The Written Nerd

From Dickens' A Christmas Carol , which the ALP and I have been reading aloud: "The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers' trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do." I love the splendid joke of Christmas in retail. Impossibly busy, we nevertheless find more time than we do at any other part of the year to give recommendations, to have a little human interaction with our customers. And it's glorious. Though we depend on it to pay our rent, it does seem to have less to do with making a buck and more with the pageantry of generosity and abundance. I spend a lot of time in the back office these days, but it's wonderful to have Christmas come along so I get to be a bookseller again. Here's wishing all of you bookselle...

My occasional column in Shelf Awareness on "graphic lit" ('cause they're not all comics, and they're not all novels... but I'm pretty okay with all terms, interchangeably) ran yesterday, with my suggestions for gift-worthy graphic lit . There's an abundance of delicious new and collected comics out there this season, and this is just a small sampling. One of the titles I didn't get to include is the first and second collection of Moomin , the comic strip by Tove Jansson featuring an endearing hippo-like creature and friends. Whimsical and surreal, childlike and socially conscious, bizarre and totally intuitive, the strip has tremendous appeal -- but since I've only read it in bits and pieces (while I probably should have been doing other things) on the sales floor, I can't say I've experienced the whole thing. It's one of the gifty new collectios that works for kids and adults, so I thought I'd throw it in as a bonus for you blog...