Somerset Books

Libraries Matter

2011-06-16T19:40:00.000-05:00

When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser. - Keith Richards

There is no doubt that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has said and sung some profound things during his public life (and not a few unintelligible ones), but for me the quote above may be his best. Libraries are truly the great equalizer, being the one place that ignores race, creed, income level, and all of the other things that tend to divide us. With all the recent talk about the viability of public libraries in the digital age, I find myself looking back at my own experience with public libraries and forward to the future I believe they are still a key part of.

I grew up in the public library, and in bookstores as well. But where bookstores were always, at their core, stores, the library was a temple of reading. The heat we're now experiencing in Texas reminds me that my public library was always cold in the summer, a welcome relief from the oppressive heat of a July day. It was warm in the cold days of winter, too, but it is summer that sticks most in my mind, maybe because with school out I was there so often.

Back then the library cards were made of a heavy card stock rather than the plastic, bar-coded ones we have today. The paper card would be warm in my hand when the librarian removed it from the odd-looking mimeograph-type machine that recorded my stack of selections. It was the first card I ever owned with my name on it, and to this day I use it more than my driver's license, voter registration card, and credit cards combined.

In those days there were no computer terminals in the library (computers still being decades away from widespread use), and no one had cell phones or smart phones, iPods or iPads, and thus the library was a much quieter place. The librarians, many of whom had received their degrees in Library Science in the years just before World War II, enforced this silence with the zeal of a born-again Jesuit. In fact, the only place as quiet (then or now) was the church. Perhaps this is another thing that made Keith link them in his quote.

I would wander through the stacks for hours, finding gems ranging from The Three Investigators series to Treasure Island and authors that I still read today like Dickens, Dumas, and Poe. Stumbling upon a book by accident and having it become a lifelong favorite is something that just can't be done through an Internet search, no matter how many "recommendations" Amazon might give. And this is just one reason why I think libraries must, and will, survive in the new e-book world.

Libraries are a crucial part of our communities. In fact, most of us have taken libraries for granted since we were children, though libraries today (both school and public) are nothing like what most of us remember. The old card catalogues are gone, replaced by computerized searches, and the vast majority of libraries offer the free use of computers with Internet access. There are also typically activities for children and a wide variety of DVDs and CDs for far less than you'll pay Netflix or iTunes (because they're free). This is why usage by citizens has increased dramatically even as many public libraries face the stark reality of reduced staff, reduced operating hours, and even closure in our tough economic times.

Public libraries can also perform an invaluable service for those wanting to build their own personal library by allowing readers and collectors to "try before they buy." Reading books for free first eliminates buying new books only to find that they're not as good as the reviews claimed, and enables people to discover more new authors and titles than most of us could otherwise afford. Stopping at the library first can help you later to only spend money on books you know you want to collect. And even if you're not a collector, few of us can afford to buy all of the books we want to read.

For those with children, there is nothing better than browsing the titles in the children's section with them, only to come across a book you read in fourth grade (the same grade your son or daughter is in now). Sharing something from your childhood like The Three Investigators series with a whole new generation certainly beats sitting in front of the television watching the latest "American Idol" installment. Simply noticing which books your kids naturally gravitate toward will give you more insight into what interests them; you can then look for opportunities to encourage and build on those interests.

Libraries are a part of who we are and should never be taken for granted, lest we lose them. They are as much a part of the fabric of our communities as our churches, and much less divisive. As Keith rightly said, they are the great equalizer; if you can't trust the man who co-wrote "Gimme Shelter" and "Sympathy for the Devil," who can you trust?

Script Frenzy Has Begun

2011-04-03T15:01:00.000-05:00

At some point, most people have walked out of a movie thinking, "I could have written a better script than that" (this is especially true if you just finished hearing 2 hours of wooden dialogue written by George Lucas). If you are one of those people, then the maniacs who created National Novel Writing Month have just the antidote: Script Frenzy 2011.

Starting April 1^st, the fifth annual Script Frenzy gives would-be screenwriters the jump-start they need to make the dream of writing a screenplay a reality. Script Frenzy is based on the same premise as National Novel Writing Month: write a rough draft of a script in 30 days. Two days into this year's competition, over 17,00 writers have signed up for this epic journey at the event's website, www.scriptfrenzy.org.

The 5 Basic Rules have remained the same as for past competitions:

1. To be crowned an official Script Frenzy winner, you must write a script of at least 100 pages and verify this total on ScriptFrenzy.org.

2. You may write individually or in teams of two. Writer teams will have a 100-page total goal for their single co-written script.

3. Script writing may begin no earlier than 12:00:01 AM on April 1 and must cease no later than 11:59:59 PM on April 30, local time.

4. You may write screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comic book scripts, adaptations of novels, or any other type of script your wish.

5. You must, at some point, have ridiculous amounts of fun.

While it sounds easy, the apparent simplicity is exactly what could trip up a number of participants, especially those who have completed National Novel Writing Month one or more times. The word-count requirement for NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words in 30 days, or 1,667 words per day. The 100 pages in 30 days required by Script Frenzy is less than half the normal page count for NaNoWriMo.

The difference (and it's a big one) is that novels and long articles allow for at least some meandering wordiness. Even the best of them may run off on the occasional rabbit-trail with no ill effect on the overall story. Not so with a screenplay. In a screenplay every word matters, whether it is dialogue or description or camera direction. Of course you can write a rambling, wordy script (the British do it all the time), but good luck getting anyone to take a serious look at it.

This is not meant to discourage anyone, but rather to caution would-be screenwriters to do a little prep work beforehand. There are literally hundreds of books that will give you the basics of screenwriting, but one that is particularly helpful is Writing Movies, from the acclaimed Gotham Writers' Workshop. It is the best one-volume book on screenwriting available, and is as informative about the screenwriting process as their Writing Fiction is for novels.

So if you want to write a screenplay, go to the Script Frenzy website and register now. It should be a great month of writing, and even if you want to write only novels or short stories, the brevity demanded by a screenplay can be a valuable exercise in how to tighten up your writing. If film is your main love, then the next 30 days could help start the process of making your goal of writing a screenplay more than just a dream.

(And just in case you were counting, this article ended up at two pages, even without camera directions).

Charlie Sheen to Star in Remake of "Interview With the Vampire"

2011-04-01T01:03:00.000-05:00

In yet another twist in the ongoing train wreck that is Charlie Sheen, it was announced today that the former "Two and a Half Men" actor will star in a remake of the Anne Rice classic Interview With the Vampire. Initial reports are that Quentin Tarentino will direct.

"I think it's time the story got a fresh telling," Tarentino told Eye on Hollywood magazine. "It's been exactly 35 years since the book was first published, and almost 20 years since the original film came out, and that was way before vampires became cool. Of course, if you want a timeless vampire flick, you should check out From Dusk Till Dawn."

Sheen was even more direct, as usual.

