucks, Cape Cods, or Saddle Rocks. And don't put any of that red sauce on them, that cocktail sauce, that mess, that gurry. Ask the man for half a lemon, poke it a time or two to free the juice, and squeeze it over the oysters. And the first one he knifes, pick it up and smell it, the way you'd smell a rose, or a shot of brandy. That briny, seaweedy fragrance will clear your head; it'll make your blood run faster. And don't just eat six; take your time and eat a dozen, eat two dozen, eat three dozen, eat four dozen. And then leave the man a generous tip and go buy yourself a fifty-cent cigar and put your hat on the side of your head and take a walk down to Bowling Green. Look at the sky! Isn't it blue? And look at the girls a tap-tap-tapping past on their pretty little feet! Aren't they just the finest girls you ever saw, the bounciest, the rumpiest, the laughingest? Aren't you ashamed of yourself for even thinking about spending good money on a damned doctor? And along about here, you better be careful. You're apt to feel so bucked-up you'll slap strangers on the back, or kick a window in, or fight a cop, or jump on the tailboard of a truck and steal a ride."

The Passage by Justin Cronin

2010-03-12T20:35:00.003-05:00

The Passage
by Justin Cronin
(Ballantine, June 2010)

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Reading Justin Cronin's The Passage was a wonderfully weird experience in so many ways. For one thing, there had been foreshadowing for weeks: my business partner, my Twitter friends, fellow booksellers, the Winter Institute buildup, EVERYTHING and everyone seemed to be telling me to read this book. Not only was it being read by everyone whose tastes I share, it sounded like just the sort of thing I would like. Literary adventure with a soupçon of the supernatural? Yes please thankyou.

Weirder though, I'd read Justin Cronin's previous book The Summer Guest -- way back when, when I was young and poor enough to need the $45 they could pay me, I even reviewed it for Publishers Weekly (login required, sorry). I loved that novel, a piercing but gentle story of a family and its secrets over a summer at a fish camp. But it was a leetle hard to picture that rather quiet literary writer penning something that sounded like, from what people were telling me... a vampire apocalypse novel.

But I needed another big fat novel for a plane ride, so I jumped in, salivating with anticipation. And what an freakin' incredible ride it was. It starts with the very first sentence:

"Before she became the Girl from Nowhere -- the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years -- she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy."

It opened up a world to get lost in. I had to come back to that sentence a number of times as the story got bigger, more epic and labyrinthine, and I needed to remember where we came from and where we were headed.

I love the backstory of this novel, as put forth in the "Dear Reader" letter at the front: that Cronin asked his young daughter what he should write about next, and she said "Write about a girl who saves the world." An unlikely challenge for the average writer of literary fiction -- but Cronin was up to it, with a vengeance. Not only did he write this novel on the full apocalyptic epic scale, but it's the first of a trilogy -- a huge world-building exercise, with heroes and villains and massive set-pieces and romance and destiny and life and death.

I don't want to talk much about the plot, other than that first sentence; I'm sure many reviews will come out that outline the story structure, but it was such a pleasure to read in breathless suspense and near constant surprise that this early on I don't want to spoil it for anybody. My impression about half way through was that it reminded me a lot of Dean Koontz, whom I loved as a teen -- adventure with a scrim of sci fi and a Joseph Campbell-ian hero to root for. But Koontz's morality was always a tad too schematic, his bad guys too obviously bad, his emphasis on the value of home and hearth almost a little right-wing, and his dialogue not especially convincing.

Cronin is showing us what happens when a writer who has cut his chops on stories of families and relationships takes on an operatic fantasy epic. The villains are sometimes monstrously horrifying, sometimes pathetically well-meaning, sometimes just driven and short-sighted. The social interactions -- the love affairs, the family life, the camaraderie and power shifts of extreme danger -- are exquisitely observed. And the action scenes leave nothing to be desired, except maybe the ability to read faster. At times, yes, it seems a little too overdetermined that the good guys will live through the horrors that have killed countless others -- but it would hardly be a satisfying adventure story (at least in Volume One) if they didn't.

What I appreciate most about what Cronin brings to this heart-pounding epic is the Big Themes, which grow on you gradually rather than hitting you over the head. There's a lot of ink spilled these days about what vampires "mean" -- in The Passage, it seems that on some level they just mean mortal danger, of the kind bands of humans have always faced. How to make meaning and value out of a life whose sweetness is likely to be heartbreakingly brief -- is this a question unique to those expecting carnivorous humans to descend on them at nightfall? And there's the question of identity, too. The vampires take away identity into a massive, hungry hive-mind, while Cronin's humans constantly ground their identity in their family name, the work they do, the place they come from -- just like us, just like always. Who are you? is a repeated refrain, sometimes answerable, sometimes not.

These are just samplings of some of the stuff I saw going on in this book, which is made not only to quicken the pulse and keep you up at night, but also to interrogate and reevaluate the deep core of being human. The only thing I hated about this book is that it is fully committed to being a trilogy: at the end, after 700 pages of horror and laughter and tears and ephiphanies and explosions, it ends on a cliffhanger. AAAUUGH!! But what more visceral response could a "literary writer" evoke? Kudos to Justin Cronin for this masterpiece, which I think is going to be the book of the summer if not the year -- and here's hoping he hurries up and writes the next one!

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2010-03-08T23:13:00.003-05:00

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
by David Mitchell
(Random House, June 2010)

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Anyone who has ever read my blog, or ever met me, stands a good chance of having heard me talk about David Mitchell. It's rather satisfying, at my age, to have discovered my Favorite Living Writer. Ever since Cloud Atlas left me slack-jawed and inarticulate with its puzzle structure and fearlessly ambitious plots and astonishing humor and humanist compassion and heartbreaking truths -- okay, even before that, when I snapped up Ghostwritten and Number Nine Dream with the satisfaction of finding just what one wanted to eat, a meal that becomes a sweet memory -- and especially afterward, when I met the man at book readings for Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green and he turned out to be the kind, brilliant, self-effacing person you hope in your heart of hearts that your favorite authors might turn out to be -- David Mitchell has been my model for what writing and writers can be, and I have described myself truthfully if unflatteringly as a slavering fan. (That sentence was just because I could. Sorry.)

But having a favorite writer also means you approach every new work of theirs with an inevitable trepidation: will it hold up? Will you have to love it half-heartedly, out of loyalty, or will it blow you away again? Will it move you in the same way -- or better yet, in a different way -- or will it be simply good, and not great?

For this reason, after I had gotten Random House's postcard last fall announcing a new David Mitchell title coming in June, and after I had begged the publicist to consider Greenlight for an event*, and after Mitchell's wonderful editor David Ebershoff had stopped into Greenlight and we'd talked about our mutual love for the man, and after Ebershoff had, taking pity on me, sent me the bound manuscript for Mitchell's new book -- I looked at it on my shelf for about a month and a half before opening it. I told myself and other people I wanted to wait until I could set aside time to read it straight through, and that was partly true. But of course I was also nervous about whether he could do it again, and whether I could love like that again. Finally, on the plane to see my family in California for a post-Christmas vacation, I pulled the 8 1/2 by 11 thing out of my bag and started to read.

So? What was it like? It was not like Cloud Atlas or Ghostwritten; it was a single narrative thread, ostensibly, the story of a Dutch trading post in Japan in 1799 and following. I noted with satisfaction that it was written in third person, a first for Mitchell -- he had noted at a reading I attended that he had always written in first person, since he "wouldn't know where to look" without a single perspective, but that third person sounded like a challenge he should set himself -- and look here, he had.

I also noted, as no doubt reviewers will, that one thread of this narrative involves a European (in Jacob de Zoet's case a Dutchman, in Mitchell's case an Irishman) falling in love with a Japanese girl (in de Zoet's case, Orito Aibagawa, a young surgeon in training who has a scar that makes her unmarriageable, but not unbeautiful; in Mitchell's case, his now wife and mother of his children, whom I know nothing more about). Here the similarity ends between Mitchell's biography and the story, but it is a telling detail -- I think during Mitchell's time in Japan he fell in love with Murakami and a kind of Japanese-ness as well as with the woman he eventually married, and Japan looms large in his pantheon of influences. There is an outsider's tenderness and frustration and fascination and longing and homesickness in the book that rings true to life; the part of me that considers myself to a very small degree David Mitchell's friend (we have had dinner together in a group, and he writes very kind things in my galleys and remembers my bookstore plans when he sees me) is glad that he wrote this part of his story, and that he did it in this particular way.

In fact, a great many things in the book delighted me, though they swam up slowly, rather than bursting in a flood of revelation. I love that Jacob de Zoet is a Dutch Reformed Calvinist (I am one myself, unlikely as that seems), and that his faith is taken seriously, as are the various faiths or skepticisms of the Asian, African, European, and other characters that populate the book -- they're not neuroses or tools of oppression, though they can be used that way. I love how in this simple through-line narrative about a young Dutchman in Japan, Mitchell manages to include dozens of other stories -- nearly every character in the book finds space to tell his own story, including some of the most contemptible. I love the endless invention that goes into making these many imaginary and believably specific lives, and the compassion that Mitchell, typically, has for them all.

I love several instances of good triumphing decidedly and sometimes hilariously over evil, as well as many more instances of good intentions bringing suffering and disappointment. I love that part way through this rigorously historical novel, a never-quite-resolved hint of creepy supernaturalism is introduced, as well as a very real nefarious institution, and the novel becomes, for a while, an adventure story. I love that, though he knows exactly how to write a satisfying adventure story, Mitchell cannot be relied upon to give all of his characters happy endings (though I didn't exactly love it at the time I was reading it -- I was actually a little angry and sad). I love how the novel in the end manages to be drawn together and loosened, resolved and heartbreakingly abandoned, all at once. I love how it stayed with me and grew in me after I had read it (on the plane and during the weekend I should have been hanging out with my family, though they're all readers too so it was mutual) -- as the best novels do.

As the ALP has postulated, the works of art that stay with us are usually not the ones that we love easily on first experiencing them. Rather, they tend to be the ones that grow on us, that we find ourselves thinking about and wrestling with and returning to. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is that second kind. It seems to have made its own distinctive ache in my heart -- for the heartbreaks of the story, and its beauties, and its delights that I will never experience for the first time again. In this way it does seem very Japanese: infused with an appreciation of the ephemeral that is as much about the nostalgia as about the event -- an autumnal beauty, in fact.

There is one delight, though, that I have yet to experience. When asked about the occasional recurrence of his characters from one book to another, Mitchell described a sort of waiting room, where every character he's ever written hangs out, and if he has a place for them in a story, they get a new part. I'm wondering whether Thousand Autumns is populated by any of the characters from the first section of Cloud Atlas, which takes place on a sailing vessel around the same time. Now, I'm gloatingly preserving the delight of re-reading Cloud Atlas to discover which characters might have life in both books. And perhaps "gloatingly preserving" is what made me wait so long to read Thousand Autumns anyway.

* The Greenlight David Mitchell event, by the way, has been scheduled: Saturday, July 17, at 7:30 PM. Random House is giving us a little budget to throw a party -- we're thinking sake and champagne. Open to ideas, though.

Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly (Felony and Mayhem Part 2)

2010-02-13T11:32:00.008-05:00

Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly (Felony & Mayhem, May 2009)

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As I mentioned in the previous post, a large part of the charm of the "Vintage" mysteries published by Felony & Mayhem is the immersion in the past. For a sense of the Agatha-Christie-only-more-so appeal, I can't say it better than F&M's modern back cover copy from Arrow Pointing Nowhere, part of the Henry Gamadge series:

"Take one grand house, stuff it with staff, and make it home to several generations. If they send their sons to Oxford and occasionally knock each other off, you've got a country-house murder mystery, that classic of English crime fiction. But if the boys are at Yale, odds are that you're reading a New York mansion mystery -- a genre largely invented and perfected by Elizabeth Daly."

Yep, only the boys go to college, and all kinds of extended family share the mansion with the servants -- it's a whole different world.

But with Elizabeth Daly's books, the exoticism off the time period is only part of the goods: the other part is Henry Gamadge. If Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade were a bit more bookish and a little less alienated, he might resemble Gamadge (except he's got a happy marriage more like Nick and Nora Charles). He's ostensibly a professional expert in rare books, with a love for solving puzzles. More importantly, he's the kind of guy you want on your side in a pinch. Gracious, diplomatic, perspicacious, infinitely resourceful, quick on the uptake and on the trigger if necessary, Gamadge is your go-to guy if you're in a spot. I love his relationship with his wife Clara (a romance which actually comes about during one of the books in the series and sticks for the rest of them, which is a rarity) and with his assistant/co-conspirator Harold, who in this volume is back from the War on leave. Their mutual trust and profoundly functional relationships are always in contrast to the web of conspiracies, suspicion, and murderous intent found in the (typically rich) families they're called in to investigate.

In Arrow, Gamadge doesn't even know which member of the family he's working for. He's received a mysterious message and knows that someone in the Fenway mansion is in mortal danger -- but is it the generous but naive Pater Familias? The invalid former beauty who married in? The grim-looking paid companion? The amiable ne'er-do-well uncle? The strong-willed spinster? The mentally deficient grandson? (I love how you can tell he's "off" by the fact that he doesn't stand when someone comes into the drawing room.)

Gamadge will solve it, of course, though there's no guarantee anyone will survive to the end, and Gamadge and his crew end up having to do a lot more physical labor in the course of cracking the case than say, Hercule Poirot. I highly recommend curling up with this or any other book in the Gamadge series, just to see how it all comes out, and to enjoy the setting and the personalities that make this series so original and yet somehow inevitable.

Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham (Felony and Mayhem Part 1)

2010-01-28T13:20:00.010-05:00

Traitor's Purse by Margery Allingham (Felony & Mayhem, October 2009)

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I will take a stand and say that the classic mysteries brought back into print by Felony & Mayhem Press (the brilliant publishing offshoot of downtown Manhattan's priceless Partners & Crime Bookstore) are one of the great small pleasures of my life. The ALP tends to buy the books in F&M's Vintage series for me, for special occasions or as a surprise, and these are always occasions for pure delight. Having read nearly every Agatha Christie novel ever written, it's wonderful to discover that I haven't reached the end of the treasure trove of early 20th century mysteries.

One of the pleasures of the Vintage mysteries is the sense of culture shock -- or cultural discovery -- the Western world in their pages presents. Unlike Christie, who has been consistently in print and most likely edited to remain comprehensible to contemporary readers, the works of Elizabeth Daly, Margery Allingham, and the like retain the cultural specifics of their time. This means that stories of 1940s New York or Britain contain not only familiar extinct delights like dressing for dinner, men with hats, and hired help in even fairly modest households, but also rituals and niceties I can only speculate about. Why is it odd that the paid companion spoke that way? What does the state of the front lawn signify? How do you know that someone is wearing clothes that don't belong to them? What does it mean when the protagonists exchange significant glances over the train schedule, or someone's shoes, or the contents of an umbrella stand or a corner shop? It's like entering an exotic, highly civilized foreign country -- whether New York or London, the citizens' habits and traditions are equally unfamiliar at a distance of 80 years.

The sense of dislocation is even more pronounced, but also eased somewhat, in Traitor's Purse, the 11th title in Margery Allingham's series featuring British policeman/gentleman sleuth Albert Campion. I'd never read any of the other Campion books when this one was gifted to me -- but luckily, in this volume Campion wakes up on page 1 suffering from amnesia, so he doesn't know his own backstory either. And not only is he trying to figure out who he is and what he does, but he's been plopped down in the middle of a mysterious matter of wartime National Security, and apparently someone wants him to hang for killing a cop. Then there's the matter of a woman named Amanda who aids him, whom he thinks may be his wife -- but who turns out to be his long-time fiance, who has just decided to call off the wedding. And in the meantime he has to make polite dinner party conversation with people whom he supposedly knows, so as not to give away his mission or his mental state.

It's all pleasantly excruciating, and of course it comes out all right. The villain is satisfyingly obvious, but the scheme is quite original and not something that would have occurred to me as a matter of national security. The competence of Campion, his "lower-class" right-hand man Lugg, and his left-hand girl Lady Amanda (who sticks by him in his mission despite his having strung her along romantically for eight years, apparently), is gratifying in the extreme.

My only quibble with the book comes at the end, when the plot has been foiled and Campion's memory has been finally restored. After realizing while amnesiac that he's been an ass to his fiance all this time, and having his deep feelings for her roiling under every action sequence, and after she's decided to take him back, their reconciliation is disappointingly perfunctory. But maybe that's a remnant of British wartime sensibilities too -- stiff upper lip, no big displays of emotion, all that sort of thing. It's a story profoundly of its time -- in its fears, its virtues, and its relationships. It makes for not only suspenseful reading, but a plunge into a different world.

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

2010-01-28T11:28:00.004-05:00

Note to readers, if there still are any about: I've taken a long hiatus from regular posts on this blog, for the simple reason that I've realized the dream I wrote about in my very first post and opened a bookstore -- which, it turns out, takes up a lot of one's time and energy. But I miss flexing my writing muscles a bit, and I find that sometimes the best relief from the stresses of working in the book industry is the books themselves. So I'm returning to this blog and changing its mission just a little. Rather than speculating about the state and future of the book industry and/or chronicling the events of the literary world (both of which are done more competently by the bloggers streaming down the right-hand side of this page), I'd like to just write a little about what I've been reading. I'll try to write something about every book I read this year, more or less in the order encountered. I look forward to it as a kind of readerly/writerly practice. Hope it's fun for you too.

