Bookdwarf

Hello, remember me? Last you heard, I was recovering from an unexpected appendectomy–are they ever expected? Turns out it left behind an infection and I spent another week in the hospital. I’m slowly recovering. So far June has been a giant time suck.

I’ve managed to read a bit in the past weeks. The new Lorrie Moore The Gate at the Stairs managed to take my mind of the pain for a while in the hospital as did Binnie Kirshenbaum’s The Scenic Route. I should probably go back and re-read portions though as the morphine made it difficult to concentrate completely. Since I’ve been out, magazines, books, and television have been my friends. Luckily I don’t lack for a supply of books or for people to bring them to me. I’m hoping to get back to the blog this week with some actual book related postings as my energy levels are finally returning day by day. Thanks for sticking with me!

I said in my post last week that I would be going to BEA in New York and would report all that I saw and heard there. Well, plans changed. I went home Tuesday not feeling quite well. I ended up in the ER where they told me I need an appendectomy. I had surgery on Wednesday and finally got home Thursday. I’ve been at home recovering since then. No BEA for me! I’ve been on the internet but not posting or twittering mainly so I would avoid any percocet-addled writing. That would be embarrassing. One of the disappointing aspects is that I’ve barely even read the last few days. All I managed to do was catch up on New Yorkers!

I also wanted to thank everyone for the kind thoughts and tweets. I expect to be back to normal in a few more days.

I did get to read a three books over the weekend. I finished Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell, a very interesting account of how our desire for cheap goods has led to the extolling of convenience over quality. It’s fascinating learning about how and when our perceptions changed. Then I read Await Your Reply by the nice Dan Chaon. I met him last week at a dinner and am looking forward to eating with him again this Thursday. His latest novel investigates what makes up a person. Finally I decided to read Elizabeth Strout’s Pultizer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge to see what the fuss was about. I liked how she used the connected stories to paint a picture of one person. It’s not a long book, but very engaging.

I’m off tomorrow to New York for Book Expo. I’ll be meeting publicists, authors, and of course, other booksellers. It’s always exciting and I’m hoping to post while I’m there. I’ll also be on a panel called Social Media and the Independent Bookseller with several other great folks. That’s on Thursday at 2:30. Come check it out if you’re attending the day of education!

At the airport in Atlanta on the way back to Boston, I stopped by a bookstore. I only had one book left and I get paranoid about having nothing to read. It was a large Hudson news I think with a cafe and bookstore. I looked at the small section they have called “Classics” which includes Homer, Shakespear, Paul Auster, and others. Then I noticed this:

Can you spot the problem?

Last week, Amazon made it possible for people to read blogs on their Kindles. As Literary Saloon reports, many litbloggers signed up for this. Most blogs cost $1-2, but Amazon only gives 30 percent of that to the blog author. Immediately one flaw became apparent–you could register any blog, one you didn’t control, according to Techcrunch. Supposedly this has been fixed by now.

I’m on record as not being a fan of Amazon. I’m the killjoy always whining about supporting local businesses and the evils of the chains and Amazon. I’m not going to apologize for this. I’m not signing up for this either not just because I don’t post as often as others. I feel like I would be selling out if I signed up for the Kindle service as an independent bookseller. I understand the value of getting folks to read your blogs on e-readers, but I can’t support the Kindle, a gadget made by the company who is putting my people out of business. So there.

{Update} Check out Kat Meyer’s lengthier post about bloggers and the Kindle. She spells out some of the reasons against signing up.

Why do I enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction so much? I read Margaret Atwood’s new book The Year of the Flood (not due out until October–also we’re going to have her for an event!) last week and I finished reading Far North by Marcel Theroux over the weekend. Both imagine the worst, the breakdown of society after the breakdown of the planet in some terrible fashion. Oddly in both novels, a pandemic of some sort causes a cataclysmic failure all over the world. Also weird given the “pandemic” of swine flu we’re supposedly witnessing right now, but that’s neither here nor there. Atwood’s book takes place in a city. People are abundant it seems. Theroux’s book takes place in Siberia–people are few and far between. And whereas Year of the Flood features a large cast of characters, Far North focuses on one, Makepeace, who lives a lonely existence in an abandoned town. They’re both excellent books in their own right and worth reading if you like reading post-apocalyptic fiction.
Why do we read and write about the end of our world? There’s something sordid about imagining our end, but there’s a long tradition of doing it–check out some parts of the bible for instance. Perhaps we need to explore what the human race would do if we had to start over again? Or why the human race has gone so far along a destructive path (nuclear weapons, global warming, continued reliance on machines for food and fuel) that more than likely can’t sustain itself?

