The Written Nerd

Blizzard. Freelance work (to make ends meet, a bookseller's salary being sadly not commensurate with the job satisfaction). Social obligations. Valentine's Day. Honestly, when's a girl to blog? Sorry for the big blank – I've actually come across several stories I wanted to comment on in the past week (a Bookslut linked article from Feb. 10 about authors accosting booksellers [with snarky subtext, surprise], more Orhan Pamuk and Frey/LeRoy commentary, poet Dan Chiasson's insufficiently enthusiastic review of Justin Tussing's THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD [which I reviewed for Publishers Weekly and found odd and brilliant], etc.), but I just haven't found the time. So I'll just start with where I'm at: two new mini-reviews, and a happy link. Review #8 The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories by Valerie Martin (Vintage Books, to be published May 2006) In one of those happy confluences of fate, I had picked up a galley of this book from the piles at ...

The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable by The Group of 33, Edited by Seth Godin (Portfolio, 2005) I was doing some shelving in the Business and Economics section and this little book caught my eye – it's a weird title, it's a pocket-size package, and Malcolm Gladwell is one of the authors mentioned on the cover as part of "The Group of 33." I read a few pages and decided to borrow it (thank goodness for our store's generous bookseller borrowing policy, without which I would probably spend more than my paycheck on books – and which allows me to learn about the "products" I'm supposed to be selling). It's a little bonbon of a business book, written in page-long, story-oriented segments by different writers (without individual attributions, a policy which Godin explains in his intro). As such, it's a little like reading something like the Bible – even with a common goal (in this case, teaching business people how to...

Thank goodness for Shelf Awareness! Their daily email on book industry news and events is an invaluable source of information on books getting buzz, business statistics and trends in publishing and bookselling, and bookstore openings, closings, and programs, among other things. And unlike an unfortunately large percentage of media outlets, the editors of SA don't start out with the assumptions that 1) real literacy is disappearing, if not already a thing of the past; 2) independent bookstores are cute but doomed to failure; 3) the Internet and the bookstore can't be friends. No, their reports on what's actually happening out there are uplifting more often than not, because they're not interested in perpetuating old stereotypes about bookselling. They do report when a good bookstore falls by the wayside, but there are just more stories about stores enacting great programs, opening up in new markets, analyzing trends and developing new ideas. This past week Shelf Awarenes...

Because I've been so busy lately, I failed to report in that Turkey has dropped the charges against Orhan Pamuk . It's a victory and a relief for the literary world, to be sure -- we've been spared one of our most interesting and insightful contemporary denizens. But many Turkish artists and writers with less international status remain under indictment under Turkey's law. And Pamuk's swift release means that attention won't necessarily continue be leveled at the institutionalized censorship of that country. Slate has a great article about the complex relationship of Turkey, the EU, Pamuk, and the ideas of Justice and Honor in complex and changing cultures. Included is the disturbing fact that while Turks vilify Pamuk for not being "Turkish" enough, some Europeans have denounced him for not being quite dissident enough. I love the conclusion: "There is surely some irony in that fact that you can now be prosecuted in Europe for denying a geno...

So we've truly come out on the other side of Spring Coursebook Rush. It seemed to happen too fast to be able to talk about it at the time, but now that the hordes of students have retreated and we've started to bring the store back to normalcy, it's time for a little commentary. Getting ready for the beginning of the semester is like preparing an army to march: we plan for months the order of operations (though now we've got it down pretty well), hire new staff and train them, and then at the last possible moment tear down our remainder and new release tables and replace them with coursebooks arranged by department and tense-a-barriers for handling the lines downstairs. It can be a very stressful time -- there are a bunch of inexperienced staffers doing their best, professors place their orders late (or not at all), and hundreds of students with individual demands pass through the place every hour. But there's a camaraderie from all this intensity, not unlike the...

If you're a book person who spends time online, you're probably aware of at least some of the literary blogs out there. MobyLives has great author interviews and a new radio show (and has launched the successful Melville House press); the LitBlog Co-op is a group of bloggers who effectively promote under-appreciated books; and of course, BookSlut is a great source for book reviews, news and chatter (though I've been clicking there less recently as the writers' snarkiness has started to get to me). There are dozens of others, by publishing types or writers or just book lovers: GalleyCa t and Elegant Variation and Beatrice and Chekhov's Mistress and on and on. Clicking on any one of these will probably lead you to a list of links to dozens of others, any of which are worth reading on a good day. But I want to give some attention to a specific segment of the literary blogosphere: the booksellers who blog. These are a special kind of reader and book lover, as I...

I've just come out at the other end of Spring Rush Week, which I mentioned in my December post -- the week that Columbia courses start, when our store has been transformed into a college bookstore and we all spend five straight days saying "What department? What professor? Do you want all the books or just some of them? Used or new? I'm sorry, your professor hasn't ordered here... I'm sorry, that's the price set by the publisher... I'm sorry, our system has crashed, it will be just a moment..." I've been working 9-hour shifts and running around a lot, so I've been a little worn out. I have managed to do some reading on the subway, though, so here's the latest batch of reviews. CONSIDER THE LOBSTER by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, December 2005) I mentioned I was in the middle of this just after Christmas, and I finally finished it last week. As I opined earlier, I'm not quite postmodern enough for literally weighty fiction like I...