"Let's face it," he said via video conference, "Tom Cruise is no vampire, at least not a manly, Adonis DNA-having vampire. Hell, the guy's a nut...he jumps on couches, worships L. Ron Hubbard, stuff like that. With me in the lead, everybody's winning. And the goddesses are going to play my vampire wives."

When asked about reports that he wanted to rename the film Interview With the Warlock, Sheen simply shrugged.

"I think it would be a better film if the character was a warlock. But vampires are cool, too. Not those Twilight vampires, but the real ones. The ones that move through the night like Vatican ninja assassins."

"Besides," he continued, "it's being directed and written by the genius Oliver Stone. We all know Oliver...it was his pen and his vision that exposed the truth that Gary Oldman killed JFK."

When informed that Quentin Tarentino, not Oliver Stone, was set to write and direct, Sheen replied: "Whatever. If they want me in it, it's a smash. If they don't, it's a turd that opens on a tugboat." He then abruptly ended the interview.

A reporter from the Transylvania (PA) Examiner-Express saw fit to contact Interview With the Vampire author Anne Rice to get her take on this new film version of her classic novel. The former Wiccan turned born-again Christian author offered this terse response:

"Today is April 1st, right? So this has to be an April Fools' gag, doesn't it?"

And she's right of course, on both counts.

The Tiger's Wife: A Review

2011-03-31T23:17:00.000-05:00

By now it is likely that you have heard about The Tiger's Wife, the debut novel from Tea Obreht. The advance praise this book has received is just short of the "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen" hoopla that preceded the release of Born to Run. And while The Tiger's Wife is not the greatest rock album of all time, it is one hell of a book, and certainly deserving of all the attention it has received.

From The New York Times to The Christian Science Monitor to The Los Angeles Times and every possible publication in between, The Tiger's Wife has been touted as THE book of 2011. No doubt part of the reason lies with story of the author herself: at 25, Serbian-born and US-raised Obreht is the youngest member of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40," a group of young writers the magazine has subtly labeled "the future of American fiction." I don't know about the rest of the group, but if The Tiger's Wife is any indication, they are dead-on in Obreht's case.

The novel's narrator is a young physician named Natalia who is on her way to treat orphans in a neighboring Balkan country after years of civil war when she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. Her memories of him and her quest to discover the circumstances of his death are interwoven with the folktales he used to tell her on their trips to the zoo in "The City," an unnamed place that is obviously her stylized version of Belgrade. Two of these tales form the second and third plot lines of the book: the story of the deathless man and the story of the tiger's wife.

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories,” Natalia says, “the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life — of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University.”

I won't go into any detail about the two tales here; part of the joy of this book is encountering them for the first time. Because one thing is clear from the first few pages: Obreht is a magician with language. Her prose is beautiful without being flowery, and the pacing of the novel changes slightly to fit each of the separate stories perfectly. Through this gift with language she shows us the importance of stories and storytelling in the lives of individuals and communities.

The Tiger's Wife is the kind of book you savor, get lost in, and are sad when it's over, wishing it had gone on for a hundred pages more. Hopefully we will see many more novels from this fine young writer, because (to paraphrase the line quoted above) I have seen the future of literature, and her name is Tea Obreht.

Books That Lead to Other Books

2011-03-20T15:20:00.000-05:00

There are times when one novel you are reading leads you to a completely different novel, usually a classic of Western Literature. This is done most often through a specific plot development, discussion between characters, or even a mention of the book or author. It may be fleeting (as a mention of a book that influenced the character as a child) or as a key plot element (as is the case in most bibliomysteries). The eleven pairs of books below are examples of one book that leads you to another, either for the first time or the first time in a long time.

The Club Dumas centers around, among other things, the discovery of an original manuscript fragment of Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers. There is a benefit to reading both of these at the same time.

Tea Obreht's amazing debut novel features Kipling's The Jungle Books as a significant plot piece. Since most of us only remember the Disney version, it may be time to actually read the original.

The Last Dickens is a compelling bibliomystery that imagines an answer to the question of how The Mystery of Edwin Drood might have ended had Dickens lived.

Sheridan Hay's debut novel doesn't deal directly with Moby Dick, but with a newly discovered "lost" manuscript by Melville. Moby Dick is a natural read after this since it's his best known novel.

In Zafon's follow-up to The Shadow of the Wind, the main character's life is changed as a young boy through his reading of Great Expectations. Yours could be changed as well.

Another Matthew Pearl bibliomystery (he's written three), this one deals with the first translation of Dante's classic Inferno into English. Knowledge of Inferno is not necessary to enjoy the story, but you'll enjoy it more reading these two side-by-side.

Jasper Fforde's debut Thursday Next novel relies heavily on the Charlotte Bronte classic, and for more than just the title. It's easier to enjoy the changes that occur in Fforde's alternate-universe imagining if you know how the book really ended in the first place.

The third of the Matthew Pearl novels mentioned here (and the best of the three), The Poe Shadow fills in the missing details of Poe's tragic final days before his untimely death. If you don't come away with a new admiration for Poe, and a desire to read him again, I'll be very surprised.

Graham Moore's new novel has his main character searching for the true-life missing journal of Arthur Conan Doyle, while also telling the parallel story of Doyle's attempt to rid himself of Holmes once and for all. Reading Holmes after The Sherlockian seems, well, elementary.

Carrell's second novel, Haunt Me Still, revolves around a contemporary production of the Scottish play, and the curse that still hangs over it. Reading Macbeth at the same time adds a nicely eerie aspect to the novel.

While by no means a key element of The Shadow of the Wind, the way Sempere Senior enjoys reading Candide is enough to make a reader curious about Voltaire's classic work. In this case, curiosity is a good thing.

Borders Looks to Used Books for Help

2011-03-18T09:43:00.001-05:00

As Borders Bookstores announced additional store closings today, Borders Group CEO Mike Edwards told the Wall Street Journal the troubled bookseller is considering a radical option: used books. During the interview with the WSJ, Edwards indicated that "Borders may also seek to add used books, an area that Mr. Edwards said is doing well online." While on the surface this may seem like a solid plan, there are just as many drawbacks for Borders as advantages.

It is hard to say just how well sales of used books are doing nationwide, simply because used books are not included in monthly and yearly sales figures reported by the Association of American Publishers. However, it is likely that used sales a doing well based on the number available online, the continued growth of mammoth used-book chain Half-Price Books, and the fact that in a down economy readers are looking for the cheapest deal they can find.

Borders would benefit from offering used titles in at least two ways. The first is the increased profit margin that used books enjoy over new titles (depending on how much Borders pays sellers for those titles when they acquire them). The second is that at least in the short-term, people looking to sell their used books would go to Borders first to see if they offer more than Half-Price or their local used bookstore. Half-Price Books, for example, has been offering less and less money to sellers over the past several years as their competition has essentially dwindled to garage sales. Borders' entry into the used-book market could help increase what sellers receive across the board as the stores compete for inventory.