The Unnamed
by Joshua Ferris
(Regan Arthur Books, December 2009)

I didn't read Josh Ferris' breakout debut novel, Then We Came To The End -- and from what I've heard from other readers, this may have made it easier for me to love his second, The Unnamed. TWCTTE had a scrim of office humor and social satire, but laughs are pretty scarce in The Unnamed -- so readers who loved the first book and were looking forward to something similar in the second seem to be somewhat disappointed. I wasn't disappointed. If it makes any sense, I was blown away in slow motion.

I started this book slowly, and later I had to put it down for a while, but not for the same reason. The story starts somewhat quietly, and it only kept me reading by the strength of his sentences and the odd believability of his privileged characters (a corporate lawyer and his pretty wife). Then it started to break my heart, over and over. The premise is pretty well known by now: the husband, Tim, is compelled to walk, far, often, and unexpectedly, and doesn't know whether his problem is psychological, physical, real or imaginary. As one review I read pointed out, this can be read as a metaphor for disease or for addiction, or just as a strange unexplainable thing all its own. Ferris' looping, time-shifting narrative, in which the condition flares up, recedes, seems to disappear, then comes back again with a vengeance, echoes painfully the cycles that physical or psychological diseases can follow. It all just keeps happening again and again, and the family strains against it, and the body screams in frustration, and the job and social life falls apart, and cures are promising until they're not, and eventually it ends, either in wellness or in death. Tim and his wife and his daughter, along with his law firm office mates and the minor characters he encounters, are painted with skillfull realism, but I think there's also a strain of fatalist magic realism through the story. Or maybe it's just that the disease/condition makes for an unwilling position of outside observation that makes all ordinary life seem strange and full of odd meanings, like a fever dream.

I had to set this book aside for a while over the holidays, because things in the story started to get so bad I couldn't keep reading it and still be good company. (It was around the part where Tim and his body/mind start to argue with each other about the existence of God, and Tim's protest against the demands of the physical results in the loss of some fingers, and I realized that this wasn't going to end well.) I finally picked it up again in January and finished it in a bar, by myself. It was the perfect place to take in the slow winding down of the story, all the ideas and experiences that filled it, and accept them, as humans have no choice but to do.

I've met Josh Ferris at a couple of events for anthologies in which he was included, and I remember thinking of him, half-humorously, as a very nice young man. I'm now somewhat in awe of his talent as a writer and the depth of his insight. This is a story like King Lear, in which one rather arrogant, powerful man's reduction to nothing but a shivering body is an irresistibly truthful portrayal of the nature of human life. That's not all there is to the story, in either of these texts or in life, but it's a deep and tough part of it to grapple with successfully, and Ferris has done it. I'm grateful for this book for the way it broke my heart.

The holiday book drive you've been waiting for!

2009-12-10T09:43:00.004-05:00

There is a joy in giving books. And if that joy can be combined with 1) getting rid of your old books so you can get new books, and 2) passing along the gift of literacy and literature to those who might not receive it otherwise -- well, that's some serious book giving joy.

This year the church I attend, Old First Reformed, is holding a book drive for a community of West African refugees on Staten Island, many of whom struggle with English and therefore with school and employment. The organization, African Refuge, is a more than worthy cause to unburden your groaning shelves, especially if you've got some children's or YA books amongst them. Details are below. The ALP and I will be schlepping a couple of boxes over there on Sunday; hope to see you there!

Book Drive!
To Benefit African Refuge After‐School
Please donate your ‘gently read’ or brand new books to help West African refugee
children who are now living on Staten Island.
For readers ages 5 – 17
Sunday, December 13th, 3:00 – 7:00 pm
Drop off at Old First Reformed Church,
7th Ave. & Carroll St., Park Slope, Brooklyn.
For more information: (718) 638‐8300
If you can’t make it on the 13th, bring books to the church office; use entrance on
Carroll St. Hours: Mon. – Thurs., 9:00 am – 5:00 pm, December 7th – 10th.

• The mission of African Refuge, a non‐profit organization, is to aid West African refugees currently residing in Staten Island. Because of the devastating civil war in Liberia, many of these refugee youths have missed one or more years of school, yet they are placed in classes in the NYC public school system based on their age rather than academic level. This has made it difficult for many of them to succeed in school. In response, African Refuge has set up an after‐school program. Go to http://africanrefuge.webs.com to find out more.

The Other Giving Thanks Post.

2009-11-26T16:21:00.004-05:00

On the Greenlight blog today we've posted a list of the people we have to thank for the opening of the bookstore.

It's a very, very long list.

Here on my own blog I wanted to say thanks to a few of those who helped me, myself, personally, get to this wonderful moment. These are the people I haven't thanked regularly in interviews -- the ones outside of the primary business development story, who nonetheless are the reasons I am here.

To my mom, of course, for reading to me when I still just wanted to chew on the pages; for letting me check out the maximum number of library books every week; for telling me I could go to college anywhere I could get a scholarship, and sticking to that even when it meant going 3,000 miles away; for giving me a chunk of my inheritance early as seed money for the store; for talking to me on the phone every week, as I planned and cried and hyperventilated and obsessed and pondered and worked toward this dream; for being the first reader in my life, and still one of the most important.

To my two younger sisters, for spending our childhood acting out our own stories (and putting up with me always having to be the king, president, or boss); for our own secret language made up of references to books, movies and inside jokes; for still getting excited about new books with me.

To Miss Rumphius, for teaching me that you must do something to make the world more beautiful.

To Anne Shirley, for teaching me that imagination creates the world.

To my high school English teachers and principals, for making me enter speech contests (I got good at it) and write essays (that too) -- so that I could be a good spokesperson, a good host, a good writer, and a good reader.

To my coworkers at Dean and Deluca on Rockefeller Center, for accepting me as a shift boss even though I was younger than most of them and we didn't all speak the same language (Wolof, Spanish, Gujarti, French), and teaching me what it's like to direct a team in a workplace.

To L.B. Thompson, my favorite poetry teacher at NYU, for casually asking me if I needed a summer job, and landing me at Three Lives, the best bookstore on earth. (Also, for being the best critical reader of my poetry, while I was writing it.)

To Jill Dunbar and Jenny Feder, the founders of Three Lives, for forgiving me when I was late (or forgot to show up at all, addle-headed college student that I was); for giving me my first taste of working at an independent bookstore; for showing me what a partnership could look like.

To Rebecca, for being the partner I didn't know I needed, but totally did; for having all the strengths I don't (task planning, merchandising, negotiating, reordering, etc...); for always picking up the ball when I'm about to drop it; for telling me when my hair looks good or I've lost weight (but not the opposite); for teaching me more about being a bookseller every day; for calling me on my shit; for working and working on a relationship that's as tough as a marriage, and just as strong, and just about as important; for becoming my friend as well as my partner.

And last, most, and always, to the ALP, Michael, husband for two years, partner for more than eight, for dating me even though I was an addle-headed book nerd; for always reading more books than I do; for that night when I was moaning over not getting into grad school, when he pointed out that the career I really loved was being a bookseller; for working office jobs he didn't love so I could do what I loved; for waking me up with coffee in bed every morning (every morning! even when I'm totally cranky!); for talking over the day over a glass of wine at night; for standing by me through every false start, every setback, every tough decision, every unbelievable success; for dealing with my weird schedule and frequent work emergencies; for being there when I walk home from the bookstore every night, so that my walk home is one of the happiest parts of the day: from the work I love, to the man I love, in the town I love, in this life I love.

Thanks, all of you. I am incredibly blessed. If I can live up to your inspiration, I hope I may be a blessing in return.

Upcoming Event: Breakout

2009-11-04T08:01:00.002-05:00

I don't often include pitches for others' events on this blog, but I've been thinking lately about the necessity of giving back, in light of all the support I've received for my own dreams. If you're a New Yorker, consider attending this event on Monday -- it's a great literary lineup, and a shot at hope for those most in need of it.

The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC Presents

BREAKOUT: VOICES FROM INSIDE

A partnership between PEN’s Prison Writing Program and WNYC’s The Greene Space

Presented as part of “The NEXT New York Conversation” Series

John Turturro, Lemon Andersen, Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, Jamal Joseph, and Sean Wilsey among others to read works authored by participants of PEN’s Prison Writing Program

Monday, November 9^th, 2009 at 7pm

For more than 30 years, PEN’s Prison Writing Program has been dedicated to helping make the harsh realities of American imprisonment part of our social justice dialogue. PEN’s program has also been on the front-lines of prison reform, helping inmates in federal, state and local penitentiaries cope with life behind bars, gain skills and have a voice while they are there. The Prison Writing Program accomplishes all this through mentorships and an annual writing competition that receives between 20-30 entries per day from local, state and federal prisons—including from prisoners on death row.

On Monday, November 9, 2009 at 7pm, WNYC Radio’s The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space’s monthly dialogue series, “The NEXT New York Conversation” partners with PEN to present BREAKOUT: VOICES FROM THE INSIDE, a night of literature and conversation. Luminaries from the New York cultural landscape – writers Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian and Patricia Smith, along with actor John Turturro and writer/performer Lemon Andersen, among others–will read pieces chosen from the best of the winning manuscripts of the Prison Writing Contest, and from the extraordinarily moving diaries that men and women have written as part of PEN’s collaboration with the Anne Frank Center, USA.

Proceeds from the evening will benefit PEN’s Prison Writing Program. The event will be streamed live on the web at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world; there are hundreds and hundreds of prisons across the country and, as of 2007, these institutions housed more than 2,300,000 inmates—70% of whom are non-white. Nearly 1 million of those in prison are serving time for committing non-violent crimes. Sadly, the situation is not improving.

The second-annual Prison Writing Benefit Reading will help to raise much-needed funds to enable this important program to continue into the future, but also to help the prisoners see themselves in a new way: as writers.

The NEXT New York Conversation, sponsored by HSBC, “The World’s Local Bank,” is WNYC’s The Greene Space’s multiplatform dialogue series featuring a collective of changemakers, newsmakers, tastemakers and New Yorkers, sharing their values about interesting topics that are reshaping, redefining, and re-imagining our world in the 21^st century.

Monday, November 9, 2009 at 07:00 PM
Duration: 2 hours

Tickets can be purchased at Ovation Tix (https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/7631135)

Collaborator: $75

Friend: $50

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy PEN’s Handbooks for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

WNYC Radio is New York's premier public radio station, comprising WNYC 93.9 FM, WNYC AM 820 and www.wnyc.org. As America's most listened-to AM/FM public radio stations, reaching more than one million listeners every week, WNYC extends New York City's cultural riches to the entire country on-air and online, and presents the best national offerings from networks National Public Radio, Public Radio International and American Public Media. WNYC 93.9 FM broadcasts a wide range of daily news, talk, cultural and classical music programming, while WNYC AM 820 maintains a stronger focus on breaking news and international news reporting. In addition, WNYC produces content for live, radio and web audiences from The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, the station’s street-level multipurpose, multiplatform broadcast studio and performance space. For more information about WNYC, visit www.wnyc.org.

An Open Letter to IBNYC Bookstores: NAIBA: It's Not Just for the Suburbs Anymore

2009-09-27T08:26:00.002-04:00

The NAIBA fall conference is a week away -- and lucky you, it's not too late to register. Stephanie Anderson (Bookavore) and I recently sent a joint open letter to NYC bookstores about the value of the conference -- it's reproduced below. Hope to see you in Baltimore!

As two NYC booksellers just starting our careers, we've recently observed two things:

1) Attending the fall regional booksellers conference hosted by NAIBA (New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association) has been incredibly good for our professional development and for our bookstores.

2) Very few New York City bookstores ever send booksellers to the NAIBA conference.

Why this contradiction? We speculated about the possible reasons that New York City bookstore owners have not been attending the regional conference or sending their employees, and thought about some answers. The result is an expression of what we've found worthwhile about the NAIBA conference, and a modest proposal to NYC stores to consider sending a bookseller to the conference this year.

"It's too expensive."
This is an understandable reaction, especially in this economic climate. But as we all know, it takes money to make money. And more importantly, the education offered at the NAIBA conference can literally add money to your bottom line. For example, the session on "Capturing Coop" (Sunday, 3:45) alone could make your store enough money in a year to cover the cost of transportation, hotel, and conference registration for one bookseller or more, depending on your store. The " Online Right Now" lounge (Sunday and Monday), where experienced booksellers offer free one-on-one help with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media, could grow your customer base exponentially. The Pick of the Lists sessions (throughout the conference) could give you the tools to handsell dozens of books that might otherwise languish on your shelves.

You could save the $100 registration fee (which admits up to 8 booksellers) by not going. But that would mean you're accepting the much greater loss of the potential profits the NAIBA educations sessions can create for your store.

"I already know this stuff."
Send your staff instead! If you've been in the business for 5 or 10 or 20 years, you might feel like you have nothing new to learn. But chances are you have younger booksellers working in your store who would benefit hugely from participating in this forum for professional development and community. Both of us (Stephanie and Jessica) found that our first NAIBA conference literally changed our lives: we went from being retail employees to feeling like members of a professional community, and our subsequent involvement in our stores and in our industry was the result. If we want our bookstores to prosper for years to come, it's worth investing in our frontline staff – the Emerging Leaders of our industry. You might find you have an incredibly talented and motivated bookseller right under your nose.

"I can't take the time away from the store."
The NAIBA conference is two days of being able to think about your store overall: the Big Picture. It's a time to talk to your colleagues and realize that your problems are similar and that you can share solutions. It's a chance to step away from the daily sales and profit margin, and think about where your store is and where it's going. It can be hard to justify carving out time from your daily routine. But it may be the only way to keep your store from stagnating. Without time to look at your bookstore from a different perspective, you risk making the same unconscious mistakes over and over again.

"Going to the conference is a luxury, for successful stores with lots of time and money."

Actually, the stores that attend NAIBA regularly tend to be prosperous bookstores because they invest the time and money in education and development. The conference rejuvenates them, gives them ideas, and makes them better bookstores. Your store can be one of those prosperous stores too.

"NAIBA isn't for me – my New York store has nothing in common with bookstores in small towns and suburbs."
This is perhaps the most entrenched reason for not attending the NAIBA conference – and there are so many reasons why it's counter-productive! First, the education offered at the conference is universally applicable: urban stores as well as rural ones need to understand co-op, create community, learn about books from graphic novels to children's books, and use technology to reach their customers. And when you begin to talk with your colleagues from upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and Maryland, you will probably find that you have even more in common with them than you do with the other retail stores on your city block. Independent booksellers are colleagues, no matter where their stores are located, and always have something to offer each other – New York City stores do themselves a disservice when they refuse to take advantage of that community.

Feel like the mix of titles and authors at the conference doesn't reflect what sells in your store? Well, not attending the conference is a little bit like not voting in an election – you can't then complain that you're not represented. NAIBA has the potential to be a powerful force with publishers, attracting major talent and funding and making indie bookstores' voices heard – but not until a higher percentage of bookstores in the region attend and participate.

So not only does the NAIBA conference offer a huge number of benefits to New York City stores, your participation has the potential to make it even better. We'll both be there this fall – we hope to see you there too!

Best Regards,

Stephanie Anderson, WORD (Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY)

Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Greenlight Bookstore (Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY)

The NAIBA Fall Conference will be held October 3 to 5 in Baltimore, MD.

For more information and to register, visit http://www.newatlanticbooks.com/fall_conference.html

or contact executive secretary Eileen Dengler, 516.333.0681 or info@naiba.com

Bookselling Generations

2009-09-23T18:30:00.004-04:00

This is all related to Greenlight Bookstore, but it's more a personal observation than a business one -- and it's all a bit scattered -- so I'm relating it here.

Greenlight Boosktore feels to me like the "next generation" of bookselling, in the best way. This is driven home by how involved the "parents" -- the generation that precedes us -- have been in helping the store come together.

Over the last few weekends, Betty and John Bennett (formerly of Bennett Books) and Susan Avery (formerly of Ariel Booksellers) have come to the store to help us with painting, book receiving, etc. These are folks Rebecca and I think of as our "bookseller parents" -- they've mentored us, counseled us, taught us, and set us an example of what a great bookstore can be. Though both of their stores are now closed and the owners have moved on to other literary projects, it felt like a seamless passing of the torch.

In addition, Cynthia of Archivia Books and other New York City booksellers have come out to volunteer and teach us what's what, helping to add another store to their ranks and building our community.

Last week Toby Cox of Three Lives -- my former boss at the first bookstore where I ever worked, the store where I fell in love with bookselling -- came to check on our progress. Three Lives will always feel a bit like home to me -- it's where I come from as a bookseller, and Toby has been one of my greatest mentors. He's a Fort Greene resident too, and has advised Rebecca and I a great deal, so his opinion means a lot. To see him get excited about the progress at Greenlight is kind of like having your dad congratulate you on a personal project -- though Toby's not really old enough to be my dad, he's a bookselling father figure in the best way.

And it gets even better. All of our wonderful staff have worked in bookstores in the past, and two of them worked in stores founded by their parents. It turns out that Jesse's mom, who owns Wild Rumpus, and Eleanor's mom, who runs Inkwood Books, are friends, and have found out with delight that their offspring are now both working at Greenlight. We joke that they're the "bookstore brats," having grown up in the business, and it's great to have the connection to two such wonderful stores. And the other stores that our employees come from -- Legacy Books, Bluestockings, Goehrings, others -- have taught them the skills that make them the awesome team of booksellers that our store needs.

