The Written Nerd

Friday morning I boarded the Amtrak train (such a blissful way to travel!) for Providence, RI, to join the New England Independent Booksellers Association for their fall trade show. I was sorry to miss Thursday, which judging by the trade show schedule had a ton of excellent educational programming, but since my panel on bookstores and digital tools was on Friday, I was only there for Friday and Saturday morning. But as usual at the fall shows, a lot got packed in! I stepped out of the cab and into the Providence convention center, made a beeline for the show floor. NEIBA is operating under a similar strategy to NAIBA's show this year, with a smaller, more streamlined trade show floor focused on "pick of the lists" and helping booksellers sell more books, rather than trying to showcase every title from every publisher. The show floor was therefore smallish and felt very manageable, even in the few hours I had to spare, but I still found myself coming away with a bag...

After much dithering, I of course ended up taking along half a dozen books on the honeymoon -- far more than I could possibly have time to read in a week; but the ALP did the same, as this is apparently the packing curse of the book nerd. Here are the ones I did get to. Frommer's Puerto Rico, 8th Edition (July 2006) Yeah, I know, not your typical narrative to review. But this is the one that's got the most signs of wear, and I probably read the whole thing cover to cover in various increments. Mostly we were interested in good restaurants (mmm, mofongos and mallorcas ) and bars ( mojitos of course), and a few historical sights (the 500-year old fort of El Morro, evocative of horrific barracks life as well as the occasional excitement of a pirate raid; and the well-preserved home of Dona Felisa, the beloved long-time major of San Juan, the first woman to be elected mayor of any Western city; and our own hotel, El Convento, which has its share of history from convent to flop...

Folks, let's not forget tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day ! Click on the link and enter your zip code to find a shop giving out yummy cartoon goodies near you. And in honor of that (and because I've had an astonishingly good run of comics reading lately), I'd like to present my take on three great recent graphic novels. (Please note I'm starting a new convention of linking to the publisher pages for books I review. That way you can take a look and find out more about the book, and you don't even have to go to Amazon. If you want to get yourself one AND make me happy, I recommend clicking over to Booksense.com to find your local indie bookstore.) American Elf: Book Two by James Kochalka (Top Shelf Productions, February 2007) At the panel on comics and interstitiality at MoCCA the other day, the question of web comics came up (they do kind of fall between your traditional publishing categories, yeah?) and I realized that two of my favorite comics of the last year st...

Just a brief review today, though this one deserves much more. WHY WE BUY by Paco Underhill (Simon & Schuster, 1999) I heard Paco Underhill speak at Book Expo last year, and my coworkers and I left the room gasping. A professional "shopping scientist," Underhill's insights into how customers actually interact with the bookstore sales floor had the astonishment of something that's been right under your nose all along. We did some serious rethinking of some of our displays and placements after that presentation, and have continued to keep his principles in mind when making changes in the physical bookstore. But I'm lazy when it comes to reading anything other than fiction, so it took me until this past month when I found myself with a spurt of interest in practical nonfiction to finally pick up Underhill's most famous book. (The ALP had read both, and told me he preferred this one to its sequel, THE CALL OF THE MALL.) And I was utterly enthralled all the...