There’s a cornucopia of post-apocalyptic fiction out there:

• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
• Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake
• Richard Matheson’s I am Legend
• James Kunstler’s World Made by Hand
• P.D. James’ The Children of Men
• Philp K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North

That’s just a handful. Can you give me some others?
P.S. Check out the trailer to The Road, due out October 16th.

I’m so very excited because Steve who runs the Used department here just gave me copies of not only The Epicure’s Lament by Kate Christensen, but her other two books, In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane, as well! I have a lot of reading to do. I suppose I always do.

I liked Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi so much that I picked up a copy of Yoga for People who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It. It’s an odd but enjoyable book, hard to classify in a genre. There are some brilliant observations and wonderful sentences. Here is his description of a new friend who had the balcony opposite his:

Nick was from California and I wasted no time in letting him know that I was the author of several books, none of which was available from the English bookshop on Via del Moro. He was teaching English in Rome—but he was also working on a short story, possibly a series of short stories, linked in some way that was of no interest to me or anyone else.

Great stuff.

I had such good luck pulling the two year old Kate Christensen ARC off my shelves, I went back to look around for more hidden gems. I had almost forgotten about Socialism is Great by Lijia Zhang, which came from Atlas & Co in hardcover.

In Socialism is Great Zhang tells what it’s like to work at a missile factory in a job given to her by her mother. She hates her job and struggles under China’s stifling state system. At the time China was undergoing a transformation of its own, opening up its borders and making reforms. Each chapter is sort of a vignette. She details how people tattle on one another to gain favor with those higher up and how the younger generation discovers music and literature as a gateway. The whole thing makes me so glad we’re not communist or at least their version of Communism. All the piddling rules—hair must be a certain length, the standard outfits, etc–make me cringe. And how they expected people to believe the party line. It seems like such a stupid system, just nonsensical. I know it’s more complicated than this, but the whole things just makes me want to roll my eyes. Zhang works hard taking extra classes and learning languages to get out of her cookie cutter life. I’m not finished with the book but I like how she goes against the grain. She rebels against the status quo as much as possible. I’ll see how it all turns out in these last pages.

I finished The Great Man and also read Trouble over the weekend. Unfortunately, we’re out of Christensen’s other books at my store! Now I have to wait to read them. Both books are fantastic. I’m not sure if I like one over the other–they’re very different. Trouble is more subtle and had a more traditional one person perspective. But then again The Great Man wouldn’t have worked as well without the various narrators. I’m eager to read the rest of Christensen’s books.

Meanwhile I’ve started Wolf Totem because I wanted to read a Chinese bestseller. Supposedly it broke all sales records and earned “the distinction of being the second most read book after Mao’s little red book“. Set during the Great Leap Forward in 1960s China, it depicts the dying culture of the Mongols through the eyes of a Beijing intellectual who has traveled to live among a small nomadic group. It took about 20 pages for me to get into it, but the descriptions of life in Inner Mongolia grabbed me.

I’ve had a galley of Kate Christensen’s The Great Man since before it came out in hardcover in 2007. Each time I’d clear my office shelves of galleys I knew I’d never read, I kept it for some reason. Now I’m glad I did. Fellow bookseller Michelle Filgate of RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH kept talking about how much she loved Christensen’s writing on both her blog and on Twitter. After reading a fairly fat book (Sarah Water’s forthcoming Little Stranger which is a departure from her previous books and definitely worth reading) I wanted something a little slimmer. I finally pulled The Great Man off the shelf and started reading it on the train ride home. Wow! I’m liking it so much that I want to read all of her other books. I have a copy of Trouble which is coming in June, but I want to everything!