All of this adds to the sense that our bookstore is in so many ways the child of the stores that have come before us. Some of those stores are still going strong, some have changed or closed for various reasons, but all of them have been sources of inspiration to us, and have created the world that Greenlight is being born into. This isn't to suggest that the older stores are on the way out -- on the contrary, many of them are still teaching us new innovations, and we're delighted to join them. It's merely to reflect with gratitude on the legacy of those who have laid the groundwork for what we're doing, who have helped to bring us into the world.

Thanks, folks. We hope to do you proud.

Taking stock, setting off

2009-08-31T08:50:00.002-04:00

Okay, so it's officially been over a month since I last posted here: my first and longest-running blog. I suspect anyone who's ever read The Written Nerd knows the reason why: my efforts have been shifted almost entirely over to the Greenlight Bookstore blog, and all the attendant activities and responsibilities of getting the bookstore off the ground.

I thought maybe I'd have more time for blogging now that I don't have a "day job" -- but it turns out there's not a lot of down time in entrepreneurship. I haven't yet succumbed to the dreaded "bookstore owners have no time to read" syndrome (just finished A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, now working on Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind and China Mieville's The City And The City) -- but it does seem to be the case that bookstore owners have no time for personal blogging.

For a little while I thought about officially retiring this blog. In a way, it's served it's purpose: I needed a way to work out my thoughts about books, bookselling as a business, the community of booksellers and publishers, etc. Now I'm on the verge of achieving the goal I confessed to in my very first post, back in 2005: owning my own store.

This blog has played a surprisingly big part in all of that. Someone asked me recently "do you do all your own publicity?" The answer is that I don't do publicity; I just talk about the store all the time in all kinds of forums, and The Written Nerd was the first. It introduced me to the folks at NAIBA, who asked me to join the board and brought me into a circle of smart and dedicated booksellers; it brought me to the attention of publishers who mailed me books for review and now are enthusiastically supporting Greenlight; it somehow gave me the status of "expert" on social media, author events and graphic novels, and I've gotten the opportunity to speak on panels about those topics and meet all kinds of new smart people. I haven't done a lot of chasing down reporters to get them to write about Greenlight Bookstore; the coverage we've gotten has come about in large part from the previous connections and visibility that's happened through The Written Nerd, and for that I'm surprised and grateful.

And this blog has also helped me to keep my focus through the last 4 or 5 years of wanting to open a bookstore, through the times when that seemed unlikely or impossible. I recently wrote a piece for the AOL small business feature The Startup about facing setbacks, where I quoted Laura Miller's recent book The Magician's Book (a critical study of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia) about the power of stories to turn hardship into adventure. And what is a blog but a never-ending story? Here's some more from Miller's book, which I've been thinking about a lot lately:

I was, of course, being sheltered by the traditional conventions of children's stories, in which the good are rewarded, the evil defeated, and the ending is at least partially happy. But getting to that happy ending was no picnic; along with the child heroes, I vicariously slogged through trackless forests and snowy wastes, took up arms against monsters, and wrangled with menacing adults. I was stirred by how much was epxected of the Pevensies. I wanted to be challenged in the same way. I wanted to be asked to give my all for a cause I could be sure was worthy. (And even at that tender age, I had an inkling that finding such a cause would be the hardest part of the quest.)

I was the same kind of child as Miller: longing for a quest, a great battle or a cause to give my all for. This blog, and the last five years of my life, have been about discovering that I've done the hardest part: I've found the cause. Now I'm dealing (mostly) cheerfully with the trackless forests, snowy wastes, monsters, and menacing adults, on the grand and Quixotic adventure of opening a bookstore.

But despite the fact that this blog has done great and noble service and could justifiably deserve an honorable retirement, I'm not going to shut it down just yet. It's nice to have a place to talk about books and stories that's not Greenlight -- that's just, still, my own. I noticed I have half a dozen posts in draft form that could go up any time, and I've got half a dozen more ideas for posts. I can't promise you'll see those here any time soon -- we're really in the final countdown to opening now and I think life is going to get more busy, not less. But I just wanted to check in, to reflect on what this blog has done and meant to me, and to let you know that it's not done yet. I've still got some more nerdy, overenthusiastic things to say for which this is still the best forum.

Really, the adventure is just beginning.

Link-mad Monday

2009-07-21T14:56:00.006-04:00

* The Guardian notes various methods of organizing your bookshelves. (The ALP and I tend toward the author's own methodology, "according to where I can jam them.") (via Bookninja, who always leads me to the cool Guardian articles)

* Literature In the Internet Age category, #1: I'd normally be skeptical of a trailer for a short story -- but the story is by Jim Shepard, the publisher is the very intriguing new multi-format literary journal Electric Literature, and the video itself is somewhat breathtaking. Watch.

* Literature in the Internet Age category, #2: our Brooklyn visionary of the literary future, Richard Nash, writes in Publishers Weekly about Cursor, the new print/digital, publisher/community hybrid creature he's working on creating. I'm still wrapping my head around it, but it seems to come down to the fact that writers are readers and vice versa, and thus offering tools for refining and publishing one's writing while also selling the written works (and the rights thereto). Looking forward to seeing how it all plays out -- like ours, I imagine the business plan evolves constantly, and I trust Richard to come out with something fabulous.

* Literature in the Internet Age category, #3: another visionary, Kevin Smokler (his anthology Bookmark Now! was one of the reasons I started blogging, AND thinking that bookstores have the potential to be viable and progressive) announces a leap forward for his brainchild, BookTour: author tour listings on BookTour will be automatically listed on the author's A****n page. I've had some interesting email volleys with Kevin and other indie booksellers this week about what this new feature, undeniably a publicity boon for authors, means for indies, and how we can continue to work together. Importantly, BookTour's partnership with site-which-shall-not-be-named does NOT prevent them from also showing this info in other places. And at the moment, indie bookstore data compiled from IndieCommerce sites does NOT appear (partly because they have to figure out how to filter out the "Jane Austen" and "Barack Obama" listings when a bookclub is listed; partly because the booksellers aren't sure they want them to). At some point they may reappear on Amazon, which would delight authors; at some further point, BookTour data may show up on IndieBound in some form, which would delight bookstores (cross your fingers for that). I'm impressed with Kevin's grasp of all the various stakeholders in this situation, and his commitment to continue to serve indie bookstores, as well as authors and readers.

* Didja notice -- Greenlight Bookstore is now on IndieBound! Also, our storefront is turning green.

* And finally: my scarily witty ex-colleague/successor Dustin Kurtz does some terrible things to books in the video below. If you notice the camerawork is a bit shaky and there are some snorty, chokey sounds in the background, it's because he let me hold the Flip camera and I was kinda laughing. He seriously did eat those book pages. Buy him a drink sometime. (And don't try this at home.) As he put it on Twitter, "booksellers are the new circus freaks." Long may we live in passionate weirdness.

Okay -- back to the daily round (emails, faxes, applications, inquiries, catalogs, breaks for iced tea...)

Link-Mad Monday: Booksellers at it again!

2009-07-17T14:29:00.008-04:00

I was at a NAIBA board meeting most of today, discussing exciting plans for the fall trade show in Baltimore (hope to give you the full report later this week). So it's rather late, but here's some Monday linkage I've been collecting. (I'm hoping to be a more regular blogger now that I'm officially self-employed -- cross your fingers for me.)

* A delicious irony in the Brave New World of e-books: Amazon sneaks into your Kindle and takes back your 1984. (via @beverlyqueery on Twitter, aka sweet pea of King's Books.)

* And, since we're feeling rather 1950s paranoid, a fantastically propagandistic video about the environmental effects of shopping local from the fine folks at Regulator Bookshop (via Bookselling This Week):

* I love the long-running feature on the music/culture blog Largehearted Boy in which "authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book." The most recent entry is by Joan Silber, one of my top 5 favorite authors, about her most recent novel The Size of the World (just out in paperback and PERFECT for smart, exotic, moving summer reading, by the way). I'm currently listening to The Mighty Clouds of Joy on her recommendation - weird awesome disco gospel.

* If anyone speaks French, I would appreciate your thoughts on this video from the if:book website (via Steve at Norton, @norton_fiction on Twitter). I think I really like the vision of the future with ebooks, ereaders, print books, and bookstores coexisting. (All I can tell for sure is that woman is way too cute to be with that dude, even if he is French.)

Okay, that's enough for today. I'm going to continue organizing my publisher catalogs (and exercising my Gmail Ninja skills) in preparation for tomorrow: First Full Day As Full Time Proprietor, Knocking it Outta The Park!

Signing off, chum!

Goodbye to all that

2009-07-16T10:55:00.010-04:00

Today is my last day at McNally Jackson Books. Tomorrow I will be the full-time proprietor of Greenlight Bookstore.

It feels weirdly like the last day of high school.

Remember that? If you were like me, you knew exactly where you were headed, and you were excited to be going there, stomach full of butterflies for the unknown adventure ahead. But there was also an almost unbearable nostalgia-in-the-making for all you were about to leave behind: the place, the people, the quirks, the routine. There's so much you learned here, both practical and philosophical, and so much you loved. It makes for a pretty intense set of emotions. (Which run the risk of sounding incredibly sappy when articulated.)

There's something about working in an indie bookstore which makes for a much more emotionally heightened workplace atmosphere than, say, working in an office. Some of us call it the "Empire Records phenomenon" (which is the best silly '90s movie about indie retail life ever -- highly recommended if you are of a certain age and sensibility, though I take no responsibility for it.) I've noticed a similar sense of cameraderie working in a restaurant -- the amount of physical work you do together makes for a set of shared jokes, systemic quirks, annoyances, and ways of working with and around each other that tends to bond coworkers pretty quickly.
But I think it's even more pronounced in a bookstore (and maybe a record store) -- there's a shared intellectual life as well as a shared physical experience. Not that we sit around and talk about Literature all day, but we're all doing this because we love books in our own particular way, and our engagement with books is part of our engagement with each other.

Additionally, I've never worked anywhere that the employees were as engaged and invested in the life of the bookstore as they are at McNally Jackson. This is primarily Sarah McNally's doing: she is both a visionary and an expert delegator, finding for each person the area of expertise where they can excel and giving them a great deal of autonomy in running it. Displays, signage, section maintenance, book clubs, and yes, author events are in a constant state of tweaking and improving, because they are run by booksellers who have the opportunity to figure out how to make things work better. This, too, makes for a strong bond to the store itself, since we all have a very real role in its existence and identity.

There are a million other reasons why working at McNally Jackson has been a rewarding and affecting experience -- but I'm running out of time.

Allison, John T., Katie, Dustin, Adjua, Yvette, David, Cheryl, Erin, Rebecca, Stewart, Angela, Doug, Brook, Eddie, Darrell, Sam, Jane, Byron, Gabi, Eva, Sandy, Keala, Caroline, John M., Yvonne, Javier -- you are damn fine booksellers and friends of mine, and I will miss you.

After tonight's author event, we're going out to a local watering hole for a proper drunken sendoff. I'm grateful for a moment to savor what has been, before turning my eyes to what's ahead.

Summer Friday

2009-07-10T16:04:00.001-04:00

It is far too beautiful outside for blogging. I'm making chicken salad sandwiches for a picnic in the park.

If you are inside in New York City, I suggest you get outside as soon as possible. Happy Friday!

Linkage for laughs

2009-07-01T10:08:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-29T09:36:00.004-04:00

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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

2009-06-24T10:37:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-22T09:32:00.002-04:00

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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

2009-06-19T09:52:00.003-04:00

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.

Shop Indie Bookstores

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.

New Audio Awesomeness!

2009-06-16T08:45:00.004-04:00

I don' t often use this blog to plug stuff going on at McNally Jackson, but sometimes it's just too good. Thanks to the diligent efforts of mixmaster Steve and blogmaster Dustin (who, incidentally, will be ably taking over my job as McJ events coordinator as I move on to Greenlight), the McNally Jackson blog is now a talkie.

It's our inaugural event podcast!

We've been sound recording author events for months now, hoping to preserve some of the great live conversations for posterity. At last, we've edited and hosted one of the best -- the star-studded March 30 poetry event with Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand, and Philip Schultz.

Click over to the McNally Jackson blog -- if only to see the awesome picture of Dustin attempting to stuff a book into his ear. The audio sounds great -- all those resonant poet voices! Leave lots of comments so we know you're listening, and we'll feel all motivated to do some more.

One Bookseller's BEA

2009-06-05T09:44:00.010-04:00

Maybe I'm just lucky.

But this was the best BEA I've ever attended.

I was lucky, in a way, that it was in New York this year, which made it easy for me to attend on my own dime as the new owner of Greenlight Bookstore... but that did mean I had to work some shifts at my day job at McNally Jackson so that other booksellers could make the show. So keep in mind that there's a lot of stuff that I missed.

On Wednesday I was lucky to attend my last Emerging Leaders Council meeting. The national council representing frontline booksellers under 40 has finally gotten a rep from each of the 9 bookselling regions, and there's a lot of talent there. Perhaps we toot our own horn, but we like to think that some of the education the ABA offered this year was partly at our instigation (and there were EL booksellers on a large percentage of the panels), and that the increasing presence and visibility of young frontline booksellers at Winter Institute and regional shows can be traced back partially to our efforts as well. We met with folks from Unbridled Press and Ingram Book Distributors, both of whom are interested in supporting our work of mentoring and networking for younger frontline booksellers. This not only creates the professional booksellers of the future (I know my first sponsored visit to the NAIBA regional show is probably what made me choose this as my career), but it gives publishers the opportunity to put their books in front of the kids who actually hand books to customers on the sales floor.

That night I was lucky to attend the Emerging Leaders Party, sponsored again by Book Expo itself, at the behest of the wonderful, inimitable BEA events director (and former indie bookseller) Lance Fensterman -- who was instrumental, obviously, in everything that made this show great. There were 250 RSVPs, both publishers and booksellers, and Last Exit Bar was packed. Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Brooklyn indie Melville House, attended along with his author, and wrote to me afterward "Who sez the book biz is dead? It was really energizing, so my thanks to you." Being a room full of young career booksellers has a way of making the future seem possible.

I know galleys were missed at the rest of the show, but we had no shortage of book giveaways to accompany the featured authors. That list read like a who's who of up and coming talent: Margot Berwin (Pantheon), Ben Greenman (Melville House), Phil Gelatt & Rick Lacy (Oni Press), Hillary Jordan (Algonquin), Maaza Mengiste (W. W. Norton), and Peter Terzian (HarperCollins). When I got up to say thanks to the assembled youngsters, I told them about my new bookstore plans (the luckiest break of them all), and emphasized how much this network had been instrumental in making that happen: teaching me, supporting me, providing resources. I'm glad to move on to the next (emerged?) part of my career (and happy to hand my Council badge over to Stephanie Anderson), but it's been great to help to foster the future of bookselling, and great to know there are lots more book nerds still coming up through the ranks.

I was lucky on Thursday to attend a couple of fantastic panels at the ABA Day of Education, one on book clubs and one on "the bookstore as a third place." I was speaking on the latter, but I took way more notes than I offered information. The ABA education staff seems to have mastered both curation and crowd sourcing: both panels had smart speakers up front to establish some best practices and set the tone, and then tapped into the collective wisdom in the room as booksellers offered their own good ideas and answered each others' questions. I came away with a notebook full of ideas to implement in Greenlight Bookstore and renewed respect, as always, for my bookselling colleagues. As an ABA staffer and I discussed in the booksellers' lounge later, indie booksellers are used to operating on a shoestring and turning on a dime -- some of us are struggling, but there's no end to the creativity and resourcefulness of these business people, and in some ways it's our moment to shine. Consumers understand the value of shopping local more than ever, and indie booksellers have lots of resources at our disposal to offer them the best bookstore experience possible.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I considered myself lucky that this year, when it was really important for my partner Rebecca and I to focus on business and not get distracted by partying, that this was a show where partying had been scaled back, and everyone was serious about the business. We talked to point of sale vendors, wholesale distributors, and lots of publishers, getting the information and contacts we'll need to open our store in the fall. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and the timing couldn't have been better: right now is exactly when we needed to see all of these vendors to get the ball rolling.

(An aside: though commentary has lamented the lack of free books at the show, I was impressed by publishers like W. W. Norton, who focused on one or two great fall releases -- in their case, David Small's amazing graphic novel Stitches -- and promoted the heck out of it. This kind of focused marketing is what we've been encouraging publishers to do at the NAIBA regional trade show, and it makes for a less overwhelming, more productive show experience in terms of the upcoming books themselves. I was a little disappointed that more publishers didn't do this -- there is a lot of gold in the fall list and I would have loved to have gathered up a few more nuggets -- but some, like Norton, clearly are turning the smaller/focused model to their advantage.)

Speaking of timing, we are lucky that the American Booksellers Association has made such great strides with their e-commerce platform, and that it looks like it will be in shape to sell e-books by the time Rebecca and I open Greenlight Bookstore in the fall. We sat down with Ricky of the ABA to have him walk us through the website platform (Rebecca also attended a couple of the e-content panels as well and came away impressed), and felt like we were in good hands and we have good options. While many are throwing up their hands about online sales and electronic books, the ABA is working overtime to make sure indie booksellers have the tools they need to make e-commerce of print books and downloadable e-books another part of our revenue stream. As Rebecca and I agreed, we're not paper sellers, we're booksellers, and we're glad for the opportunity we will have to sell books in many forms and many places.