But the downside for Borders of selling used books is daunting. Borders is a new book retailer with no experience in the used book market, and it is a very different market. Edwards said recently that it was "critical for Borders to be able to return (unsold) books to publishers consistent with our ordinary business practices." You can return unsold new books to the publisher for credit, but you can't return used books; you're stuck with them until they sell.

Another point in the WSJ article shows just how little Edwards understands what it takes, labor-wise, to handle used books:

Although Borders isn't looking to add to staff—it shed a number of key members earlier this year, Mr. Edwards said he might be willing to hire a senior online executive to work with Borders.com.

If Borders isn't looking to add staff, they should not even consider moving into the sale of used books, and here's why. I was recently in a Borders store (one that has escaped closure) and a Half-Price Books location. The Borders store is a roughly 25,000 square foot super-store, and there were four employees on duty. The Half-Price store is a little more than one-tenth that size (3,000 square feet), and had 7 employees on duty: two working the registers, two shelving and answering questions, and three working the counter where people sell their books to the store.

Why so many working the incoming books counter? Because buying used books from customers for your inventory is a time consuming and labor intensive process. You have to look through every box and at every book, look up current used-book prices, and consider how many of that title you already have on your shelves. You have to wade through piles of books with torn covers, mold, and water damage. For every current best-seller you examine, there will be multiple Readers Digest Condensed books, diet books, Jane Fonda workout books, Harlequin romances, and book club editions, all of which are worthless on the secondary market. Then you make the offer to the seller. If they accept then you have to price and shelve the good books and dispose of all the dreck; if they refuse the offer, they take their books home and you just wasted valuable time for no benefit.

At a time when Borders is both unwilling and unable to add staff, there is no way they could process the used books customers would bring in to sell; they simply don't have the manpower. They would have to reconfigure a sizable area of each store to receive and process these books, as well as using significant shelf space for a used-book section. These issues are not a problem for smaller, independent used bookstores with 1,500 square-foot stores (which need much smaller inventories) or for Half-Price Books (which has 40 years of experience in the used-book market). But for an established new-book chain struggling to get out of bankruptcy, adding used books would simply be another in the long line of critical business missteps that brought them to where they are today.

Buying Indie When You Can't Buy Local

2011-03-15T18:30:00.000-05:00

I'm a big supporter of the "Buy Local" movement, having seen both through research studies and personal experience that supporting merchants within your own town and neighborhood benefits your community far more than buying from a big-box chain store. For obvious reasons, I am especially supportive of local booksellers. But what to do when there are no independent bookstores in your area?

I was faced with exactly this dilemma when searching for a signed copy of The Tiger's Wife, the debut novel by Tea Obreht. I have heard great things about this book (and will be starting it soon, so look for a review in the near future), but there was nowhere to find a signed copy in my area. The nearest independent bookstore is more than 60 miles away and had no signed copies.

Then I saw a post on Facebook from Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn saying that they had a few signed copies left (Obreht was there for a signing a few days ago). I immediately went to their website (http://www.greenlightbookstore.com/) and snapped up a copy. Within a few hours I received a nice e-mail telling me that my order had been filled and would ship soon. Imagine that: better customer service from two time zones away than I get at the Borders down the street.

While I was not able to buy the book locally, I was still able to support a local independent bookshop rather than a chain; it just happened to be the Fort Greene, Brooklyn neighborhood. And as strange as it may sound, I was even happy to pay the New York sales tax. I live in a state that is laying off teachers at the same time Amazon is fighting to keep from paying the $275 million in sales taxes they owe the State of Texas, so I'm a big believer in E-fairness when it comes to collecting sales tax.

So the next time you can't find a book at your local indie bookstore, or if you have no indie bookstore near you, try buying online from an independent bookstore like Greenlight (or Powell's in Portland or Murder By the Book in Houston or the Tattered Cover in Denver...you get the idea). It may not directly benefit your community, but it directly benefits someone's community, and the more local business that thrive the better off we'll all be.

If You're a Bookseller, Then Sell Books

2011-03-13T22:11:00.000-05:00

A recent story in The Grand Rapids Press (via Shelf Awareness) caught my attention. The story profiles recent moves by a Michigan bookstore to remain solvent in a challenging time for bookstores across America. Here is the opening paragraph:

In the battle for survival in the cut-throat retail world, Schuler Books & Music is coming out swinging oven mitts. There are also scarves, kitchen utensils, board games, puzzles and dozens of other items meant to bring in shoppers looking for more than the printed word.

Seriously? Oven mitts? I certainly understand the need for sidelines to add to a bookstore's income, and some are natural fits (bookmarks, journals, etc). But when you move beyond the point of a few additional money-makers to becoming a department store that also sells books, it's time to question whether you are really a bookseller or simply someone who loves being a retailer.

There was a husband and wife team in my area that began selling books online because they realized that with books you didn't have to keep a lot of different-sized shipping boxes on hand. I kid you not: they sold books because it saved them money on boxes. They are out of business now, and their demise was reported as another bookstore failing.

Later in the story on Schuler Books and Music, we have this gem:

But Schuler isn’t giving up on books. Books still make up 60 to 65 percent of total sales.

Wow. Books make up 60 percent of total sales...for a bookstore. That means that if the oven mitts and puzzles grab another 11 percent of the business, Schuler can no longer have "Books" be the first word in the name of the store without engaging in false advertising (see the "bar and grill" vs. "grill and bar" rulings by your state alcohol commission).

This is America, and every business owner has the right to run their business in the way they think will make it successful. But if you're a bookseller, then sell books, and not just because you see them as a commodity, but because you love the written word. If not, then do something else. That way your eventual failure won't be reported as another bookstore closing.

Judging a Book By Its Cover

2011-03-05T18:54:00.001-06:00

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can do just that. Or at the very least you can judge the cover itself, both in relation to the book contained within and as a stand-alone work of art. The ten covers below are among my favorites, for reasons that will be explained beneath each one.

One of the greatest novels ever written, with an iconic cover that was replaced in the paperback editions by the more familiar (and perhaps more fitting) bullfighting image. If you see this cover in your local thrift shop, grab it; you just made several thousand dollars.

Another amazing book (perhaps my favorite of all time). It is simply done, with the tag line at the bottom that sums up the book better than any New York Times reviewer could.

I discovered this book shortly after it came out in 1985, and it is as disturbing now as it was then. But the writing was like nothing I'd read before, and it was the vanguard novel of a new generation of writers. Just as important, the cover art screamed "cool."

Another legendary cover from one of the "Lost Generation" writers of the 1920s. A great novel and a cover every college student since World War II would recognize immediately.

This was one scary book, and the darkness of the cover reflects the darkness contained within. The road fits nicely with both the physical and emotional journey the characters endure, and (like the cover for The Razor's Edge) the tag line at the bottom is sure to grab you.

A street shrouded in fog, a streetlamp from a bygone era, the solitary silhouette of an unknown man. They couldn't have come up with a better cover for this stunning novel if they tried for a hundred years.

Long before we ever saw Daniel Radcliff on a movie screen, we knew exactly what Harry Potter looked like. The broom, the scar, Hogwarts in the distance. This cover is perfect.