It’s rare to find an author that makes you want to read their entire body of work. It hasn’t happened to me since reading Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom a few years ago. Sometimes a book pulls you in so strongly that you can’t put it down, but how often does it make you wonder how the author crafted it and how does their writing evolve over time? Has this ever happened to you? What authors have you absolutely had to read all of their works?

I recently finished reading The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a young-ish Colombian writer. I had never heard of him before, but with the popularity of Bolano, publishers are looking to South America for more literature. The book follows Gabriel Santoro, a journalist living in Bogota, over several different periods in his life. First, he makes up with his famous father after years of not speaking. Santoro had written a book, A Life in Exile, about a family friend who emigrated from Germany right before the war. His father wrote a damning review which caused the breach. When his father has open heart surgery, he comes back to his father only to lose him several months later in a tragic car accident on . After his father’s death, he investigates his father’s last days finding hidden secrets going back 40 years. The entire book looks into the dark secrets of Colombian history.

Now, I have to admit here that I knew very little of Colombian history. I turned to the internet and read up on the colonization followed by independence led by Bolivar, the various civil conflicts including La Violencia, and especially what happened right before and during WWII. Apparently Austrian and Germans who opposed Hitler were treated the same as Nazi sympathizers, but once President Santos sided with the Allies, the Nazi sympathizers were interned and had their property confiscated. This plays a large role in the plot of The Informers. What’s also interesting about this book is how not just this piece of history but what happened after the war, Colombia’s years of violence between two political parties, also influences the story. Vasquez doesn’t tiptoe around it. He wants to explore how a country’s dark history influences its citizens.

I also found it embarrassing how little I knew about South American history. I knew nothing about Colombia until I read this book and though you don’t necessarily need to in order to read it, it certainly helps. The 1994 assassination of Andres Escobar in Medellin for example was mentioned in the novel as a huge event in their history, something that left everyone glued to their televisions for information. There are several theories about why he was killed but regardless this moment lives large in the Colombian mind, at least according to this book, and yet I knew nothing about it. It’s funny how a novel can make you follow these paths.

Oh boy, this is awkward. I’ve been gone from here for so long! I went away on a fabulous vacation to Mexico and never really came back. My mind has been stuck on the beach reading. I read about a book a day for seven days–what luxury! And what did I read, you might ask? Here’s the list:

• Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea
• Lush Life by Richard Price
• Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
• Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski
• The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

And since then, I’ve read:

• The Hand of Isis by Jo Graham
• The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno
• The American Painter Emma Dial by Samantha Peale

And I’m currently enjoying The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

All were good books, but if I had to say which I liked best, I would say Lush Life, The Great Perhaps, and Into the Beautiful North. Looking at my list, I’m realizing that I don’t read many books written by women which I hadn’t noticed until now. That’s what I’ve been doing.

And I’m also addicted to Twitter now, another reason I haven’t written here in a while. My handle is @Bookdwarf of course.

Also Mr. Bookdwarf and I are going to get married.

That’s my news for now.

I’m here to report on what might be one of the worst customer experiences ever. And I mean “worst” from my store’s perspective. AssholeGentleman walks into the store and asks a friendly bookseller to help him find a book. Friendly bookseller finds the book for then customer who then asks if he can use the computer behind our info desk for a second. He then proceeds to look the book up on Amazon, drops the book on the counter, says he’ll get it from them, walks out. This is a true story that happened this prior weekend.

I was chosen along with some other booksellers from around the country to participate in a cookbook challenge. Our colleague’s at Vroman’s made their dinner last Saturday night, same as we did, and claim they won! Not so, my friends. The other participants are Third Place Books, Chapter One Books, Vintage Books, Watermark Books, Chester County Book Company, Books & Books, The Book Mark, Garden District Book Shop, Town Center Books, Northshire Books, and Book Loft. The challege: use Frank Stitt’s Bottega Favorita to cook for a dinner party. The cookbook comes from the Bottega Restaurant, an Italian trattoria with a bit of a Southern-US flair to it. Sounds fantastic. I already like throwing dinner parties. Now I have an excellent excuse to throw another one.