I was lucky to be invited to a dinner on Saturday night with Diamond Comics Distributors and Image Comics, for a couple of reasons. First, it's always a treat for me to talk comics with fellow geeks (it's kind of especially fun when I'm the only girl), and I learned a great deal about Image, a creator-owned press that publishes some of the best and most innovative comics out there. And I was reminded once again that I can't afford to blindly demonize anyone in this industry, because there are smart and professional and good people working in every corner of it. I spent half the night talking to a vendor manager from the Amazon Kindle store, and despite my intention to be icily polite (proprietary platform! anti-competitive practices! the death of the print book!), found myself talking animatedly and with a surprising amount of agreement about electronic formats, consumer interest in digital content, and the Amazon guy's insistence that there is, and should be, room for multiple channels for buying electronic books. Along with the Barnes and Noble buyer and the Hudson News guy, he couldn't get enough of the news about my new bookstore opening in Brooklyn, and they all gave me their cards to be put on the mailing list. I learned once again that pretty much all of us just love books and bookstores, and the sinister motives we imagine for our competitors are almost always oversimplified and don't take into account that we're all just trying to make an honest living getting books in people's hands (or electronic devices.)

I was incredibly lucky to be walking the floor all three days with a fantastic business partner, with whom I see so eye-to-eye that we can almost finish each other's sentences at this point (except when she's teaching me something new). "Do you think...?" "Yeah, totally," seemed to be the refrain as Rebecca and I navigated the riches of the publishing world. And as we got to introduce each other to all of the people we respectively know, the refrain became, "I've heard so much about you!" How lucky to work in a business of such cameraderie and enthusiasm, and with someone who has the same passion for books and readers, as well as good instincts about nearly everything. I seriously couldn't have handled this show -- or the entire bookstore startup process -- without Rebecca.

I felt almost guiltily lucky every time I had my badge scanned to come into the exclusive-to-booksellers ABA lounge. We may be the lowest-paid segment of the industry, but we booksellers had free coffee, lemonade, snacks, internet access, and comfy couches to retreat to whenever we needed. And whenever I stopped in I was sure to run into a colleague I knew and loved, and especially my core group of bookfriends: Amanda, Steve, Kelly, Stephanie, Christine, Dustin, Sarah, Toby, Emily, Sweet Pea, Jenn, among others. These are people who are passionate about what they do, creative and energetic beyond belief, and awfully fun to be around. I have a sense that they're the ones I'll still be talking to in twenty years, through all the changes of our industry and our careers. Maybe we'll look back on this BEA as one of the last good ones, or as a quiet moment before things got big again, or as the beginning of a long-term change for the better.

All I know now is that it was a hell of a show.

P.S. Okay, one last geeky lucky break: as I trolled the aisles on my last day looking for last-minute book swag, someone at the Dark Horse booth took pity on me and handed me possibly the Best. Giveaway. Ever. So along with a handful of books, a ton of information and contacts, and a renewed appreciation for book people, here's what I took home from BEA:

If you haven't read Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's trippy, funny dysfunctional superhero family graphic novel The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, it's highly recommended. Dude, I have the action figures.

@BEA

2009-05-28T21:57:00.002-04:00

Hi all,

As you may have noticed, it's Book Expo America time. This year is a very working (vs. partying) oriented BEA for me, which is all good but very intense.

It's also a very intense time with Greenlight Bookstore stuff, so what with the one and the other, I haven't even found time to blog my plans.

BUT! I have finally figured out how to Twitter from my phone, so I'll be posting occasional updates on the #BEA2009 hashtag as @booknerdnyc. Lots of other cool folks Twittering too, so hopefully those updates will suffice until we have time for something more substantial.

More soon, I promise!

Emerging Leaders Party, plus publishers (and a panel!)

2009-05-08T09:34:00.004-04:00

Young booksellers of Emerging Leaders, we're partying at BEA again! This time we're expanding our community to include the young publishers of the Young Publishing Group of the AAP. And we're expanding the day's activities to include a cool panel discussion that's of particular interest to our generation.

The invitation is being "deployed" today by the fine folks at Reed/Book Expo, so you may see it in your inbox. But allow me to reiterate:

The Panel:
"How To Get A Job Like Ours (…in 63 Easy Steps)"
Wednesday, May 27th 5:30 pm
Marriott Hotel at Brooklyn Bridge
Metrotech Room
333 Adams Street, Brooklyn, NY

Geoff Kloske, Vice President and Publisher of Riverhead Books
Geoff Shandler, Editor-In-Chief of Little, Brown & Company
Moderated by Ed Nawotka from Publishers Weekly

The panelists convey their opinions about book publishing today, in an era of ongoing digitization and changing retail landscapes. Among the topics addressed: Are big author advances so yesterday? What are your best agent flirting techniques? Kindle: Hot? Or Not?
Are you a twit if you don’t Tweet? Just how long does it take to make it to publishing’s big time? And why did your folks choose spell your name with a “G” instead of a “J”?

The Party:
Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Last Exit Bar
136 Atlantic Ave
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201

Open Bar
Schmoozing with peers in publishing and bookselling
Free stuff: books, buttons, and other swag
Information about Emerging Leaders that you can take back to your store/region
Chatting with authors:
Peter Terzian, editor of Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives (HarperCollins).
Margot Berwin, author of Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire (Pantheon)
Ben Greenman, author of Please Step Back (Melville House)
AND MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED

You can RSVP for one or both by emailing ypglunchreservations@hotmail.com. Make sure to do it by 5pm Wednesday, May 20, 2009, or Lance Fensterman gets first dibs on your drinks...

Hope to see you there!

Hanami in Brooklyn

2009-05-06T11:59:00.002-04:00

After the chaos of selling books at the PEN Festival (a week of 12-hour days organizing, hefting boxes of books, ringing in hundreds of sales by hand, and processing returns), I'm finally getting my wish:

A day with no obligations.

If the weather holds, here's where I'm going this afternoon.

Indie Love: #buyindieday

2009-05-01T10:05:00.003-04:00

"And can you imagine 50 people a day, I said 50 people a day walking into an indie bookstore, buying a book and walking out? Friends, they may think it’s a movement."

Robert Gray's column in Shelf Awareness today about Buy Indie Day (that's today, May 1, folks!) made me choke up a little. With Arlo Guthrie on NPR this morning (singing a very old song about an auto bailout...), the reference to "Alice's Restaurant" is even more prescient, and it seems like everything old is new again. We've regained our skepticism of The Man, and we've got a new strategy for fighting 'em (supporting local, sustainable economies) and we've got some new tools: Twitter (#buyindieday) and Facebook (International "Buy Indie Day).

I suspect that telling readers of this blog to buy books at an indie bookstore is something like preaching to the choir. But if you possibly can, do find your local indie bookstore, go there, and buy a book today. Even if you're a publisher or a bookseller and you get books for free, spend a couple of bucks for something you've been meaning to get. Make it a movement.

And if you're still feeling the indie love tomorrow, don't miss The Millions NYC Indie Bookstore Walking Tour. Even if you're familiar with the bookstores in question, what better way to spend a Saturday than in the company of fellow book (and bookstore) lovers, hooking up online to spend time in the best brick-and-mortar stores in the city?

It's May 1, traditionally a day of renewed idealism and optimism. Make it happen, be part of it, get yourself into an indie bookstore today.

Link-Mad Wednesday: Comics, ebooks, and a semi-hiatus

2009-04-29T08:53:00.006-04:00

Blogging has been, and is likely to remain, sparse... as Greenlight Bookstore prep ramps up, the rest of life ain't going anywhere, and your friendly neighborhood Book Nerd is feeling a bit under the gun. I'll try to get up here once a week or so, but forgive me my semi-absence, okay?

Still, there's time for a few links.

In e-reader news:

The IndieBound iPhone app makes me long even more for that lovely little piece of hardware. Props to the ABA for rolling this out so fast! The IndieBound app means that you can use the iPhone to find bookstores and other indie shops, search books, buy books online -- along with reading books and emailing and making calls (and, as I learned at a delicious early summer barbecue this weekend, mapping the stars... )

In the meantime, not only does your Kindle become a brick if you lose your Amazon account, but rumors persist that Apple is coming out with a more book-friendly device. E-reader enthusiasts, start your engines!

In comics news:

This Saturday, May 2, is Free Comic Book Day! Find yourself a local comic shop (there's a great locator tool on the FCBD website) and get yourself some free comics action. And buy something while you're there, why don't ya? (When, by the way, are bookstores going to instigate Free Galley Day? How about it, book industry?)

If you happen to be in my part of the world, you've got some pretty awesome options: Rocketship is hosting a signing by Wolverine writer Fred Van Lente (along with giving away a new comic about the spiky-knuckled guy), and Bergen Street Comics is hosting a showing of original art from act_i_vate.com ("where every day is free comics day!")

And, while I'm hoping to have time to stop in to one or both of these stores, I'll be spending most of my day at another venue for comics love: the PEN World Voices Festival. At Cooper Union on Saturday, McNally Jackson will be selling books for events with Neil Gaiman, Emmanuel Guibert, David Polonsky, Shaun Tan, Jonathan Ames, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, and Adrian Tomine. And of course, the Festival hosts wonderful literary events happening all week long.

It's a good week for books! Happy reading!

The Handsell: The Manual of Detection and The Secret Currency of Love

2009-04-22T10:22:00.008-04:00

Some of the good stuff I've been reading lately...

The Manual of Detection
by Jedediah Berry
(Penguin Press)

If you like your mysteries with a bit of meta, but still insist on being richly entertained, you are so in luck -- this is the book for you. Rain-slicked streets and wood-paneled halls, sinister carnivals and decaying mansions, trench coats and fedoras and femmes fatales -- the iconography of the genre makes up the dreamlike landscape of this tightly structured and chaotically effulgent novel. Yet it's also a moving story of a humble Everyman trying to make his way in an incomprehensible system of institutions and obligations, and filled with both pathos and humor. My tagline: Chandler meets Kafka for whiskey-laced tea at G.K. Chesterton's house.

I'm one of two booksellers at my store who LOVE this book to the point of obsession. And now I'm starting to see fedoras and pin-curls, mysterious briefcases and memorable umbrellas on my rainy commute to work. It's one of those books whose dreamlife seems to seep into real life, rendering the whole world more wonderfully mysterious.

(Author Jedediah Berry reads with fellow genre transcendentalist Benjamin Rosenbaum at McNally Jackson on May 27. If you're not partying with Emerging Leaders at BEA, I highly recommend attending.)

(Update: do not fail to check out the book's website, complete with atmospheric music and dossiers on agency operatives and suspects.)

The Secret Currency of Love
The Unabashed Truth about Women, Money, and Relationships
By Hilary Black
(William Morrow & Company)

I thought this anthology might be a little fluffy for my tastes -- but after hearing some of the contributors read, I was open-mouthed in admiration and recognition, and totally hooked. (Some of my smartest girlfriends were equally intrigued --we're now reading it in anticipation of a drink-fueled book club discussion at some point.) As "traditionally" the non-wage earning gender, bearing the weight of all those Jane Austen marry-for-money-AND-love expectations even as we now have the power to make our own living, women have an especially fraught relationship with money. And that relationship affects our other relationships: with our parents, our friends, our romantic partners (especially those), and eventually our kids.

The women writing here are married and single, come from wealth or poverty, have found financial success or still struggle to make ends meet -- and the questions they have to answer sound very familiar to me and my generation of women. What's necessity and what's luxury, and who decides? What's worth doing for money? What's the cost -- monetary and emotional -- of giving and receiving generosity? Who is rich and how do you know? What is financial equality -- both partners paying half, or both paying according to what they earn? The questions and experiences are intense, and I recognized myself, my friends, my enemies, and every relationship in my life in these stories. It's not often that a non-fiction book absorbs me like good fiction, but this one kept me rapt through every single essay, and gave me both new insights and new questions. Can't wait to discuss it with my girlfriends (and maybe even with my mom, my business partner, and my husband.) Compelling reading and definitely worth recommending, especially for women struggling anew with these questions in an uncertain economy.

Blog proliferation... and pirates.

2009-04-17T09:57:00.004-04:00

How many blogs can one bookseller blog?

Here's yesterday's Greenlight post...

... about the New York Times Local post that went up on Wednesday (a profile of FG resident / food book editor extraordinaire Emily Takoudes)...

... and here's Wednesday's post on McNally Jackson's blog The Common Reader (recommendations for great books by overlooked women writers sent in by Deirdre Shaw, who reads at the store next Wednesday)...

... and here's today's post on the Emerging Leaders blog (about EL Council members at the day of education, and free passes to BEA). (Email here if you want in.)

But after all this blithe blogging, it's time to address some real issues. There's been a lot of news about pirates these days, from the Somali coast to the music downloaders of Sweden to the DRM fears of publishers. (Would this make Amazon the British Navy, then?... but never mind.) It's all fun and games, as long as you're not the one being keelhauled. Luckily, (former) newswoman Tina Fey brings our attention to an aspect of this issue that should be taken very, very seriously: book pirates.

This may actually replace The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything as my favorite pirate song ever. Thanks to Bookavore for the tip via Twitter, and have a beautiful Friday!

Friday Fishmen

2009-04-10T09:52:00.002-04:00

Lots of work to do today, so I'll just share with you some of the random tunes stuck in my head.

I love that the fans of early 20th century horror writer H.P. Lovecraft -- purple-prose writing, misanthropic, paranoid, and kinda racist (check out his descriptions of the "swarthy races" of Brooklyn if you doubt me) -- are themselves such a fun-loving and cheeky bunch. On the McNally Jackson blog the other day, Dustin posted a video touting the benefits of "Eldritch Sign", a product designed to thwart, um, some sort of floaty Lovecraft monsters, much to the bewilderment of the customer/participants. It's pretty funny. But my favorite Lovecraft homage will always be this:

Good luck getting that (or its Christmassy counterpart) out of your head. Ha! Happy Friday.

Talking about e-readers with smart booksellers

2009-04-08T10:19:00.008-04:00

Sometimes these days I feel a little like I did at my high school and college graduations, watching my best buddies up on stage or leading the procession: man, my friends are some smart people. (True, I did get to hold the NYU banner for a moment to relieve the brutally hungover valedictorian, one of my best friends, but I was only a Magna, not a Summa, myself.)

I feel that way this week listening to the conversation about e-readers and ARCreaders, let by my bookselling colleagues/buddies Stephanie Anderson (WORD, Brooklyn) and Jenn Northington (King's English, Salt Lake City). Both are fellow Emerging Leaders types, and they're leading the charge in embracing the possibilities and pushing the boundaries and fostering the conversation.

That conversation has been going on for a while on Twitter. Jenn made a modest proposal on her blog a couple of weeks ago. And Stephanie brought it together with today's column in Shelf Awareness. The question is, generally: would it make sense for booksellers to read ARCs on e-readers? And who's gonna get them for us?

I haven't jumped in before now because 1) I've been preoccupied and 2) I wanted to get the lay of the land. I still have a bit of catching up to do on this conversation (I just signed up for netGalley, finally, today), but I'm ready to venture a tentative opinion or two. I want to talk a little about ebooks and e-readers in general, and why it makes sense for booksellers to start reading ebooks. The question of how and from whom we'll get those expensive ereaders is one that will have to be hashed out at length in many forums, so I'm not going there quite yet.

To me, one of the most important things for booksellers (and readers and publishers) to realize now is that e-reader DOES NOT EQUAL Kindle. A bit that stuck out for me in Stephanie's column: "A side benefit to such a program could be to increase interest on the part of customers in e-readers that aren't the Kindle--booksellers have already noticed some of their best customers are switching some reading to the Kindle because it's the reader that's most familiar to them right now."

I think for a lot of booksellers right now, the idea of an e-reader provokes growls of hostility because it's associated with the Kindle, which is a proprietary platform sold and administered by Amazon, our primary competitor. We indies can't sell ebooks for the Kindle, so if readers buy a Kindle in means, on some level, lost sales for us. But the Kindle is not the only e-reader, nor even necessarily the best! The Sony Reader, the iPhone, the Google phone, and other electronic devices can also be used to read ebooks -- and those platforms are wide open for ebook sales from indie bookstores, provided our ecommerce technology is up to par.

Just as we have to educate our customers (and ourselves) that Amazon is not the only option for buying online, we'll have to make some efforts to make sure those who want to read ebooks know that they have options besides the Kindle, and that they can still "read indie while reading e" (feel free to steal that tagline). And ebook-reading booksellers are the perfect group to start spreading that word, to make sure that we can make ebooks a part of our business model rather than just more competition.

Here's the next most important issue: E-readers make sense for people who read in massive quantities. Many of our sales reps are already reading on Sony readers, and it makes sense for booksellers too. We'll all most likely still be reading plenty of pbooks (that's print, or "real" books), but since it's in our job description to read widely and quickly, carrying around many on one device makes sense.

Our best customers probably buy books from us, from other indies, from chain stores, online, and borrow from the library too. We hope to have them buy the majority from us, but we know the biggest readers are getting books from many different places. Chances are, some of them are going to start reading ebooks as a part of their book addiction. This pretty obviously doesn't mean they're going to stop buying print books. But it does mean we have a chance to sell them something additional. If we start familiarizing ourselves with the products, the formats, etc., we'll be better handsellers of ebooks. And isn't that what we do?