Dan Jenkins is one of the funniest writers ever, and since he sets most of his books in my hometown, I have a special fondness for him. In the case of Baja Oklahoma, simply seeing the cover reminds me of home.

This the only cover represented that is not the original, first edition cover. Not that the first edition cover for On the Road was bad; for me this later version just captures the spirit of the novel much better.

This cover is the best so far from "The Hollows" series about a bounty hunting witch. It's also one of the only times I bought a book because of the cover. What can I say...I'm a guy.

One last note about book covers. For any book published in the last century (about the time they started putting separate dust jackets on hardback books), 90 percent of the value to collectors is in the condition of the dust jacket. It may simply be because now the only outwardly artistic part of the book is the dust jacket; whatever the reason, keep those covers in perfect condition.

A Surprising Poll Result

2011-03-02T13:43:00.000-06:00

Three weeks ago I posted a poll on this blog. The results are now in, and I must admit that I am a little surprised by the outcome. The question was about the ongoing debate over printed books vs. electronic books, and it was titled simply "Which Do You Prefer?" The results were:

Printed Books - 62%
E-Books - 8%
Both - 30%

As for those who chose "printed" or "e-book," the comments I received were the standard arguments we have all heard made for each option numerous times since e-readers became mainstream. What surprised me was the high number that answered "both," mainly because the media frenzy surrounding this issue rarely includes that option. Several people responded that they would be likely to continue to buy both because there were some times when they wanted to read on their e-reader (during the work commute, on vacation, etc) and other times when they wanted to hold a printed book in their hands (when curled up on the couch on a rainy day, when reading to their children, etc).

Obviously this was not a scientific poll, but it was one where (given the nature of this blog) the respondents are most likely actual readers. Many of the other polls of this type never take into account that a majority of those queried haven't read any type of book since high school.

The 8% result for e-books is intriguing for another reason. According to several publishers' statistics, in 2010 electronic books made up just a little over 8% of the total book sales in the United States. There is no doubt this number will increase in the coming years, but it is an interesting coincidence. I was personally gratified that printed books still won a clear majority in their own right, as I am both a traditionalist when it comes to books and a collector (try getting your favorite author to sign your Kindle).

The debate over printed books vs. electronic books will continue for the foreseeable future, but for today at least it appears that the printed book is both still very much alive and unlikely to meet its demise anytime soon.

The 2011 Texas Storytelling Festival Starts March 10

2011-02-23T16:10:00.000-06:00

Ever since the advent of television effectively killed the radio drama, oral storytelling has been in a fight for survival. Now that we have the Internet, iPads, YouTube, and any number of other visual media at our fingertips, some may think that storytelling is completely dead. Well, there are some folks that beg to differ. And while this may seem like an odd post for a blog about books, people who love books love stories, so I think it fits.

Starting March 10^th and running through the 13^th, the Tejas Storytelling Association will host the 26th Annual Texas Storytelling Festival. This year's festival will be held in Denton, just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and will feature storytellers from all across the country, including Jeannine Pasini Beekman of Louisiana, Jay Stailey of Texas, Donald Davis of North Carolina, and Lyn Ford of Ohio.

The Tejas Storytelling Association was started in 1985 with the mission of perpetuating the art of storytelling. TSA promotes all facets of storytelling and hopes to expand the understanding and experiences of storytelling by nurturing storytellers and listeners and recruiting new audiences. They named the new organization Tejas to express founding member Finley Stewart's grand vision of creating an organization that would bring together listeners and tellers from throughout the Texas region (Tejas is the Caddo Indian word for "friend," from which Texas derives its name).

Some of the highlights of this year's event include:

GHOST TALES: Thursday night means ghost stories. Tales begin at 6:30 pm with frights appropriate for the younger set: the really scary stuff for adults begins at 7:30 pm, with haunting legends and eerie tales of the unexplained and unexplainable.

FRINGE PERFORMANCES: New to the Festival this year is Fringe Performances. These performances offer something a little off the beaten track, where you might hear a new take on ancient monsters or a personal account of a natural disaster or take a look at storytelling in the future.

TALESPINNER DINNER AND SILENT AUCTION: From 5:00 to 7:00 pm on Saturday, March 12^th you can join the featured storytellers for dinner before the evening concert. There will be great Mexican food, plus a chance to place bids on a number of goods and services at the festival's silent auction. All funds raised will go to support activities of the festival.

LABYRINTH WALK and SACRED TALES CONCERT: On Sunday, Jay Stailey will lead a Labyrinth Walk, a kind of moving meditation that opens you to think about your own life journey. The Sacred Tales Concert will offer stories from diverse spiritual traditions.

WORKSHOPS: There are storytelling workshops each day of the festival, ranging from an introduction to storytelling to how to share scary stories to how to use storytelling as a tool in the classroom.

The festival will be held at the Denton Civic Center. Visit the Festival’s website for ticket prices, hotel accommodations, and a full schedule of events.

When Do You Give Up On a Book?

2011-02-17T23:26:00.000-06:00

It is a simple fact that there are more books in print today than any of us will ever be able to read in one lifetime (and this doesn't even take into account the new books that will come out during our lives). Faced with a finite amount of time in which to read, one question that must be asked is at what point is it acceptable to give up on a book and move on to another?

In a recent interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, librarian and author Nancy Pearl (of "Book Lust" fame) gave the following suggestion:

"On the spur of the moment, with no particular psychological or literary theory in mind to justify it, I developed my Rule of 50: Give a book 50 pages. When you get to the bottom of Page 50, ask yourself if you're really liking the book. If you are, of course, then great, keep on reading. But if you're not, then put it down and look for another....

"This rule of 50 worked exceedingly well until I entered my own 50s. As I wended my way toward 60, and beyond, I could no longer avoid the realization that, while the reading time remaining in my life was growing shorter, the world of books that I wanted to read was, if anything, growing larger. In a flash of, if I do say so myself, brilliance, I realized that my Rule of 50 was incomplete. It needed an addendum. And here it is: When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book. As the saying goes, 'Age has its privileges.' And the ultimate privilege of age, of course, is that when you turn 100, you are authorized (by the Rule of 50) to judge a book by its cover."

Certainly an interesting reading rule to live by, but I tend to know well before page 50 if I like a book or not. It is true that some only really get going once you reach the middle, but even those show enough glimpses of what is to come to make you want to keep reading. I live by more of a "Rule of 25" unless the book came highly recommended with advance warning that it starts slowly.

When it comes to abandoning a book, I actually find it harder with the "classics." Every year I start Ulysses again, hoping it will somehow click for me, and every year I bail before page 20. The thing is, I feel bad enough about quitting that I try again year after year; after all, Hemingway and Sylvia Beach loved it, so I must be missing something. But with the critically acclaimed books and/or bestsellers of today I feel no such guilt. I quit "Wolf Hall" ten pages in, and have no regrets at all.