Aside from the appetizers in the cookbook, we started the meal with cheese and crackers, and some American proscuitto from one of Kentucky’s best artisan ham shops, Father’s Country Hams. The proscuitto had the texture and depth of the best Italian ham, but with a smokier kick to it.

The first dish was a decidedly un-Italian one: Onion dip. With potato chips. Who doesn’t like that? At Bottega, they make their own chips in house, but we did pretty well with store-bought chips and the Bottega dip recipe. As we discovered throughout the evening, the recipe was simple and the flavors were complex. A mixture of charred red onion, chives, sour cream, salt, pepper, and mustard spent the night in the fridge and emerged incredible.

Our pal Bronwen brought us two additional appetizers. First, Vegetables a la Greque: A quick-pickled mix of carrots, onions, garlic, and fennel. Again, simple and fresh beats overworked and contrived every day of the week.  We overlapped with our competitors on the third appetizer: Beet and ricotta crostini. Bronwen made both the bread and cheese herself, as well as roasting the beets and nuts. Suck it, other bookstore!

Then, on to Tuscan white bean soup. It sounds impossibly simple:  Sautee your garlic, carrots, rosemary, and leeks, then add your simmered beans, simmer more, and pour over some greens (the recipe called for escarole, but we used chard) that you’ve sauteed with more garlic. Absolutely fantastic. And check out the knife skills on the diced carrots!
Next, the animal part of the meal: A fish dish. When I told them about a recipe for roasted fish with fennel, onions, and baby artichokes, the guy at New Deal Fish Market suggested striped bass. He didn’t steer us wrong. We did make a mistake with the artichokes: You can substitute artichoke hearts for baby artichokes, but you can’t use much more than the heart. We tried, and ended up with number of tough chunks. The rest of the dish was fantastic though.

Finally, we had dessert: a cream cheese tart. The recipe’s introduction asks “how can something so simple be so delicious?” You could say that about most of the dishes in the cookbook, to be honest, but this one in particular is amazingly simple. It’s basically butter, cream cheese, sugar, nuts, and cinnamon. And it’s awesome.

Around the time we were putting the dessert into the oven, we realized we’d forgotten to start the meal with cocktails. So, obviously, we had to go back and make everyone the Tegatini. Despite the fact that we all hate the idea of any beverage with a cutesy name ending in “tini,” this was yet another example of simple, excellent flavors: A shot of gin, half a shot of Aperol, shaken and served with a twist. Half a bottle of gin and most of a cream-cheese pie later, some of us were ready to go out dancing… and the rest of us slumped into the couch to watch Planet Earth.

Our overall impression of the food was simple and delicious. While planning the menu, we thought each recipe looked simple. Too simple, even. But it seems like Stitt cut out all the fluff and pretense in his recipes and left only the flavor.  Our photo skills are not quite as good as the folks at Vromans (what kind of lighting do you guys have?), but you can see more pictures of the food and us enjoying it on my Flickr page.

I’ve in a flurry of reading, finishing books left and right, all starting two weeks ago. I spent a Friday home sick which gave me a chance to finally finish Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood. I should thank whatever made me sick that night for giving me something so wonderful to take my mind off of the nausea! Okay, I admit that’s weird, but really it’s a great book but one I find very hard to describe. Aliens arrive on Earth many many years after we’ve wiped ourselves out to resurrect the human race for unknown purposes. There’s a lot going on in the three books with allegories about human’s destructive personalities, nature, female and male relations, etc.

I wanted to follow Octavia Butler with some non-fiction so I started on Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness by Lisa Hamilton, coming from Counterpoint in May. You can deny the growth of the farm to table movement but who has written about the farmers themselves? Hamilton profiles three unconventional farmers in different areas of the country. These aren’t used to be corporate but went back to the land for a more fulfilling life people, these are people whose roots are in the land but who recognize that the current agricultural complex does not work. It’s a great read. Hamilton’s skillful profiles show the possibilities of a different system.