One thing that also seems clear to me, and that will be important as this conversation goes on: we need a standard format for ebooks. At this point there are a number of different file types for ebooks floating around, and they don't all work on all devices. If publishers can agree on a standard file format (like .mp3s for music), that will go a long way toward making ebooks more accessible, and toward enabling indies, among other channels, to sell them effectively. The Association of American Publishers supports the .epub format, and it would be great if this could get codified pretty soon.

Personally, I'd love to have a publisher (or the ABA, funded by a group of publishers, or whoever) buy me an iPhone. (This gets a bold because buying me stuff is important. I'd also love it if someone could send me to the Digital Book 2009 conference, which costs about as much as an ereader....)

Okay, in all seriousness, I've seen some of the various platforms for ereaders on the iPhone, and it's pretty exciting -- I'd love to spend more time with it. Along with some of my other smart buddies, I can see the iPhone (and other multi-use devices) becoming the primary method of reading ebooks in future. It kind of reminds me of the "orison" in the central chapter of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas -- a communicator, a recorder and player of print and visual information, a mapping device, etc. -- technology so advanced it feels like magic. It doesn't feel anti-literature; it feels like a very literary vision of the future.

As you can probably tell, I'm still pretty new to this conversation, and I've got a lot to learn. I get a lot of mynews and opinions on ebook stuff on the Teleread blog, which I recommend. And you can follow the conversation of those smart kids on Twitter by searching #ereader, #digiARCs, or #ARCreader. I'm delighted to get to hobnob with these smarties, and excited about where the conversation will go.

Update: I must also mention (and link) the other smart booksellers whose ebook musings I've been reading lately: Rich Rennicks (Malaprops), Arsen Kashkashian (Boulder Bookstore), and Patrick (Vroman's), among others.

Literature and race

2009-04-06T13:47:00.004-04:00

Been thinking about literature and race today. I noted on the Greenlight Bookstore blog that Nelson George writes in the Times today about the changing racial demographics of Fort Greene, and how that changes the artistic scene -- in his view, for the worse, though I'm not sure I agree. Tonight at McNally Jackson we're hosting a panel discussion about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., with some amazing experts in the field, and good writers, too. I'd like to have today's National Poetry Month Twitter entry reflect something about that, but I can't think of anything appropriate except for maybe Langston Hughes, and the old folk song about Martin and John.

What can literature do against racism? Or is it more useful in forming racial identities? What do I, a white person, have to do with literature by black writers? Am I meant to appreciate it apart from the writers' identities, or is it meant to allow me to identify with someone other than myself? Can I share in the Lent-like suffering in observance of King's death, or does it not belong to me as well?

These are old, old questions, of course, and I don't have clever answers today. Just what I'm pondering amongst the petty tasks of a busy morning.

A Word from IndieBound at 1 year

2009-04-03T12:17:00.005-04:00

I'm posting here an email announcement from Paige Poe, the liaison for IndieBound at the ABA, and Meg Smith, the marketing guru. Bloggers, booksellers, and readers: spread the word, and share your ideas! (You can click on their names below to email them directly, or share ideas on the forums they mention.)

Hello—

It’s hard to believe IndieBound is nearly a year old. But in that time it’s been adopted by hundreds of indie bookstores, recognized by thousands of consumers, and commented on by countless bloggers and others. Check out the attached stats and examples for the evidence!

IndieBound has potential to grow even more, and so much of that growth can—and should—come from you and other ABA members. We would love to visit every store in person, see how we can help, explore the DIY, but it’s just not possible. (We do hope to offer a series of webinars to chat with members…)

Booksellers like you are talking—whether online, at conferences, even visiting each others’ stores. All of you I’ve spoken with before have been tremendously helpful in getting us this far, and the few of you I haven’t met or spoken to I’m very eager to get to know. So I’m asking for your help.

A few requests and questions:
- Perhaps you know about stores using IndieBound that are under our radar? Who are you talking to? As you talk with each other, keep us in the loop, and if you can, bring us in on the conversation.
- Do you know any stores who are struggling, that could really use marketing help? We’re attempting to find these stores and give them personalized help with DIY, community integration, and social media.
- One thing I’ve stressed this past year is that IndieBound is always open to new ideas, new features, new everything. What is your ideal IndieBound? Send us your ideas.
We started a forum on IndieBound.org that we’re opening up to all of you (http://www.indiebound.org/forum). Come here to discuss anything IndieBound-related, share news, ask questions—anything! Feel free to start discussions on topics you feel need some extra light. If any booksellers you talk to want to be part of the forum, let me know.
- One idea we’ve been discussing is a bookseller-only/trade-only group on Facebook, to disseminate info and get you guys talking. Would you participate in such a group? Or would the IndieBound.org forum be sufficient? If you’re already spending time on Facebook, maybe that would be the place to meet. Let me know!
- We’re always available through email, and you can call us anytime at our office numbers. Of course you’ll run into us on Facebook and twitter, too. The point is, get in touch with us!

Eagerly awaiting your response…

Paige Poe - IndieBound Outreach Liaison

Meg Smith - Chief Marketing Officer

Link-Mad Monday: Cool stuff from the internet

2009-03-30T09:31:00.003-04:00

Apologies, Written Nerd readers: there's been a distinct lack of posting around here. I blame the truly frenzied level of real-ness which the bookstore project is approaching. More details and announcements as soon as I'm able, I promise. In the meantime, since I have no attention span, here's some random cool stuff I've noticed lately.

Via the ALP's friend Heather (thanks!): The Most Interesting Bookstores in the World. Can't argue with the title. These photos make me woozy with desire, especially the Lello bookstore in Portugal. (Watch out for the hairless cat, though -- rather disconcerting.)

Closer to home, Mona Molarsky of the New York Examiner website continues her series on Favorite Bookstore of New York with the Upper East Side (that's Corner Bookstore, Archivia, and Crawford Doyle if you're trying to get your bearings.) Check it out, then browse through the previous 7 articles in the series for an in-depth look at some of the city's best. I recommend the Village and SoHo, naturally.

Someday I should be so lucky. A Nova Scotia book club, too big to continue meeting in homes, just went ahead and opened a private bar to hold book discussions. It's called Fables, and it's beautiful. Sigh.

Can't wait to listen to this radio broadcast on genre fiction, featuring Michael Chabon, Richard Price, and Agatha Christie's grandson. I'm in kind of a genre mood right now; I'm reading and pondering G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much, and looking forward to starting Berry's The Manual of Detection right after that.

My awesome sister who works in Santa Barbara, possibly the most beautiful town in Southern California, sent me this article on the one thing the town lacks: strong indie bookstores. The piece is typically doom-and-gloom (the internet is killing the indies!), but it does have a list of the few that are still around, an interesting interview with an indie internet entrepreneur, and a great quote from indie bookstore champion Roy Blount Jr.: “I'd say the more local and personal and informed a store is, the more it will provide what the Internet can't.” Right on, Roy (and thanks, Sarah).

Okay, I'll end on that note -- too antsy to keep pasting links. Better do some yoga, then get back to work. Will update you soon, promise promise promise.

Emerging Leaders Night Out, Spring 2009 edition!

2009-03-20T10:47:00.003-04:00

Happy first day of spring! -- on which it's been snowing here in NYC. Weird. Spring is undeniable, however, and with it a young bookseller's thoughts turn to raising a pint with fellow industry professionals. That's right, folks: it's time for another Emerging Leaders Night Out!

This coming Wednesday, March 25, at 7 PM, we'll be gathering at Swift, one of my favorite Irish pubs, for some professional networking with fellow booksellers and industry folks. This time, we'll also be joined by members of HarperCollins program for young folks, HarperCollins Emerging Professionals (HCEP). It's a great chance to learn about what the publisher is doing, and meet some fresh faces coming up through the ranks. And the Independent Booksellers of New York City (IBNYC) will also have a presence, so you can learn about what that organization is doing to promote indie booksellers to consumers in NYC. EL, HCEP, IBNYC -- it will be an evening of acronyms, and beer. (This one is just for booksellers and HCEP folks -- sorry, other publishers, we'll get ya next time.)

With everything else that's been going on, I'm a little late in promoting this event. I just sent an email to our Emerging Leaders list, and Kelly at IBNYC will be doing the same to the many indie stores on her list. I'm gonna start spreading the word on Twitter, too. This will be an interesting experiment to see how fast we can gather a mob of booksellers in this connected age. Let's show them how it's done.

You do need to RSVP via email to hcep@harpercollins.com -- do that now, while you're thinking of it. And see you for a pint on the 25th!

Discoveries and discussions

2009-03-19T10:17:00.002-04:00

Okay, I've got internet, but not wireless or phone. Stuck in text-only land until a friend comes by to figure out my network issues on Saturday. Sigh.

In the meantime, some stuff.

I love the Brookline Blogsmith's reference to Bambi: we are all "twitterpated" now. I've been tweeting (ugh, finally a word more embarassing than "blog") incessantly as @booknerdnyc and @mcnallyjackson, and learning a lot about books, book news, and what folks had for breakfast. My new favorite Twitter use: at last night's event at McNally Jackson, John Wray discussed his ongoing Twitter novel (@John_Wray). He allows as how he doesn't think it's the "wave of the future", but he likes the challenge of making something happen in every 140 character installment, as well as serving a larger narrative.

Seventy-one years ago (that's before Twitter), writers already valued "talks, rum, argument, politics and laughter", and a quiet place to write in the park. I wrote about the bench commemorating Richard Wright's sojourn in Fort Greene Park on the the New York Times Fort Greene/Clinton Hill Local Blog.

Speaking of Fort Greene, turns out local publishing mover/shaker Emily Takoudes has started a Fort Greene publishing group on Facebook. I'll definitely be checking in for their take on all things literary in FG/CH.

Looking forward, I was very impressed wit the ABA White Paper "Opportunities in the Digital Arena for Independent Bookstores: An Action Plan for the American Booksellers Association", authored by Len Vlahos. It might have been easy to miss in there, but the encouraging news is that 1) we're getting close to a standard file format for e-books, and 2) the ABA e-commerce websites are capable of selling them. I posted about this on the ABA forums, as follows:

"I'm proud of our trade association (and Len especially) for thinking about this issues so proactively. I'm very happy to learn that the e-commerce solution is "more than capable of supporting the sale of digital content in any form we deem desirable", and that the book industry is moving closer to adopting a standard format for e-book files across various platforms.

Yet even when we're fully e-book capable, the question we'll have to answer is "why would a consumer buy e-books through an indie bookstore." Kindle book sales are proprietary and therefore lost to us, so we'll be focusing on the other platforms -- iPhone, Blackberry, etc. We will need to work hard to market our curatorial function as a motivation for buying digital files through indies -- i.e., you'll come to our site for staff picks, recommendations, promotions, tie-ins, etc., and you'll buy the book digitally while you're there.

This is where the campaigns to raise awareness of IndieBound linking and buying are going to serve us well in the years ahead. We have a unique opportunity to educate people about their options when buying online/digitally, just as we have done about their choices in shopping at their local bookstore. Transferring the new awareness of the value of localism to the virtual/digital realm will be a good trick, since there's no "there" there.

But if anyone can do it, it's indie booksellers and the ABA. Thanks, Len, for bringing us to this point in our awareness and capabilities, and for pointing our eyes forward."

I want to write about e-books and indies more extensively (as others have done) but I'm off to a meeting now. Would love to hear your thoughts on the discussion, and hope to think/talk/write more when I'm back in the land of the networked.

Technical difficulties

2009-03-17T08:15:00.003-04:00

We're having some trouble with our phone and internet this week -- something to do with multiple routers or VOIP lifespan or something. So blogging is unlikely as I'll be spending every spare moment on the phone with various communication-oriented companies. I have been Twittering a fair amount from work, though (this is allowed??) -- you can follow me @booknerdnyc. Some more long-attention-span thoughts in the works as soon as everything is humming along again.

Link-Mad Monday: Cool Newness!

2009-03-09T17:17:00.003-04:00

Bloggin' on my break at the bookstore, crammin' it all in...

Via Vroman's: The annual Tournament of Books at The Morning News has begun! Click over for an irresistible death match between this year's top works of fiction, judged by the literati with unabashed prejudice and total transparency. Way more fun than the Booker or NBA, if far more tongue-in-cheek.

Brownstoner has a post on the borough's newest comic shop: Bergen Street Comics in Park Slope. Ha, scooped -- I blogged about that on Friday! Had a delightful retailer-to-retailer chat with owner Tom -- and it's totally awesome to have a new comics purveyor in the nabe.

Via Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn: TheBrooklynInk chronicles Heights Books' move from Brooklyn Heights to Smith Street.

Speaking of comics -- our Graphic Novel Book Club discussion of Watchmen on Thursday night was AWESOME. I was so happy with the size and diversity of our group, and the conversation was totally exciting. I saw the movie over the weekend, too -- some thoughts up at the McNally Jackson Graphic Novel Book Club Facebook Group, and some on Twitter too. (Oh yeah, I'm Twittering: @mcnallyjackson for the store, @booknerdnyc for lil' ol' me.)

However good the movie was, though, it couldn't compete with this Saturday morning edition, via And Now The Screaming Starts:

It's so very weird and sad and funny to see the alternate reality version of the characters, where they're just pure and simple heroes. And now I can't get the theme song out of my head: "Strong together, united forever, they're the best of frieeeeends..."

Writing Elsewhere

2009-03-06T09:54:00.003-05:00

Sorry I haven't been writing much around here lately, but I have been writing for other forums.

Reverend Daniel Meeter was kind enough to post some thoughts on Lent I wrote last week on Ash Wednesday. Not my usual sort of topic, so it made sense to post it on the Old First blog rather than here. But it was very satisfying to express those thoughts, and I'm grateful.

And as you may have noticed, I am now one member of the intrepid blogging crew of the New York Times' new Local blog project for Fort Greene/ Clinton Hill. I'm playing the role of the literary blogger, which means I'll be writing once every couple of weeks about the literary life of the neighborhood, past and present. Andy Newman, the Brooklyn-based reporter who's running the blog, approached me about contributing several weeks ago, and I'm having a great time working with him on this new blogging project.

I'm pretty excited to have a byline in the Times. It's a fascinating project, and I'm learning as much as I'm contributing. But as seems to be the norm with Brooklyn neighborhoods as they are manifested on the internet, the expressions of enthusiasm and interest are occasionally (often) tempered with comments by people who think you don't know what you're talking about. One problem is that yeah, I'm a carpetbagger -- I live in Park Slope, not FG/CH, though my store plans are most definitely FG centered. I don't honestly think that precludes me from being involved in the literary life of the neighborhood -- I know that I am -- but the comments can rankle. But it's probably good practice for doing what I know is best in spite of some slightly snarky opposition. Even if not, I'll just take it as my Lenten discpline.

By the way, if you've got any ideas for Fort Greene or Clinton Hill writers, literary happenings, trivia, or projects -- let me know! I can use all the help I can get. Thanks for reading!

The Handsell: Comics Roundup!

2009-03-01T19:36:00.011-05:00

As promised, I'm catching up on reviewing some of the many comics I seem to have been reading lately. This will be Handsell style: just a quick description/pitch.

A note on linking: I'm trying something new. I'm using my own images and linking them directly to the IndieBound book info page, rather than using the affiliate links, which require an extra several clicks before you get to the book. It takes a bit longer for me, but seems more likely to be click-through-friendly for you. Let me know what you think.

Miss Don't Touch Me
by Hubert & Kerascoet
(NBM/ComicsLit)
This graphic novel is a study in contradictions: it combines a somewhat lighthearted tone - "prudish girl finds herself working in a high-end whorehouse, bring on the sex comedy!" - with some rather grisly plot points, including some pretty dark perversions and more than one bloody murder. The very French drawing style -- quick and flowing, almost sketchy, a la Joann Sfar of The Rabbi's Cat -- contributes to this strangeness. It's a grippingly suspenseful plot and the characters and images are very well-done and sometimes even sexy, but I'd suggest it only to readers with strong stomachs and a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

Luke on the Loose
by Harry Bliss
(Toon Books)
This is my favorite of the latest season's offerings from Toon Books, the comics-as-early-readers line created by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. The plot and dialogue are intended for early primary kids: Luke, while on a walk with his dad, gets interested in chasing some pigeons and rampages across New York City like a hurricane -- but grownups will enjoy reading along for the fun of recognizing both many NYC landmarks and scenes and the unstoppable energy of a small boy. Harry Bliss, a Brooklyn native, brings this episodic tale to life with kinetic drawings perfect for the target age group, who will likely see themselves in Luke's exuberant flight.

08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail
by Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
(Three Rivers Press)
Admit it: you kind of miss the never-ending drama of campaign season. This unique work manages to recapture the suspense and comedy and nobility and absurdity of it all, even though we know how it all comes out. Goldman, co-author of the Iraq/media/blogging satire Shooting War, is no stranger to capturing political realities and metaphors. Through the personae of two reporters who have seen it all, he and Crowley let you relive the political year moment by moment, and use the graphic novel format to get across the non-verbal subtleties as well as the rhetoric (every line of dialogue spoken by a candidate or other figure in the book is from their actual recorded words). Highly recommended for political junkies and those interested in what this medium can do with recent history.