So what about you, dear reader? Do you slog your way through every book you start, out of principle as much as enjoyment, or do you bail after Chapter One if it's not a page turner? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

February is National Library Lovers' Month

2011-02-12T08:17:00.000-06:00

Since the founding of our nation, libraries have played a key role in our society and culture; this is particularly true today, as libraries offer everything from books to Internet access to job-search resources. It is therefore appropriate that February has been declared Library Lovers' Month, a month-long celebration of public, school, and private libraries of every kind. It is also a time for library supporters around the country to promote the valuable service libraries provide at a time when budget cuts threaten their very existence.

While National Library Week is held in April each year (with a particular focus on showing appreciation for library workers), Library Lovers' Month is more broad in scope. It encompasses libraries of every type, from the small home library to the New York Public Library. This month-long focus is particularly important for public libraries around the country today; with the ongoing recession hitting local economies hard, many public libraries face the stark reality of reduced staff, reduced operating hours, and even closure, all at a time when usage by citizens has increased dramatically. Large cities like New York, Phoenix, and Dallas have all cut their libraries' budgets and operating hours over the past year, and California is considering completely eliminating state funding for public libraries (a devastating $30 million cut).

National Library Lovers' Month provides a wonderful opportunity to make people aware of how and why libraries are a crucial part of our communities. In fact, most of us have taken libraries for granted since we were children. However, libraries today (both school and public) are nothing like what most of us remember. The old card catalogues are gone, replaced by computerized searches, and the vast majority of libraries offer the free use of computers with Internet access. There are also typically activities for children and a wide variety of DVDs and CDs for far less than you'll pay Netflix or iTunes (because they're free).

For those with children, there is nothing better than browsing the titles in the children's section with them, only to stumble upon a book you read in fourth grade (the same grade your son is in now). Sharing something from your childhood like "The Three Investigators" series with a whole new generation certainly beats sitting in front of the television watching the latest "American Idol" installment. Simply noticing which books your kids naturally gravitate toward will give you more insight into what interests them; you can then look for opportunities to encourage and build on those interests.

Libraries aren't as flashy as the Super Bowl or Valentine's Day (which will get most of February's publicity), but all of us should make a point this month to visit our local library and show our support. Thank the staff at your children's school library, and maybe even begin a collection of your own that you can pass down to future generations. Libraries are a part of who we are and should never be taken for granted, lest we lose them.

Super Bowl Sunday Book Review: Semi-Tough

2011-02-06T09:58:00.001-06:00

Tonight the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers will face off in Super Bowl XLV. Therefore it seems like an appropriate time to review the best football novel ever written, and one of the funniest books of any genre, Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins.

The novel chronicles the journey to the Super Bowl of two Texas-born NFL players, Billy Clyde Puckett and Marvin "Shake" Tiller. Billy Clyde and Shake play for the New York Giants, who are battling their arch-rivals, the "dog-ass" New York Jets in the Super Bowl in Los Angeles. In addition to being the Giants' star running back, Puckett has also been asked by a book publisher to keep a journal of events before, during, and after the big game, a journal that will later be turned into a book. Billy Clyde does a fine job of this, mainly because author Dan Jenkins (a Fort Worth native himself) has been a sportswriter for most of his life, and his description of in-game action is one of the highlights of this book.

First published in 1972, Semi-Tough is not just a book about football, and not simply a hilarious read throughout; it is also one of the least politically correct books you will ever read. It contains booze, drugs, sex, smoking, foul language, and humor that would certainly be considered both sexist and racist, especially today when we are actually censoring the language in classic books like Huckleberry Finn. Yet the book works, perhaps because rather in spite of the coarse humor; in Semi-Tough the humor is always honest and no one is spared, regardless of race, color, gender, or creed.

It is likely that many more people have seen the film adaptation from 1977 staring Burt Reynolds than have read Dan Jenkins' novel. This is a shame, because the movie (as is usually the case) is nothing like the book, and nowhere near as good or as funny. Semi-Tough is a must-read for both football fans and fans of great books, and a great way to spend the long hours before kickoff tonight. So run to your closest bookstore (preferably an independent one) and pick up a copy of Semi-Tough. You'll be laughing so hard you just might miss kickoff tonight.

Pondering Borders’ Impending Bankruptcy

2011-02-02T20:54:00.000-06:00

Since the beginning of January, the news regarding the fate of Borders’ Books has grown increasingly dire. The nation’s second-largest bookseller is in a financial free-fall from which it is unlikely to recover. At the time of this writing, the company’s share price has fallen to 47 cents and a bankruptcy filing is widely expected to occur within weeks, with massive store closures to follow. This news elicits decidedly mixed feelings in me; I’m frankly not sure whether to cry or throw a party.

First, the complete demise of a bookseller with over 650 stores will put a very large number of people out of work; given the current unemployment situation this could not happen at a worse time. As with the closing of any large business, there will be collateral damage to ancillary businesses as well; the impact goes well beyond the book world. Lastly, for me there is nothing worse than seeing a bookstore, any bookstore, close.

With that said, Borders has done little to warrant the goodwill of independent booksellers or the reading public. Borders, which itself started as a single independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan showed no mercy in destroying independent bookstores across the nation by undercutting their prices, only to raise them again once the competition was gone.

Borders has consistently shown that, from a business standpoint, they have no idea what they are doing. While able to initially defeat the smaller indie stores because of mega-purchasing and discounting power, they have since been behind the curve on nearly every other decision. They expanded their CD section as everyone was turning to audio downloads, expanded their DVD section as everyone was moving to Netflix, and completely missed the explosion in e-books by producing an e-reader that was both inferior to other models and introduced later.

Worst of all for a bookseller, as time went on the number and variety of books they offered decreased. In a typical 25,000 square foot Borders store you will find a café, games, toys, calendars, stationery, and any number of other sideline items, but fewer and fewer books. The majority of the books leaned toward the best-seller list, exactly the titles that people could buy cheaper on Amazon or at big-box retailers like Wal-Mart or Target. The literature section got smaller (except for their own Borders Classics titles) and the vampire section got bigger.

There are some who think the loss of Borders will have a negative impact on the books that publishers bring out each year, especially from new or unknown authors. I don’t see how this is possible, given that they aren’t exactly on the cutting edge of new literature now. And as for publishers taking huge losses on inventory if Borders goes under, Borders stopped paying those bills back in December and have been essentially cut off by publishers since then.

Ultimately, while I won’t do a happy dance when Borders is gone, neither will I shed a tear. While giants like Amazon and Barnes & Noble will pick up some of their market share (what little is left by now) the void will also be filled by new, entrepreneurial, independent booksellers who are more knowledgeable, more customer-friendly, more able to adapt to changes in the publishing world, and more rooted in the community than Borders ever was. For me that’s a fair trade.

2011 Reading Challenges Update

2011-02-02T10:57:00.000-06:00

In late December I posted two different reading challenges for 2011, The International Book Challenge and The 2011 Chunkster Challenge. With one month of the year gone I thought I would update my progress, and invite anyone who has also taken one of the above challenges to post their progress in the comments section. And before anyone asks, I do not consider it cheating to count single book for both challenges if it fits the criteria.