Then in what seemed like a week, I read four books! First was Border Songs by Jim Lynch, whom I met at a meet and greet thrown by Random House. Second, the fabulous The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. Third, I read The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Okagawa based on Junot Diaz’s recommendation–it’s so good! Last, I finished Goat Song by Brad Kessler, which is perfect for someone who has always dreamt about buying a farm to raise goats and make cheese. Perhaps the upcoming vacation is inspiring more reading?

I’ve got two great, unrelated links for you.

First, Ann Kingman, sales representative for Random House was interviewed by Susan Henderson at Litpark. Do you want to understand how a book gets from the publisher into the store? Or why shopping at independents is so important? Then read the interview. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

As publishing becomes easier and less expensive, the number of books will increase. And I think that there will be an even more important role for people to act as curators for the volume of content that will come.  When faced with an infinite number of choices, we will still need someone to put a book in our hands (or the virtual equivalent) and say, “Read this, it’s fantastic.”

Second, what I assume was John Updike’s last review/essay for the New Yorker is available on line. He writes about Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever called Cheever: A Life. One of my fellow booksellers Mark just finished this book and wrote a staff recommendation for it:

This terrific book goes immediately to my top shelf of literary biographies. John Cheever lived in endless turmoil with his contradictions—the erudite high school dropout; the closeted bisexual who despised gay men, guilt-ridden, manipulative and rampant in his pursuits; the snob most at ease with workers; a man who idealized husband-and-fatherhood, and an alcoholic compulsively unkind to his children and estranged from his wife. Given a lesser biographer all this could be merely lurid, but Bailey’s clean, low-key style and generous insights tease out the strands of harsh judgment and emollient self-deception in Cheever’s journals, and convincingly trace them into the effort and effect in his stories and novels. I don’t expect to read anything better this year. Brilliant.

Definitely will have to read this one. Also, Blake Bailey will be appearing at my store on Tuesday, March 10th at 7pm if you live in the area.

Mr. Bookdwarf has been kind enough to write some thoughts on Stieg Larsson’s forthcoming The Girl who Played with Fire, the second in the trilogy featuring Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomquist:

As mentioned in the previous post, I’m heading to Cancun on Friday for a week of vacation. Just in time too. We’re expecting a foot of snow tonight and I’ve about had it with Winter. As usual, I’m nerdily deciding on what books to bring with me. I want some Mexican literature, maybe some Carlos Fuentes, whom I’ve never read. Also, has anyone read Underdogs by Mariano Azuela? That sounds good too. I’m also into the idea of reading travel literature while traveling. I purchased copies of Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney, Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, and Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski. I want to bring some regular ol’ fiction too. I still haven’t read Lush Life by Richard Price. Worth bringing? Any suggestions are welcome!

• The Stranger reports on a reading by Junot Diaz in Seatlle the other night. Diaz  recommends reading Out by Natsuo Kirino, The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, and anything by Edwidge Danticat.
• Here’s an interesting article in North by Northwestern on why independent bookstores have so much trouble. The author really tries to get at the heart of the problem.
• The New York Times covers Europa Editions, whose The Elegance of the Hedgehog has hit bestseller lists all over the place. The sales on this book increase so much each week at my store, it amazes me.
• E-Books! Both Rich at Malaprops (his blog is personal and does not represent the store. I just know he works at Malaprops.) and Patrcick at Vromans have posted about e-books. I’m going with the hyphenated spelling for “e-book” because I really like hyphens.
• I really liked this post on The Millions about literature in lieu of the tour guide. I’m off to Mexico next week. Can anyone recommend me some books about Mexico?

Just read in Publishers Weekly that Richard Nash is stepping down as editorial director of Soft Skull Press.

He said he was grateful for the reprieve Counterpoint gave to Soft Skull’s writers and readers, but said, “It is time to let Soft Skull move onto the next phase of its existence, and to allow me to take on the new challenges our industry is facing.”

I wish Richard luck in whatever new venture he begins. He’s a literary light as far as I’m concerned.