Frankenstein: Prodigal Son 1
by Dean Koontz, Chuck Dixon, and Brett Booth
(Del Rey)
This book for me is that rare challenge: a negative handsell. I found the dialogue unintentionally laughable and the art cliched -- in fact, what amused me most about the book is that while the plot involves a still-alive Frankenstein creating an army of creepily perfect artificial people, it was impossible to tell his creations from anyone else in the story, as EVERYONE is creepily perfect, in a boring superhero comic kind of way. However, the plot kept me reading (against my better judgement) through the end of this installment, and the newly imagined Frankenstein's monster is kinda sexy. I suspect I'm just not the target audience for this sort of thing -- at ComicCon the folks behind this book touted it as a way to bring Koontz's work to teen readers, and it might work for teens. I'd sell it to those who were interested in Buffy or Twilight-style melodrama, with the caveat that there's much better work out there.

Scott Pilgrim #5: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe!
by Bryan Lee O'Malley
(Oni Press)
This is it! The big book of ComicCon 2009! So popular that you can't find it in stores! The penultimate book in O'Malley's manga/kung fu/video game/slacker culture/coming-of-age masterpiece! Could it possibly live up to the hype? Well, yes actually. Scott Pilgrim, still working through his quest to defeat the seven evil ex-boyfriends of the mysterious Ramona Flowers, is becoming a character of more depth and maturity, and the story is beginning to focus more on the limitations of a battle fighting, rock and roll playing, partygoing approach to solving the real problems of love, friendship, identity, and one's place in the world. Because it's the second to last, this one ends on an Empire Strikes Back-level cliffhanger, which means I will be in agony for the next two years or whatever it takes O'Malley to bring out number 6. But I can always go back and read 1 to 5 in the meantime, reveling in the layers of humor and visual motifs and hints about the outcome that the work provides in spades. I'd recommend you do the same, if you are the kind of person who likes fun, especially when it gets serious. Seriously, please just buy (or reserve) #1 at your local indie bookstore or comic shop as soon as possible and begin the Scott Pilgrim adventure.

Nocturnal Conspiracies
by David B.
(NBM/ComicsLit)
David B. is one of the stars of the very sophisticated French comics scene; his memoir Epileptic was a bestseller and highly acclaimed here in the States. I'm still reading my way slowly through this rich, eerie, atmospheric and thoroughly enjoyable book, a compendium of some of the author's own dreams over a period of decades. It's a kind of counterpoint to another recent favorite, The Night Of Your Life by Jesse Reklaw; while Reklaw compresses other people's dreams into four surreally humorous panels, David B traces his own dreams at length through their irresistible desires, pressing demands, and French Resistance-influenced atmospherics and drama. I found each meandering episode both deja vu familiar and utterly other, as other people's dreams often are. The combination of words and pictures seems like the perfect -- maybe only -- way to convey both the visual nature of dreams and the fact that our understanding of a dream situation goes beyond what we can see (the "it was you, but it didn't look like you" phenomenon). Another example of the best of what's going on in the genre -- some nudity and dream violence make it unsuitable for the youngest readers, but for all others it's definitely recommended.

Shifting focus

2009-02-26T10:42:00.005-05:00

The lack of posting around here should not be construed as a lack of activity. This has turned out to be a week with high demands from other aspects of my bookish life: Emerging Leaders, McNally Jackson (we -- by which I mean me -- are on Facebook AND Twitter now), a new blogging project (info TK), and mostly, working on Greenlight Bookstore. I've tidied up that other blog of mine (and Rebecca's) to reflect the evolving reality of our project, and in hopes that we'll be seeing some more traffic soon. We've also got a real estate lead that involves so many unknowns I can't even explain it right now, but it's potentially really exciting. So I've been kinda distracted.

I do, however, have a pile of recently read graphic novels I want to write about, and not one but TWO thrilling not-yet-published books in my bag: the new Kate Christensen, Trouble (out in June) and the new Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (out so long from now I don't even know the date -- the book is still in manuscript form). So as soon as I'm done frantically tearing through those two I'll be posting frenzied fangirl reports. I'm also meeting one of my contemporary author heroes Jim Lynch, author of The Highest Tide and Border Songs, tomorrow afternoon, so I hope to report on that as well.

So with renewed promises I beg your forgiveness, and hope you can be satisfied with more to come. Happy reading!

LinkIndie: Change Has Come to Book Linking

2009-02-20T10:06:00.008-05:00

Lucky us that Bookavore has joined the ranks of booksellers and bloggers. She's kick-started a campaign I've been meaning to launch for ages:

Litblogs linking to indie bookstores.

It's long been a tenet of mine that bloggers and indie booksellers have a lot in common. We're the independent voice that's an alternative to corporate culture. We're beholden to no one but our own opinions of what's worth reading and recommending. We don't do it (just) for the money -- we do it for the love. So why shouldn't we support each other?

Now that indie bookstores have figured out that blogging and reading blogs is good for them, it's time for bloggers to return the favor. When discussing a beloved book, rather than linking to you-know-what behemoth of online retail, why not link to your local indie bookstore, or a network of indie bookstores, instead?

In the past, you could have linked to the book page of an indie store, but it would have involved a fair amount of HTML knowledge, and you wouldn't have gotten credit for the clicks that resulted. Then came the advent of IndieBound, and its wonderful affiliate program, which meant you could sign up to easily create links using text or book covers, and have the potential to make a little cash off of the resulting clicks. But your readers still had to go through another layer of clicking choices: once they clicked the book cover, they had to enter their zip code, then choose and indie store's website on which to view the books.

This was a decision the ABA, which runs these stores' e-commerce sites, had made in the past in order to avoid competition amongst its member stores -- a well-intentioned move that unfortunately made internet denizens less likely to click through to any store when they just wanted the information, and thus made bloggers less likely to use it.

But it's a whole new era now. IndieBound and its user-generated, responsive model means that we ask, we got. Now you can find a book on IndieBound (without having to first look up the ISBN) and create an affiliate link directly the book info page. When a reader of your blog clicks on the link, they get taken straight back to the book information page. Only when they decide they'd like to buy it do they need to choose a bookstore -- a much more logical path. This means that you can have a book cover image on your site that's a direct link to the publisher's information about the book, and you can get paid for it, and you can support an indie at the same time.

So there's no excuse anymore. Bloggers, you know you're indie. Step up and support your local bookstores by using IndieBound links in your book reviews. It's easier and better looking than ever. As President Obama, our first web-savvy commander-in-chief, observed, it's a new era of responsibility. If you care about having bookstores in your community, support them in the internet community.

I'm demonstrating and celebrating today with a link to my favorite contemporary novel, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Click on it! Check it out! Then get over to IndieBound and start making your own links.

Shop Indie Bookstores

(Update: Okay, so it looks like when I create an affiliate link, it still asks for a zip code and wants you to choose a store. In the link below, I pasted the book page link into the code, which eliminates my affiliate ID but goes directly to the book info page. So it's still a work in progress. But the ABA and IndieBound deserve major kudos for taking these steps. Here's hoping for more to come -- and the more of us are using these features, the more likely they are to be adapted to our needs.)

Shop Indie Bookstores

Serendipity in Bookland

2009-02-18T11:48:00.005-05:00

Or, It Just So Happened: Why I Love Being A Bookseller In New York
(to the tune of "Lullaby of Birdland")

On Monday night at McNally Jackson, we hosted one of our ongoing Author/Editor events, and I found out rather late in the game that I would need to moderate. So I did a bit of cramming on the novel over the weekend -- with events 4 or 5 or 6 nights a week, it's rare that I read many of the featured books.

It just so happened that I love this book, Water Dogs by Lewis Robinson. I love the somewhat hapless narrator, the calmly skeptical girlfriend, the ridiculous male posturing, the snow, the sense of somewhat muted menace. I love that Mainers struggle with some of the same issues of authenticity that Brooklynites do -- are you a real [fill in the blank], are you one of us or an interloper? We had a great conversation with Lewis and his editor Laura Ford that night, and I'm still reading and loving the book.

It also just so happened that among Lewis' friends in attendance were Nathanael Bellows, who had been at the store for an event with his poetry collection Why Speak the year before; and Aaron Hamburger, who not only has his own excellent short story collection out, but is also one of the winner of our First Annual Children's Story-Writing Contest. So I got to chat with him about his story "The Dessert-Breathing Dragon," which he'll be reading on Saturday.

Last night several bookseller friends had arranged to meet up in a bar in Williamsburg to welcome to our borough Stephanie Anderson, who just started as a manager at Word in Greenpoint. Somehow in the 10 years I've lived in the city, I had never before been to a bar in Williamsburg, despite living there for one summer in college -- I was probably a little scared of the hipsters, and a little proud of living my youthful Brooklyn life without recourse to the standard stomping ground. But I trekked out on the L train after work, and it just so happened that on the way to the bar I passed Desert Island, a newish comic book shop I'd been dying to visit. I popped in and introduced myself to the owner, Gabriel, and chatted for a minute before hurrying on to meet the folks. When I arrived at the bar Stephanie was the only one there, and it just so happened she too had been meaning to visit Desert Island. So we went right back down Metropolitan Avenue and spent another 20 minutes talking with Gabriel about his year-old store (he made the shelves himself! He'd never worked in a bookstore before! He hangs a projector screen from hooks in the ceiling! He carries unique foreign and self-published comics that attract the afficianados, even if they end up buying Adrian Tomine!), our own stores' work with graphic novels, consignments, and other wonky book biz stuff. Far from being a scary hipster, it just so happened that Gabriel is a totally decent human being, and Stephanie and I made another friend in the book biz.

We returned to the bar, where our fellow book folks were waiting, and proceeded to have an uproariously enjoyable evening. It just so happened that two of the attendees were born quite near each other in upstate New York. It just so happened that three of us were separately scheming about BEA parties, and are now scheming together. It just so happened that my Random House rep gave me a galley that I'm as eager to read as she is to have me read it. It just so happened that some other folks joined us halfway through the night with their own connections to the book world. It just so happened that Kelly Amabile and I both had to take the L train home, and wove our way back to the subway together.

It's been a good week in New York. We spent part of the evening last night discussing our "hazing" experiences when we first moved here, and how the city can make you work for it. But in weeks like this, it's pretty obvious why we do it.

Guest blogger: The ALP on Black Lizard and Joe Lansdale

2009-02-13T11:15:00.007-05:00

Happy holiday Monday, everyone (unless you work in retail, of course). I'm taking the day off from blogging and ceding book review duties to everyone's favorite, the ALP.

* * *

Back when I was in high school, I somehow stumbled across the Black Lizard edition of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet. I don't know how I came across it. I may have thought the book was about vampires or something. Anyway, back then, most of the Black Lizard books had a uniform look: a blurry black and white cover photo with bars of vivid color criss-crossing the photo. The covers had a matte finish that gave them a pleasingly thick and slightly pebbled feel, like really high-quality old paper. The look was distinct and badass. It had a lurid and pulpy edge, appropriate to the contents, but the quality of presentation also suggested something lasting and enduring. As physical objects, these books were a perfect manifestation of the publisher's philosophy that these unjustly neglected genre "hacks" were actually under-recognized geniuses worthy of the full-on quality lit giant treatment. Because the BL books looked so classy were clearly meant to outlast mass-market paperbacks, I developed a peculiar prejudice against non-BL crime lit. Authors on the BL list were, somehow, on a different playing field than "regular" crime/mystery authors. I felt that BL treatment was something a writer graduated into if they were good enough.

This is, of course, silly. There are several authors on the BL list that are curious exemplars of the hardboiled style, but honestly aren't that awesome. More importantly, there's just too much good stuff out there to limit yourself like that. After years of collecting BL novels, I eventually lost my Black Lizard snobbishness.

But, still, when I notice a writer gets the BL treatment, I can't help but think that he's somehow made the big leagues.

Which brings us to Joe R. Lansdale, a prolific master of just about any genre you could care to mention (except, perhaps, bodice rippers – but he's still got a ton of books in him, give him time), whose backlist is getting the BL treatment. Recently, his long-running Hap and Leonard series made the jump and the first two novels in the series - Savage Season and Mucho Mojo - are available in BL editions.

My recommendation: skip the intro and jump right into the second book.

The former, which introduces of to Hap, a ex-hippie turned manual laborer, and his buddy Leonard, a gay African American Vietnam War vet, is marred by very uneven pacing and unseemly self-congratulatory streak regarding Leonard. For their maiden adventure, Hap's ex-wife, a Southern siren who ditched when Hap was serving time for refusing to be drafted, convinces Hap and Leonard to join up with an odd batch of over-the-hill radicals to find a gangster's missing loot. The premise is promising and, when he's on the case, Lansdale's unique mix of aw-shucks tall-tale country boy language and hardboiled chops make for fun reading. Unfortunately, after a short set up, the novel loses its way for nearly 80 pages, spinning its wheels in navel-gazing reassessments of the 1960s. There's also something distracting about Lansdale's use of Leonard. It's like Lansdale is worried that readers won't give him credit enough for having a black gay character. Too often he functions solely as the book's "have you met my black gay friend" token.

Savage Season is an inauspicious opener, but Mucho Mojo rewards you amply for keeping the faith. We still get the nifty country noir narration, but the plot – involving a serial child murderer who may be connected to events in Leonard's past – is tightly constructed, the pacing excellent, and the mystery genuinely engaging. A subplot involving a feud with the gang that runs the local crack house and a romantic entanglement between Hap and a forceful but cynical young lawyer are entertaining, but never derail the main story. Even the characterization is much improved: Hap and Leonard act like friends who have known one another for years and not a narrator and his PC sidekick. A tougher, smarter, better executed work on almost every level, Mucho Mojo is a real treat.

The Word (and pictures) from New York Comic Con

2009-02-12T09:23:00.004-05:00

You can read my (somewhat abridged) report from New York Comic Con in today's Shelf Awareness. I had a great time, but I know I only saw a tiny "swath" of what was going on over the weekend, and some of the other 77,000 fans who attended have been reporting back as well.

Douglas Wolk & crew report on Scott Pilgrim #5 and other "big books" that were selling at NYCC in the fabulously titled Publishers Weekly piece "Scott Pilgrim Wins the Convention!"

MediaBistro's GalleyCat blog asks "Can You Sell Comic Books In This Economy?" -- and the answer from the Con seems to be yes. (Great wookie picture, too.) They've also got a video interview about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with an editor from Quirk Books, and some other vids from the Con.

Show director Lance Fensterman has, of course, tons of good links on his blog. (I got a kick out of running into Lance on Thursday and giving him a big hug, though he was deep in serious conversation with a muckety-muck from DC comics...)

Via Journalista (which has TONS of comics links), an thought-provoking piece on the Con and the comics industry that evokes Gifted and Talented class on the blog The Factual Opinion.

I'm sure there's more out there, but this should give you a little comics fix for today. Below, my favorite picture from Comic Con: a member of the Black Hawk Squadron. This series is a favorite of the ALP's dad, so I ran up to the guy and asked if I could take his picture; he calmly obliged by posing in appropriate fashion for a WWII flying ace. Comics makes the world a cooler place.

Stepped Out. Back Soon

2009-02-10T14:21:00.000-05:00

Having one of those weeks -- so much going on -- NYCC, NAIBA, industry stuff, store stuff, etc.... I'll be back when I can, promise...

Book Nerd vs. The Universe!

2009-02-04T09:12:00.005-05:00

Guess what comes out in comic shops today?

SCOTT PILGRIM NUMBER FIVE!!

As you may have noticed, I am somewhat obsessed with this Canadian comic book series by Bryan Lee O'Malley. It's got everything you could want in a comic, or any book really: rock and roll, hapless hero, true love, kung fu, running gags, mysterious backstories, you name it. I've been one of the legions waiting breathlessly for the 5th and second-to-last installment, and early reports indicate that the wait has been worthwhile -- Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe delivers the goods.

I wasn't able to make it to last night's midnight release party with O'Malley at Jim Hanley's Universe, nor will I be able to attend this evening's book party with the author at Rocketship (I blame "making a living", which often interferes with my comic book reading.) But you can bet I'm jetting over to Rocketship as soon as they open this morning to pick up the copy the supernice owner Alex has set aside for me. And I harbor hopes of bumping into O'Malley at ComicCon this weekend and getting all fangirly. In any case, I will probably have read SPvTU by the end of today. Hooray for the joys of anticipation!

(Just a note: because of the weirdness of the comics distribution system, bookstores won't get copies of SP#5 for a couple of weeks, even though comics shops have them today -- even Amazon doesn't have it yet. So you'd best seek out your local comics-centric retailer if you want to get your hands on the book before the 18th.)

The Handsell: Jonathan Howard & Jim Lynch

2009-02-02T16:23:00.005-05:00

I've spent an amazingly satisfactory day cleaning house, cooking soup, and enjoying the sunlight through the windows. Before I go in to the bookstore to host tonight's event, and while I wait for booksellers' reports on WI4, there's time for a book review or two. Neither of these books have been published yet, but they were both miss-my-subway-stop compelling January reading, so I wanted to talk about them now while they're still fresh in my mind.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
by Jonathan L. Howard
(Doubleday, July 2009)
The jacket copy on this beautifully designed ARC (it looks like a Mexican Day of the Dead woodcut, very creepy/fun) suggests that Johannes Cabal should be compared to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or Wicked. After we both read it, the ALP and I agreed that a more apt comparison would be Good Omens, the apocalypse comedy collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. You've got your self-important forces of evil arrayed, cocky mortals playing around with forces beyond their control, and most importantly, a very British dark humor based on double takes, slapstick, self-and-other-deprecation, and merciless wit. It's basically a "deal with the devil" story crossed with an "evil carnival" story, and the vaguely German titular necromancer, along with his reluctant vampire brother (who turns out to be one of the few decent people in the story), may just be clever enough to outwit Old Scratch. My only quibble with the book was that it sometimes seemed that as a novel it had some gaps, or could have used more backstory or motivation; the episodic chapters seemed like they'd make for an ideal long-running comic book series or TV show. But it's a hell of a carnival ride, and well worth the price of admission for any fan of the clever, literary end of the genre fiction spectrum. Can't wait to staff pick it when it comes out this summer. (The ALP reviews it much more extensively here.)