For the International Book Challenge, my goal is 10 books by authors not born in my country (the US). To date I have finished two: The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse (England) and The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Spain).

For the Chunkster Challenge, I have completed one of the eight books I hope to finish that are more than 450 pages in length: The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (531 pages).

And for anyone who wonders how my struggle with Ulysses is going, it is still a struggle. But if I can slog my way though it I get a 768-page whale for the Chunkster Challenge and can check Ireland off my list of countries visited for the International Challenge.

Good luck, stay warm, and keep on reading.

A Winter Reading List

2011-01-30T12:14:00.000-06:00

Most of the United States continues to be rocked by harsh winter weather, which makes it the perfect time to stay inside with a good book. Here are a few suggestions to carry you through the spring thaw, and up to the annual Summer Reading List post. I have left off current best-sellers for the simple reason that those are not yet out in paperback (for those of us on limited budgets who are still resisting the e-book revolution). In addition, most are more suited to cold winter nights than sunny days at the beach.

1. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. If I continue these lists for the next 50 years, this book will still be first out of the gate. It has moved into a tie with The Razor's Edge as my all time favorite. It touches on such diverse topics as forbidden love, the Spanish Civil War, and the innate need we have for books. It layers all of these things on the mystery of why a disfigured man is burning all of the copies of books by Julian Carax, an obscure author whose novel, The Shadow of the Wind, was discovered by main character Daniel Sempere when he was 10. But be sure you have a lot of free time when you start this one; I stayed up all night reading the last 250 pages.

2. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. This is one of those novels that literally has everything you could want jammed into its 416 pages, and yet it all works. There is mystery and history and ghosts and danger and romance and books and feral twins and even two heroines, and all of it weaves together perfectly. Maybe best of all, you won't guess the ending midway through (I thought I had...wrong). And yes, in that list of things a few sentences ago I included "feral twins." This is the kind of book that deserves to be read in front of a crackling fireplace in a comfy chair over a long weekend; but make sure there are no pressing items on your calendar, because you won't get to them once you start this book. It is a literary escape of the very best kind.

3. Booked to Die by John Dunning. The first novel in Dunning's "Bookman" series is a minor classic, especially if you're a fan of the biblio-mystery genre or a book collector. It's the story of a Denver cop-turned-rare book dealer Cliff Janeway, and it will teach you a lot about the book trade while taking you on a mystery thrill-ride at the same time. Best of all, it has one of the best surprise endings of any mystery I've ever read.

4. The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. The story of young Baltimore attorney who makes it his personal cause to defend the recently-deceased Poe's reputation from the rumors that he drank himself to death. Pearl weaves a gripping fictional story around historical fact, much of it newly discovered as he was researching this book. Anything to do with Poe is perfect for a stormy winter night.

5. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Forget all of the movies you've seen; if this is your first time reading the novel, you are in for a treat. The mix of fiction with French history takes you back to another place and time, and D'Artagnan, Porthos, Athos, and Aramis provide more rollicking adventure than Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy combined.

6. The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. There really aren't any sub-par Lincoln/Child books, especially ones that feature FBI Special Agent Pendergast, but for whatever reason I liked this one the best. This is a great novel on its own, and a crucial introduction before starting the Brimstone trilogy.

7. Ex-Libris by Ross King. In seventeenth-century London an antiquarian bookseller named Isaac Inchbold is called upon to restore a private library destroyed during the English Civil War. This seemingly simple task pulls Inchbold into a deadly search for a lost manuscript amid the political and religious upheaval of 1600s Europe.

8. The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Zafon's semi-prequel to The Shadow of the Wind. The Angel's Game is the story of David Martín, a young Barcelona author with a troubled past who writes crime novels under a pseudonym. As he struggles with his love for a woman he cannot have, he also realizes that his talent has been sold to the highest (in fact only) bidder, and despair overtakes him. Then he receives a surprising and lucrative offer from a mysterious French publisher to write a book that will change people's lives forever. He accepts the offer, only to learn that his new situation is far more deadly than the first. This novel is the perfect way to end a winter of great reading.

The Winter Ghosts: A Review

2011-01-26T13:05:00.000-06:00

Author Kate Mosse is well-known for her best-selling novels Labyrinth and Sepulchre. Next week marks the release of her latest novel, The Winter Ghosts, but it is unlikely to add to the acclaim she has received for her previous works.

The Winter Ghosts is a perplexing book. The language is often beautifully lyrical and Mosse is excellent at both describing locations and capturing the atmosphere of a locale. I have not read her previous books, but it is likely that her skill with words is part of the reason for their success.

The Winter Ghosts even has a captivating plot idea (note the word idea). The jacket blurb summarizes the novel this way:

In the winter of 1928, still seeking some kind of resolution to the horrors of World War I, Freddie is traveling through the beautiful but forbidding French Pyrenees. During a snowstorm, his car spins off the mountain road. Dazed, he stumbles through the woods, emerging in a tiny village, where he finds an inn to wait out the blizzard. There he meets Fabrissa, a lovely young woman also mourning a lost generation.

Over the course of one night, Fabrissa and Freddie share their stories. By the time dawn breaks, Freddie will have unearthed a tragic, centuries-old mystery, and discovered his own role in the life of this remote town.

So far it seems like this should be a really good novel; unfortunately, it is not. Mosse may have a great story idea, and may have a way with words, but both the ultimate plot and the characters that move through it are as wooden and predictable as a daytime soap opera. The narrative plods along for at least the first 100 pages, then accelerates to a conclusion that any reader saw coming from at least the midpoint of the book.

Perhaps the worst thing about the predictability of the second half of the story and its ultimate resolution is that the one person who seems to never figures out the clues is the protagonist, Freddy. There have been many novels where the reader had information the characters did not, but never has there been a main character so obtuse as to not recognize the answers to questions when they are right in front of his face. In fact, Freddy may be the single dumbest fictional character I have read in decades.

If you’re are a die hard Kate Mosse fan, you will either blindly love this book or be tremendously disappointed. If you are not a die hard fan, simply don’t spend your money on The Winter Ghosts. There are too many good books that deserve your attention for you to waste time with this one.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon Interview

2011-01-19T21:18:00.001-06:00

Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon is one of the most talented writers working today. His novels include The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game, and The Prince of Mist and have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. A new novel, The Midnight Palace, will be released in May.

I always find it fascinating to learn the process by which an author created a great novel (or novels, in this case), so I thought I would share this video highlight of an interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon conducted by The Agony Column’s Rick Kleffel for Zocalo Public Square in May of last year.

The full interview can be found on Zocalo's website here; it's about 52 minutes long, but well worth the time. In addition to insight into how he writes, over the course of the full interview Zafon covers topics ranging from the authors that inspire him to the importance of language to the process of translating his novels from Spanish to English to the complexity of female characters. If you haven't already read Zafon's novels, you will definitely want to after seeing this interview.