Border Songs
by Jim Lynch
(Knopf, June 2009
Jim Lynch's previous novel, The Highest Tide, was one of those books I loved obsessively that never seemed to find its audience on a large scale (though I believe it got Book of the Year from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and it is a very Pacific Northwest book). It was kind of a liminal book, somewhere between a powerful YA coming-of-age story and a thoughtful grown-up novel, and inflected with a knowledge and passion for nature so strong it made you want to learn the names of every animal and plant you saw. I think this new novel is going to get Jim Lynch the attention he deserves. Like Miles, the teenage protagonist of The Highest Tide, Border Songs' central figure Brandon Vanderkool is an awkward kid with a profound connection to nature. Where 13-year-old Miles' marine life obsessions were rewarded by the discovery of a strange creature washed up on the shores of Puget Sound, six-food-eight Brandon's possibly autistic birdwatching makes him the best Border Patrol agent on the America-Canada border, which mostly embarrasses him. Brandon is heartbreakingly lovable, but the novel is really an ensemble piece about the idiosyncratic farmers, academics, pot dealers, lost souls, illegal immigrants, and observers in a contentious border town in a present day much like our own. I suspect I'll be writing and talking a lot about this book in the months to come, so I won't try to articulate all my thoughts here; I just finished the book and it's still throbbing in my head and heart. Look out for it, though -- it will probably be sparking many conversations about authorial voice, about outsiders, about birds and other fellow creatures, about artists and originality, about government and media, about working class anxieties and dreams deferred. It's also one of those rare literary books you can recommend when someone says, "I just want something with a happy ending."

I wish I could show you the beautiful bird-saturated cover design, but Knopf hasn't made the image available online yet. It was fun, though, reading the ecstatic bookseller comments on the ARC and seeing names I know -- Mark at Politics and Prose, Dave at Powells, Rick at Elliot Bay. And just when I was feeling a teensy bit sorry for myself that I hadn't been one of those offered an early read, I came across my own words -- the PW review of The Highest Tide that I wrote back in 2005.* Full circle, eh? I'm grateful to still be reading and writing about books -- a happy ending in itself.

* Please excuse the out-of-date nature of the rest of the website where the PW review is posted -- I created it ages ago with free software from Earthlink that doesn't seem to be available anymore, so I can't change anything, but it's nice to see the old reviews I scanned and posted. Guess I should get a real resume / clip file up online somewhere one of these days.

Keeping Up*

2009-01-29T11:31:00.009-05:00

Umm.... I guess I'm on Facebook now. We recently created a Facebook page for McNally Jackson -- I admit I groaned a little at first, but it's becoming a neat way to spread the word about events, extend discussion beyond the bookstore, and share the love. I had to create a personal profile to administer the store page, and well.... there are just so many cool people out there (that I do, actually know IRL**) that I now find myself friending with abandon.

I think I'd avoided Facebook for a long time for the same reason I haven't read Harry Potter -- if everyone else is doing it, why should I? (In other words, I'm a snob, and it somehow seemed like something for kids with short attention spans.) And I still have my reservations about the procrastination potential, not to mention the idea that relationships can be maintained without face-to-face contact, and that "friend" is a verb... but I think perhaps I was just being stubborn by avoiding it altogether. Hopefully I can control the addictiveness -- and hey, I've already gotten in touch with an author for a potential event, so come on, it's totally practical.

And today, I discovered via the Facebook page of Kristin Gillian Vlahos of the ABA that there's a Winter Institute Flickr page! So I'm feeding my hunger for news from Salt Lake City by perusing the pics submitted. If you're there, help a sister out and post some great book and people pictures. If you're stuck at home like me, check it out for some vicarious thrills. Hooray for the intersection of the electronic and the traditional!

* Get it? Keeping up with the Facebook Joneses, keeping up on Winter Institute happenings...

** IRL = In Real Life. Like, totally LOL.

Good bookselling, good reporting

2009-01-28T09:49:00.005-05:00

One of my oft-lamented pet peeves is the recurrence of media stories about books and independent bookstores that tell the same old story: indie bookstores are a dying breed, reading is the victim of new technologies, etc. So I must give credit where credit is due to two pieces of journalism today that present a more nuanced picture of the world of books and bookstores.

Via Publishers Weekly, here's an LA Times piece on the uncertain future of the fabulous and venerable Hollywood bookstore Book Soup, after the too-young, too-soon death of its founder Glen Goldman. Even with this somber starting point, the LAT piece offers the most balanced and realistic picture of the actual business of bookstores that I've read in a national newspaper. Here's a sample:

In recent decades, independent bookstores have become endangered, closing as chain stores move into their neighborhoods and market share is gobbled up by online booksellers such as Amazon .com. Some, like Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, closed when the cost of real estate (usually rented, rarely owned) swamped small (though reliable) profit margins.

Yet believe it or not, independent bookstores, carefully run by those rare individuals who are both "book people" and "businesspeople," are often profitable -- meaning that you can make a living, pay a few employees and work reasonable hours.

Contrast this with the dire reports of Borders teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, or Barnes & Noble's reported $172-million loss at the end of the third quarter last year. To hear the chain executives talk, you'd think people had stopped reading altogether.

People have not stopped reading. The problem, most bookstore owners and publishers will tell you, is a distribution system that caters heavily to chains and wholesalers like Wal-Mart.

When the economy founders, big stores, with their hierarchical policies enacted miles from where the books are sold, have a harder time responding in a flexible way.

According to manager Tyson Cornell, Book Soup did "very well" last year. So did Los Feliz independent Skylight Books, which recently expanded from 2,000 to 3,100 square feet.

I suspect that Tyson and the other great booksellers at Book Soup will find a way to a future despite the terrible loss of Goldman. And it's good to see the newspaper with an open-eyed pictures of their strengths as well as their challenges.

Also today in Shelf Awareness, Robert Gray writes about the issue of technology and books. The best part is the link to his previous column, where he quotes extensively from Stephanie Anderson, inspiring Emerging Leader-type bookseller (and soon to be Brooklynite). Here's what Stephanie, who comes from a very traditional bookstore, has to say about the boogeyman of e-books:

"If there isn't a place for e-books in the indie store retail future, there isn't an indie store retail future. I like your Genius Bar example [i.e. asking whether bookstores can work with the Apple store model of expert help]. That is always what I've envisioned--you handsell the book and then the customer sets their e-reader into the dock, pays you, downloads the book, and leaves. It's important for indie booksellers to look at this as an opportunity, not, groan, another thing to add to an already busy day. As I see it, once most books are available in e-book form, and presumably stored on someone else's server and accessible through the Internet, the so-called advantage that chain and online bookstores have in terms of number of titles available just disappears. Everyone is on a level field now--except that we still have the advantages we've always had, like solid customer service/hospitality, staff who read books and handsell well, etc."

Kudos to Robert and Stephanie for thinking forward on this one, rather than trying to resist the developments that are coming.

And in what turned out to be her last online column for Publishers Weekly, editor in chief Sara Nelson expressed her trademark responsible optimism about the industry to which she's devoted herself. For example:

In other words, while everything suggests that the road ahead is going to be rocky, like many others in BookLand, we're still on our feet—and moving forward—because we're still passionate about what we do. We're real readers, we care, and even though many of us have spent our lives swimming around in the publishing pond, we still get excited at the sight of a mail delivery that contains padded envelopes filled with books. And publishing is all about passion: in the people that make books and the people who will still, always, continue to read them.

I was saddened to hear that Nelson had been let go from PW, as she's been a very visible face and voice for the book industry, someone who paid attention and listened and expressed well-informed opinions in the magazine as well as in panels, news sound bytes, and anywhere else there was something to be said about books. I hope she'll find another platform to speak from, and I'm grateful for her words.

Let's hear it for "those rare individuals who are both "book people" and "businesspeople,"" the ones who make books and bookstores viable now and in the future.

Link-Mad Monday: Watch out when we get together...

2009-01-26T10:14:00.007-05:00

* As the world of indie booksellers knows, this coming weekend is the eagerly awaited Fourth Annual Winter Institute! Due to the uncertainty of my own plans months ago during registration, I won't be there in person... but I'll be jealously following the schedule of every educational session, party and rep picks meal throughout the weekend. If anyone is live blogging, let me know...

* And if you're at WI and of the under-40 persuasion, don't miss the Emerging Leaders Reception, Friday night at 9 PM in the charmingly titled Deer Valley room. Your intrepid Emerging Leaders Council will be meeting throughout the weekend to plan upcoming projects and programming, but on Friday night they'll do what they do best: drinking. I mean, networking with fellow booksellers, of course. The event is hosted by Unbridled Books, an emerging up-and-coming publisher itself, and will feature two of their promising new authors. The winners of the Emerging Leaders scholarships from Ingram and the ABA will also be recognized and cheered, and I expect a good time will be had by all. Toss one back for me!

* The NEXT weekend, already, is the also eagerly awaited New York Comic Con! I managed to score the highest prize for a comics geek: a press pass to the Con, courtesy of Shelf Awareness (where I'll be reporting on the festivities) and the illustrious Lance Fensterman and his crack convention staffers. The ALP and I will be wandering the show floor, snapping pictures and reporting on the madness and excitement from the bookseller's perspective. I'm also going to try to catch some of the programming for Thursday's ICV2 conference, in between my bookstore work schedule. Let me know if you'll be there too -- maybe we can meet up and share stories of our favorite costume sightings.

* And on Saturday at 11:00 at NYCC, in Room 1A18 at the Javitz Center, I have the additional awesome privilege of moderating a panel of heroes of the medium, discussing nonfiction in comics. Here's the actual panel description from the NYCC website:

"Telling A Story With Imagined Pictures: How can there be non-fiction comics when every image drawn is representational? This panel examines the non-fiction comic, looking at photographs, non-fiction prose works, and non-fiction comics as each is uniquely able to portray different aspects of non-fiction. Four creators will discuss how the element of representation and construction continually present in non-fiction comics work impact the stories they tell."

The illustrious panelists are Mike Dawson, creator of the fantastic memoir of Queen and adolescence Freddie and Me; Sabrina Jones, creator of the forthcoming biography Isadora Duncan on the groundbreaking dancer; Dan Goldman, co-author of the Iraq war satire Shooting War and the forthcoming presidential campaign memoir 08 (also, his webcomic on Obama and the singularity is fantastic); and George O'Connor, creator of Journey into Mohawk Country, using a 17th century traders' journals as text for his true adventure story. It's an amazing group of folks to talk about the potential and challenges of telling true stories with the comics medium, and I can't wait to hear what we talk about. Props are due to comics girl-about-town Gina Gagliano of First Second Books for bringing us all together. Check it out, along with the rest of NYCC's fascinating programming.

* And if you're not going to any of these gatherings, despair not: the illustrious Kelly Amabile of the Independent Bookstores of New York City has compiled a list of 25 fantastic happenings at bookstores throughout our fair city this month. Most of them are free, and all of them sound intriguing (Scott Pilgrim midnight party, anyone?) Check it out, and enjoy getting together with your fellow booklovers!

Book Futures

2009-01-23T11:01:00.004-05:00

Clearly, it's time to read Lev Grossman's article in Time about the future of books. I expect to agree, argue, and quibble in various measures. In the meantime, GalleyCat has a good summary and analysis of the piece, especially as it pertains to us snobby NYers.

In the meantime, Bookninja pointed me to an indie bookstore story from Britain that sounds like something out of a Frank Capra movie. An MP from Lancashire discovered that his beloved, homey local indie bookstore is closing because of economic pressure. So he storms into Parliament and tells everyone it's high time the government started supporting locally owned small businesses. And for good measure, he tells publishers they'd better be careful about relying too much on chains and online sellers, because "it's in their own interests to have a large number of outlets." Since when did a politician get so passionate, practical, and well-informed? Truly it is a new day in politics. Perhaps Kaydee Bookshop in Clitheroe will become our rallying cry for a new politics of supporting the local and independent.

Gathering Around The Bookish President

2009-01-20T08:09:00.006-05:00

Happy Inauguration Day! I'm psyched that at the last minute we've decided to screen the event at McNally Jackson. It's the sort of thing you want to be around other people for -- the excitement just isn't the same by oneself.

I'm also pleased that those who come to the store will get a chance to take a look at the new display some of our staff have been working hard to compile. Titled "How History Was Made: Books That Inspired A President," the display encompasses two groaning tables of political theory, fiction, history, memoir, and classics of world literature that make you wish you'd taken more cross-disciplinary critical thought-type classes in college.

The books come specifically from a period in Barack Obama's 20s when he read voraciously and when much of his political thought was formed. My coworker John McGregor has done a ton of research to put this together, and it shows. Starting with Laura Miller's Salon article "Barack By The Book" and culminating with Michiko Kakutani's piece in yesterday's Times "From Books, New President Found Voice," it's been widely observed that Obama has been shaped by his reading in unprecented ways, and that shows, too.

Contemplating this massive reading list (and dipping in oneself) is fascinating. But one of the best part about reading great books is that they spark great conversations. On February 13,
we're having a panel of distinguished guests to talk about what this reading list tells us about our president, and what we can learn from his influences. In addition to Laura Miller herself, James Baldwin scholar Colm Toibin, political writer and scholar Susan Jacoby, journalist and novelist David Samuels, and Spiegel & Grau editor Chris Jackson will each bring a unique perspective to this discussion of the books that shaped a president.

I'll be mentioning this panel again as it gets closer, but it seemed that today was the perfect day to let you know about the ongoing conversation of books and politics we've got going on. Along with, I suspect, many in the world of books, I'm full of joy and hope to have a real "book person" in the White House, and I can't wait to see what it does for our national conversation. Having books at the center of things might be part of the change we want to see.

Guest Blogger: The ALP

2009-01-19T09:30:00.004-05:00

Greetings literature lovers. The ALP here with some dispatches from that other pile of books on the purely metaphorical nightstand. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that Book Nerd, within her "About Me" sidebar section, claims that I read everything she doesn't. Here's what Book Nerd hasn't read recently.

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, by Richard Rhodes

With his Pulitzer-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb and his 1995 follow up, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Rhodes pretty much staked out the nuclear era as his personal stomping ground. In his latest, Arsenals of Folly, he moves from the dawn of the Cold War Era into the lingering last days of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the end of the arms race. Where Atomic played like a tragic Promethean foundation myth and Dark Sun was steeped in the shadowy cloak and dagger paranoia of the early Cold War, Arsenals reads like a grotesque farce. Late in the Eisenhower administration, it became abundantly clear that existing nuclear stockpiles were more than enough to deal fatal amounts of damage to the United States and the USSR (if not the whole planet). And yet, in the face of hard data and common sense, a moronic cabal of American hardline militarists managed to influence administration after administration, convincing them that a nuclear war was not only winnable, but that the secret to success was to simply keep developing and stockpiling more and more destructive nuclear weapons. Rhodes diligently and forcefully makes the case that this potentially suicidal and astoundingly wasteful strategy was neither wise nor inevitable. The cast of this particular comedy of errors includes notable military leaders, neo-Stalinists, leading lights from what would later be dubbed the "neoconservative" movement, a handful of now iconic presidents, and even some favorites from the Bush administration (Cheney is truly the bad penny of American politics). Rhodes makes no attempt to hide his contempt for this crowd of wannabe tough-guy bureaucrats who nearly led the word down the road to utter annihilation, and critics will certainly cite this overt hostility as proof that Rhodes's book is little more than a hatchet job of Reagan and his cronies. Still, if Rhodes is even half right, then these men fully deserve the scorn history will, one hopes, heap upon them. Arsenals is out now and I'm certain it is available at your finer independent book vendors.

Castle, by J. Robert Lennon

There's a neat-o Deliverance by way of Kafka premise at the base of Lennon's up-coming Castle: Eric Loesch, an Iraq War vet with a tangled family history and nasty scandal hanging over his military record, returns to his hometown in upstate New York. He purchases a secluded house out where he plans to live out his remaining days in hermit-like isolation. This plan hits a surreal snag when Loesch discovers that there a small castle, complete with turrets and everything, smack dab in the middle of his property. This bizarre turn of events takes on a more sinister aspect when it becomes clear that the castle and its mysterious occupant are connected to Eric's guilt-haunted past. Lennon expertly shifts between exacting detail and fantastic horror, giving his tale the crisp realism of a well-remembered nightmare. The end result is somewhat marred by an awkward attempt to create a metaphorical parallel to the prisoner torture scandals of the War on Terror, the results of which are neither insightful or illuminating. Still, aside from that one misstep, Lennon's curious thriller is a refreshingly odd slice of genre fiction and it is bound to please fans of "new weird" horror and genre bending mysteries. Castles is published by Greywolf Press and streets in April. Go hassle your favorite indie bookseller about it now. Just keep telling 'em it is about a guy and this castle with no road to it. They'll keep saying, "It's Kafka's The Castle." And you'll keep going, "No. It's not that." You can probably keep 'em going for hours like that.

Book Nerd here: Give him a hand, folks! You can read the ALP's regular commentary on books, movies, comics, and other stuff horror-related on his own blog, And Now The Screaming Starts. I'm grateful to him for expanding this blog's book coverage outside my own reading. We may make this a regular feature.

Trends, Counter-Trends, and Re-Evaluations

2009-01-15T09:01:00.003-05:00

At the PowerUp! ceremony last night, I mentioned the headline of the (otherwise lovely) New York Times article on my bookstore party, which read "A Woman Dreams of Opening a Bookstore, and Defying the Trends." I asserted that the existence of the 75 stellar business plans in this year's competition suggest that my efforts to open an indie bookstore actually embody any number of trends: toward localism, toward idealistic entrepreneurship, toward communities taking charge of their own sustainability, toward valuing books, toward the growth of vibrant, savvy independent businesses.

Thus, it was rather gratifying to read in book industry newsletter Shelf Awareness today that two major papers have been revisiting the common perception of the trends.

The Wall Street Journal article "Folks Are Flocking to the Library, a Cozy Place to Look for a Job" begins

"A few years ago, public libraries were being written off as goners. The Internet had made them irrelevant, the argument went. But libraries across the country are reporting jumps in attendance of as much as 65% over the past year..."

Business librarian Maud Andrews and I discussed this issue at the reception last night: that bookstores and libraries have certainly had to revamp their business model, to become gathering places for the sharing of information rather than warehouses of information on paper. But it's working, for both of us.

The San Francisco Chronicle's piece "Bay Area indie bookstores beat the odds" (deja vu to the Times article) begins thusly:

"As everyone knows, independent bookstores are dead. Or at least dying. Next to opening an indie video rental store, it is hard to imagine a less promising investment opportunity.....

Defying conventional wisdom, and despite what you hear every time a landmark bookstore closes - Stacey's on Market Street is the latest example - independent bookstores are thriving in San Francisco."

The article details the passion and smarts of Preveen Madan and Christin Evans, who bought the small indie store Booksmith and are succeeding in their goal to "push the boundaries of a bookstore for the 21st century," along with Pete Mulvihill, one of the three partners that runs Green Apple Books, who talks about indie bookstores curatorial role.

It feels serendipitous to hear these stories that question the negative "trends" by really observing the successes and changes that are occurring in the world of books, after going out on a limb to assert that the trends are not as they are often assumed to be. Given the wonderful plans I saw last night, and the passion and energy evident in the entrepreneurs, the future is not so bleak as it might have appeared.

(cross-posted on A Bookstore In Brooklyn)

Link-Mad Monday: The Good News

2009-01-11T17:02:00.008-05:00

'Cause that's what we do around here.

* In the New York Times, an interesting article on how small-scale and niche manufacturing in Brooklyn is prospering even as larger concerns suffer in the economic downturn:

Many business owners interviewed said they were staying strong in this market by employing few workers and keeping their products specialized.
“They tend to be very nimble, even in the downtimes,” said Mr. Kimball. “They can make it through a difficult stretch easier than the bigger players.”

Manufacturing isn't retail, but I can't be the only one to see a parallel to the indie store which can make adjustments and cater to local clients as corporate sellers can't. We ARE all making those adjustments, right?...

* Also in the Times, an article that evokes the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in discussing how internet forums and social networking, especially in New York City neighborhoods, can strengthen local bonds, not increase isolation:

The Web was first seen as a radical alternative to the bricks-and-mortar world, but the truth, it turns out, can be more complicated.
“The original idea of the Internet was to get away from physical geography,” Steven Johnson, a 40-year-old Brooklynite and the author of several tech-related books, said as he sat in the Dumbo loft that serves as the office to Outside.in, a Web site he helped to found two years ago. “The dream was that everybody would be able to telecommute from Wyoming.”
Yet, the Internet has also had the opposite effect by helping to connect people more closely to their physical and political surroundings. And for New Yorkers, whose surroundings are more complex than most, this effect can be particularly powerful, enabling them to take on the long-anonymous, too-big-to-fight city.

There's also an acknowledgement of the gentrification wars that seem to flare up on every neighborhood blog (whose side are you on?!?) -- but this is a good way to think about how a local bookstore can be a part of their online neighborhood as well as their physical one.

* Sometimes, it takes a Nobel-prize winning author to stem the spread of panic and illogic in a publishing corporation. Thanks to a letter from Gunter Grass, Umberto Eco, Amos Oz, Wislawa Szymborska, Jose Saramago and others, beloved and competent editor Drenka Willen has been re-hired at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, after being fired last month. Score one for literature over the suits. (Thanks to Levi for the link.)

* I'm still thinking about the question inherent in Jason Lutes' Berlin graphic novels about how and whether artists and writers should be engaged with politics. Pankaj Mishra has one answer: if writers are there in the shit and they write about it, listen to them. Arundhati Roy and David Grossman are certainly examples of writers whose political ideas and expressions we would be mistaken to ignore.

* The good news about the following kerfuffle is that the backlash happened so fast. To quote Sarah Retger at the ABA Omnibus:

Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse wrote a stunningly dumb article for the WSJ in which she argued that the only way for publishers to survive is by throwing lots of advance money at projects they hope will be bestsellers. Happily, people more eloquent than me have done the necessary debunking, criticizing, and introducing of logic.

My own two cents: there's nothing wrong with hoping for a blockbuster. But shelling out multi-million dollar advances (at the expense of publicity efforts for the rest of the list) ain't gonna get you one. One of the strengths of books as a medium is that they're viable on such a small scale; we're lucky for the books with print runs of 500 as well as those with 50,000, and it would be great to see publishers begin to think critically about how to work those strengths for a diverse, vibrant, long-lived list.

* Ooh, here's a nice one: the National Endowment for the Arts survey, usually a staple of doom and gloom about the state of American literacy, this year shows a substantial increase in the numbers and percentages of readers. I have yet to read through the complete findings, and it will be interesting to hear theories on why the shift occurred, but it does strike a bright note.

* This kind of counts as good news: I'll be speaking at the Brooklyn Business Library's PowerUp! awards ceremony on Wednesday night, in my capacity as past winner. An interesting opportunity to review the past year in the bookstore process. Free eats, also.

What have YOU got going on that's good?

Part 2 of What I Read On My Christmas Vacation; Or, How Books Make Things Better

2009-01-09T11:54:00.004-05:00

Part II: Engage!

I didn't necessarily read all the escapist books first and all the inspiring/engaging books after that (and certainly most of the books I read over the 12 Days of Christmas had elements of both). But as I enjoyed the comforts of fantasy and adventure, I also found myself getting a bit fired up about interesting ideas. Since I had been a little worried that end-of-the-year letdown and disappointments would leave me lethargic and apathetic, I was willing enough to let these next books work their magic.

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Berlin, City of Stones
and

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Berlin: City of Smoke
by Jason Lutes

Jason Lutes' Berlin series is one of those graphic novels that the ALP has been telling me I should read for ages, while I was more interested in the flashy superhero stuff (Green Arrow, for example). During the cold, quiet days of the year's end, I finally felt inclined to pick up the first volume, and within pages was immersed in a vision of 1929 Berlin, rich with early 20th century details but eerily recognizable: the economy is very bad, violent political factions each proclaim themselves the true voice of the people, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is impossibly wide, and nightlife, the arts, journalism, and relationships can seem to offer either perspective or an escape. Lutes' story is complexly structured and peopled with dozens of well-drawn (literally and metaphorically) characters; I felt I wanted to read everything slowly and repeatedly to grasp the shape and the details of the world he created, but at the same time I had to read quickly to know what happened next -- the pleasant agony of the best books.

But perhaps the most lasting effect the books have had is an ongoing conversation, first with the ALP and spreading to others, about the responsibilities of artists to engage with politics. One of the main characters is an artist, concerned mainly with art for art's sake and drawn into the decadent nightlife of Weimer urbanity; another, a journalist, is frustrated by the artist's naivete as he struggles to articulate what is happening in his country, yet his rejection of jazz seems of a piece with his detached observer's stance. Is an intense engagement with culture a sufficient stance in itself? Is a refusal to take sides an act of cowardice, or the only honest reaction to a situation of great complexity? The issues are starker because we know that these characters are on the precipice of the Third Reich, but they illuminate (or complicate) contemporary issues as well. Lutes itself, it seems, has found a way to engage deeply while remaining true to his art; his work elevates the comics form to the most cogent cultural history, and the best fiction, which makes demands on the real world.

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Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
by Rebecca Solnit

This essay collection is yet another work I'd been meaning to read, but picked up with a bit of reluctant crankiness: am I really in the mood to read something this serious? But Solnit, whose writing I loved in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is on fire here, and set me burning as well, with the gorgeous and horrifying intersections of place and politics that she illuminates. Partly it was because this is the kind of writing I have done and want to do: narrative nonfiction that makes little distinction between the familiar and the formal, that incorporates place and memory and philosophy and ethics and other parts of the human experience into pieces as structured and artful as poetry and as stirring as a great speech. Partly it because she is talking about hugely important issues that I suspect but don't know much about: the poisonous fallout of large-scale corporate mining, especially for gold; the need for (and difficulty of) architecture and urban design that creates human-scale communities; the out-of-fashion but still present problems of land grabs from Native Americans and nuclear testing and waste disposal in the Nevada desert. Here is an artist engaged.

I don't always agree with her assertions -- sometimes I'm arguing with her throughout an essay, sometimes I swallow it whole and only in talking about it afterward discover that I question some of her conclusions or assumptions. (One essay about Silicon Valley, for example, written in the early '90s, is full of interesting metaphorical connections but a little embarrassing in its judgements on the internet.) Most left me with more questions than answers. Why haven't I heard about this before? Who is responsible for this? If this isn't the right way to do things, then how? But each also left me with the satisfaction of a complete work of art: the kind I'd like to make. I'm still reading this one, still wrestling with Solnit as an activist and admiring her as a writer. It's good to get set on fire again.

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Moomin, Book 3
by Tove Jansson

Moomin is a comic strip with talking animals (or creatures of some kind -- the Moomins are more like Jeff Smith's Bone creatures than like the hippos they are occasionally, scandalously mistaken for). It is also not exactly for kids. Jansson's humor is sometimes wicked, her scenes often melancholy, and her worldview rather subversively anarchic. I've been reading this series as its been re-released by Drawn & Quarterly, and feel rather proprietarily fond of the fussy Mrs. Fillyjonk, the always lovesick Mymble, the practical but mean Little My, the outlaw Stinky, and of course Moominpappa (top-hat wearing, high-mindedly silly), Moominmamma (supremely competent but not at all fussy), Moomin himself (a wistful everyman) and Snorkmaiden (his on-and-off girlfriend, moody but loveable). In this volume they encounter an encroaching jungle (the animals are quite nice given a chance), move to a lighthouse (and back) for the sake of Pappa's great novel of the sea (which becomes a great novel of the veranda), deal with the vagaries of love (a leading lady seduces Moomin) and loyalty (Moominmamma finds herself a member of both a law-upholding and a law-breaking club). It seems silly, but this book was the one that made me happy to relax and engage in the comfort and chaos of family life. The ALP and me are a bit like the Moomins, I like to think: a little silly, a little chaotic, prone to wacky ideas that don't always pan out, not quite respectable, but awfully loving, and awfully happy. As a character says in the last panel of the book:

"Indeed you are the most idiotic family I ever saw -- but you are at least living every minute of the day!!"

May the same be said of all of us. Thanks to these books for making the season bright, and here's to a new year full of magic, adventure, art, and engagement with the world.

What I Read On My Christmas Vacation; Or, How Books Make Things Better

2009-01-07T10:39:00.004-05:00

Part I: Escape!

I didn't actually get much Christmas vacation: one day off for Christmas, half a day off for New Year's Eve and the same for New Year's Day. I admit I was a bit jealous of my publishing friends, none of whom seemed to be anywhere near the office from the 24th to the 5th. But I made the choice to stick around the store this year, and hopefully I'll take a couple days in the dismal months of February and March to make up for it. Still, it felt like a time out from the usual working year, and I chose my reading accordingly. The books I read during the 12 Days of Christmas (that's the 25th to the 6th, as the Inklings Bookstore was humorously reminded) felt like a separate entity, separating the old year from the new year.

It's also been a time when I've been struggling a bit against hopelessness and despair (which seems to hit me around this time of year, if last year's post is any indication). It's been a great year in terms of progress toward my own store – winning the PowerUp! prize, partnering (financially and in a meeting of the minds) with the wonderful Rebecca Fitting, connecting with the Fort Greene Association, and having a wonderful party at BAM that showed how enthusiastic the neighborhood of Fort Greene is about bringing a bookstore to their neighborhood. Which makes the decision to postpone our efforts to open because of the economy even more heartbreaking. So I was asking a lot of the books I read over the holidays: distraction, inspiration, magic. And good old books – they turned out to be just what I needed.

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The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
I was casting about in the last days before Christmas for something sort of magical or adventurous or escapist – that's my idea of a Christmas read. I wished I hadn't yet read Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, or Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or even that I was in the mood to read about Narnia or Middle Earth again – those were just the ticket. At the last minute on Christmas Eve, I remembered I'd been wanting to read Neil Gaiman's latest, the YA novel The Graveyard Book, so I bought a copy (with actual money, not a comp copy – a Christmas indulgence) and took it on the subway with great satisfaction.

It was the first of several just-right books. Replete with Gaiman's requisite imaginative spookiness, drawn from English magical and religious traditions and informed, always, by a dark English humor, the story of Nobody "Bod" Owens and his friends and enemies among the dead and un-dead was quite satisfactory. I wished for more – scaling something down to YA level seems to involve a bit of winnowing of the complexity of say, American Gods, or maybe Neil's just been writing children's books for a while now. But it is essentially the story of a boy finding a home, growing up, defeating monsters, and finally going off to seek his fortune. I found that last bit especially appropriate, and a little inspiring.

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Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory by Roy Blount
I adore Roy Blount: his Southernness makes me feel tenderly toward my own Southern man, and his old-fashioned erudition combined with a mischievious playfulness (always with that Southern slowness, or deliberation) has been the delight of many a weekend morning listening to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me." And, of course, he has his head on straight when it comes to supporting independent bookstores. His new book on the English language turns out to be something of a dictionary/encyclopedia of sorts, so I didn't read it all the way through – I'm working through it slowly. But his introduction is enough to make you fall in love with words all over again, especially this sentence:

"No doubt it would be superficial to liken the universal grammar theory to a virtual program wherein all the steps of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are reduced to a flow chart, with no attention to Fred's ears of the ineffable things Ginger does with her shoulders. But I get no kick from genetics."

Allusive, witty, complex, and ultimately an argument for the irreducible magic of language. Thanks, Roy.

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The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa
Laugh if you want to, but this was probably the single most enjoyable and comforting and even inspiring book I read during the designated period. Don Rosa is building on the world created by Carl Barks, the originator of the comics about Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and Uncle Scrooge – a late addition, at first seen as a one-shot character, but one that became so popular Barks used him often. Rosa has taken all the allusions to the ways in which Uncle Scrooge amassed the ridiculous fortune in the Duckberg money bin, and created a 70-year saga of the adventures of Scrooge: from a bootblack in Edinburgh to a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi to a cowboy in Montana to a gold hunter in Australia, South Africa, and ultimately the Yukon. The thing that I loved was that it took the ultimate billionaire 20 years of failure before he found his first gold nugget: he got to the diggings too late, or his boat sank, or he had to go home to defend the family castle. But every adventure taught him to be "tougher than the toughies, and sharper than the sharpies," and to be a straight dealer (except for that one time he got greedy and burned an African village, for which an avenging zombie followed him the rest of his life – nice symbolism). If Scrooge can deal with decades of failure in pursuit of his dream, gosh darnit, so can I – and I know a bookstore is going to make me happier than that cranky old man's bin full of money. And incidentally, it's a great adventure story, far more interesting than what you probably think of when you think of Disney. Check it out.

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Green Arrow: Quiver, Book 1 by Kevin Smith, Phil Hester, and Ande Parks
One of the nice things about working retail (and being on the evening event hosting shift) is that I rarely have to leave the house in the early morning. Cold, rainy holiday mornings are made for sitting up in bed with a cup of coffee and reading comic books. This, I have discovered, is the way to total contentment. This re-introduction of the character of Green Arrow, written by Clerks' own Kevin Smith, is one I'd read before, but I felt like returning to old favorites. It's a cut above a lot of the superhero comics writing out there, but it's still a lot of costumes and monsters and secret hideouts. I like the new Green Arrow series because of the interesting contrast between the original, Oliver Queen – the fiery leftist railing against "corporate fat cats" as only a rich boy can do, who's also a chronic womanizer – and the new Green Arrow, Connor Hawke, Oliver's recently discovered illegitimate son, a Zen buddhist and all-around quiet sort, except for the ass-kicking archery. The original GA comes back from the dead, as people do in this sort of story, and has to deal with the changes in the world since his heyday in the Silver Age, along with the usual bad guys and relationship drama. It's total fun, with the occasional moral lesson for good measure. Hooray for escapism, one of the many things books can do.

Next time, Part II: Engage!