Enjoy.

Heart-Shaped Box: A Review

2011-01-14T19:09:00.000-06:00

I'll be the first to admit that I'm typically not a big fan of the horror genre. This may be the result of having read The Shining as a twelve-year-old...I think the damn thing both scared and scarred me. Which is why it's ironic that Stephen King's son (who writes under the name Joe Hill) is the one who made horror enjoyable for me again. Not long after starting this blog I reviewed Hill's second novel, Horns. I think it's time to take a look at his debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, as well.

Long before anyone knew he was the son of horror legend Stephen King, Joe Hill's outstanding debut novel Heart-Shaped Box made it clear that a major new voice had arrived on the literary scene. And not just the horror scene. As the San Francisco Chronicle said in their review, it is a "story likely to be enjoyed by horror enthusiasts and mainstream readers alike."

The premise is simple: an aging heavy metal icon named Judas Coyne has a macabre collection, including a peasant's skull, a witch's confession written 300 years before, and a snuff film. When he sees an online auction offering the ghost of a woman's stepfather, he doesn't hesitate to add it to his collection. She sends him the dead man's favorite suit in a black heart-shaped box, and that's when his troubles begin. Because he didn't just buy an empty suit, or even some anonymous ghost; this is much more personal.

What ensues is, for Jude, a road trip where he switches back and forth from hunter to hunted so fast it's sometimes hard to keep up with who's chasing who. The tension builds, gives you just enough time to take a short breath, then builds some more. And Hill understands very well what Hitchcock meant when he said there is no terror in the "bang," only in the anticipation of it.

Like his father, Joe Hill is firmly planted in the horror genre. But Hill diverges from most horror writers in that he creates truly literary novels at the same time. His plotting is tight, and his characters, both hero and villain, are fully formed. In fact, what makes them so real is that none are completely hero or completely villain, just like in life. You find yourself caring about the characters because they are not cardboard cutouts of people; they're us, even with ghosts hot on their heels (in Heart-Shaped Box) or horns growing out of their heads (in Horns).

Make no mistake: Heart-Shaped Box will scare the hell out of you. But in the process of being scared you'll also see a remarkable transformation in Jude that I certainly never saw coming at the start of the book. Too often in novels today we see no development in the characters, regardless of genre. That is not the case here. It is an amazing debut novel, and as Horns has shown, it was no one-hit wonder.

So pick up a copy of Heart-Shaped Box and settle in for a great read. Just be sure to lock the doors first. And you'll probably want to leave all the lights on too.

Shakespeare and Company: A Review

2011-01-06T08:43:00.003-06:00

Sylvia Beach in front of Shakespeare and Company

It seems appropriate (given my goal of opening a bookstore) that the first review of the new year is of a book written by the woman who should be canonized as the Patron Saint of Booksellers. Just over ninety years ago, American Sylvia Beach opened the now-famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, and her memoir of the same name chronicles the roughly 25 years that her shop was the center of the literary world.

Before delving into the particulars of this wonderful book, it is probably best to clear up any confusion over the store itself. In an earlier post I reviewed Time was Soft There, a memoir by Jeremy Mercer about his time at Shakespeare and Company. However, the store Mercer writes about is not the store Sylvia Beach founded, but one that another expatriate American named George Whitman opened in 1951 and renamed Shakespeare and Company after Ms. Beach’s death. In what was either a double homage or a case of grand larceny (depending on your viewpoint), Whitman not only took the name of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore for his shop, he also took her name as well: his only daughter is named Sylvia Beach Whitman, and she now runs his Shakespeare and Company.

The original Sylvia Beach started Shakespeare and Company in 1919 with $3,000 borrowed from her mother. As is the case with independent booksellers to this day, it was never a lucrative enterprise but rather a labor of love. She began the store as a lending library for those looking for books in English, charging a small monthly membership fee; this practice was quite common in the early part of the last century, but has essentially vanished today. As time went on she began selling more books than she loaned, but the shop’s fortunes remained tenuous for its entire existence.

What makes Shakespeare and Company (the memoir) so appealing is the melding of Beach’s light, anecdotal writing style with the monumental people about whom she writes. This is more than a book about a bookstore; it is a chronicle of the writers, artists, publishers, and others who essentially made the shop their second home throughout the 1920s and 1930s. And while anyone writing a memoir likes to drop a name or two, the names in Shakespeare and Company stand out a bit.

One of Sylvia Beach’s best customers was a young, unknown (when she met him) writer named Ernest Hemingway. He was covering sports for a Canadian newspaper at the time, and it was to Sylvia Beach and her longtime partner Adrienne Monnier that Hemingway read his first short story. Hemingway and his wife Hadley later introduced Beach and Monnier to the grand sport of boxing. She knew all of the so-called "Lost Generation" writers, and her memoir contains stories about Hemingway, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot, Robert McAlmon, Thornton Wilder, Andre Gide, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas. It was Sylvia Beach who took F. Scott Fitzgerald to meet James Joyce when Fitzgerald was too nervous to go alone.

Her relationship with James Joyce and his family takes up a good part of the book, and with good reason. By her own admission, Sylvia Beach worshiped James Joyce. Her shop became an office of sorts for him; he met with other writers there, received his mail there (as did many other writers who had no stable address), and read through the inventory of the bookstore. But Sylvia Beach’s greatest contribution to both Joyce and literature was offering to publish his novel Ulysses when it had been rejected as obscene by his publishers in England and America. The trials of publishing and distributing Ulysses are interesting not only as history but as a cautionary tale against censorship even today.

Because she felt that authors deserved to be paid more for their work than the people who published them, she took no royalties from her publication of Ulysses, and nearly sent herself and the bookstore into bankruptcy covering the costs and expenses. It was only the intervention of several writer friends that saved her from having to close her doors permanently, but she seemed not to be concerned about what happened to her as long as Joyce’s novel made it to the readers who clamored for it.

Shakespeare and Company is a quick read, although you may have to look around a bit to find it. I was determined not to buy it online, but rather from a real local bookstore, and it took me about a week to track down a copy. It is a glimpse into an amazing time in the history of American literature, a wonderful chronicle of a bygone era, and a fine portrait of the woman to whom Hemingway gave his highest praise: "No one," he wrote in A Moveable Feast, "was ever nicer to me."

Hemingway, Faulkner….Snooki?

2011-01-04T14:27:00.001-06:00

In one of the more disturbing literary developments in recent memory, today marks the release date for A Shore Thing, the debut novel by "Jersey Shore" star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi. It is fortunate that I am typing this post, because every time I try to say the previous sentence out loud, all that comes out is a stream of obscenities.

I realize that nothing should shock or surprise me anymore, even in the book world. But this…this is an abomination not seen since Leonard Nimoy was recording albums that featured him playing a Pan Flute. And while celebrities often get books deals, they are usually confined to autobiographical fluff or diet/workout books. This is a NOVEL.

Courtesy of the intrepid journalists at The New York Post, here are a few snippets from Snooki’s magnum opus:

"Yum. Johnny Hulk tasted like fresh gorilla."

"Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky."

"He had an okay body. Not fat at all. And naturally toned abs. She could pour a shot of tequila down his belly and slurp it out of his navel without getting splashed in the face."

Wow. Those literary gems rank right up there with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Move over Charles Dickens.

I realize I should just ignore this atrocity and hope it goes away, and probably should not add to the attention it’s already getting. But right now I’m too angry for rational thought. As Peter Finch screamed in the film Network: "I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!"

Ms. Polizzi (who has apparently admitted in past interviews that the only two books she has ever read are Twilight and Dear John) has received a publishing deal while the manuscripts of unknown but talented writers lie buried in the slush pile of some literary agent’s office. They could be the next Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen King, or J.K. Rowling, but their books will never see the light of day because both agents and publishers are too busy churning out crappy vampire books and touting the merits of the latest reality show moron.

Novels often say more about a culture, generation, or point in time than all of the histories and biographies combined. The mid-1800s had Dickens and Dumas, the 1920s and 1930s had Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and we have Stephenie Meyer and Snooki. It would almost be funny, if it wasn’t so damn sad.

Starting a Book Club

2011-01-01T20:50:00.000-06:00

Book clubs are a great way to both discover new writers and develop new friendships. Many readers, however, do not have a book club they can easily join, and are unsure how to start one themselves. However, starting a book club is far easier than most would imagine.

All you really need to start a book club is two or more friends or acquaintances who share a love of books and reading. Co-workers, neighbors, and friends from church or other organizations are all people you can ask to join your book club, as long as they share your love of books. They do not have to love the same types of books, however; discovering new books, authors, and genres is part of the joy of being part of a group of fellow book lovers.

It is best to limit the group to a small number at the outset; no fewer than three and no more than eight is probably a good guideline. If there are too few it will be difficult to get a good discussion started, and with too many someone will invariably be a wallflower and never join the discussion. And the discussions will lead you in directions that will both surprise and enlighten you.

Once the membership of the book club has been determined, there a some logistical items than need to be taken care of, such as how often you will meet, where the meetings will be, and in what order people will choose the book the group will be reading. These may seem like insignificant issues, but they are actually critical for the club to run smoothly and keep members interested and engaged.

In most cases, meeting once a month will give time both for everyone to read the current selection and to arrange things like childcare for the meeting night. The order in which people will choose the book to be read can be done in any number of ways, from alphabetically by name to drawing names out of a hat. It may make sense for the person who organized to group to choose the first book, and then follow the decided upon order after that.

Book clubs can meet almost anywhere, from the house of the person who chose the current book to a restaurant or coffee shop. You can also take trips to museums or art galleries if they match up well with the subject matter of the book. Just be sure to leave plenty of time for discussion. The person who chose the current book should have questions prepared before the meeting in order to both stimulate the discussion and keep the conversation on topic.

Over time, usually during the first year, one or more people will drop out of the club and others will be added. As time goes on, you will have a feel for what the right size for your group is, and may choose to either expand it to more than the original number or to keep it at the same size. You will also learn what types of book will or will not work for your particular group.

Finally, while each person will tempted to choose a favorite book to share with the group, one they have already read (and should re-read when the group does), one of the most rewarding things about a book club is discovering new authors, especially ones you would never have chosen if left to pick for yourself. In this way book clubs open up new worlds of reading and expand your horizons, both in the literary sense and in our view of the world. There will inevitably be books most of the group hates, but even this can be a valuable experience, as knowing what you don’t like helps steer you toward what you do like.

So don’t be afraid to start your own book club. Reading is a solitary endeavor, but paradoxically one that can and should be shared with others. Discussing books with friends is a great way to strengthen the bonds of friendship and share something you all love.

A Global Resolution: The International Book Challenge

2010-12-31T19:20:00.000-06:00

As we move into a new year, many book clubs and individuals are taking various reading challenges that will run to the end of 2011 (I wrote about one of these in my last post). Since I am often a bandwagon-jumper, I decided to come up with a challenge of my own. It wasn't all that difficult, given that I have a fondness for books in translation, revere foreign authors, and hope to someday live in Barcelona.

Thus, my reading challenge for 2011 is The International Book Challenge. It's fairly self-explanatory, but here are a few guidelines ("rules" sounds too strict; reading should be fun):

The goal is to read books by as many "foreign" authors as possible. For the purposes of this challenge, foreign means not born in your country.
Reading the work in translation is perfectly acceptable; some of you are able to read multiple languages, but most of us are not.
Try to step out of your comfort zone. If you've never read a Korean or Somali novelist, ask your local bookseller to suggest a good one; you might be pleasantly surprised.

Here are the achievement levels, based on number of countries "visited" in 2011:

Homebody: 0-2 countries visited
Budget Traveller: 3-6 countries visited
Frequent Flier: 7-9 countries visited
Marco Polo: 10 or more countries visited

If you don't think 10 is an achievable number, consider the following partial list of novelists and their country of birth that are "foreign" to me:

Roberto Bolano - Chile
Umberto Ecco - Italy
Carlos Fuentes - Mexico
Amos Oz - Israel
Geraldine Brooks - Australia
Antonio Munoz Molina - Spain
Mikkel Birkegaard - Denmark
Paulo Coelho - Brazil
Henning Mankell - Sweden
Mario Vargas Llosa - Peru

Keep in mind that the list above doesn't mention even one of the "classics:" Alexandre Dumas (France), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Jane Austen (England), or James Joyce (Ireland), to name just a few. So the problem won't be finding enough authors, but rather paring the list down to a manageable number.

While there are no prizes for successfully completing this challenge, I can assure you that as a reader you will gain great satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. I may even post a list of the Marco Polo-level folks in a 2011 year end blog, if you send me your names.

Happy New Year, and happy reading.

A Big Resolution: The 2011 Chunkster Challenge

2010-12-29T09:36:00.000-06:00

The start of each new year always brings new resolutions, challenges, and goals; the most common resolutions involve dieting, exercising, or some other painful pursuit. This year, why not set an enjoyable goal in addition to those unpleasant ones? And what's more enjoyable than reading a really big book?

Registration is now open for the 2011 Chunkster Challenge (click the link for the sign-up page). This challenge is, simply put, all about reading fat books (or thick, chunky, stout...whatever word you prefer). The Challenge runs from February 1, 2011 through January 31, 2012. These are the guidelines:

What is a Chunkster:

A Chunkster is 450 pages or more of ADULT fiction or nonfiction ... A Chunkster should be a challenge.

A Few Rules:

No Audio books allowed
No e-Books allowed
No Short Stories and Essay collections
No need to list your books ahead of time

Levels of Participation:

The Chubby Chunkster - this option is for the reader who wants to dabble in large tomes, but really doesn't want to commit to much more than that. four Chunksters is all you need to finish this challenge.
The Plump Primer - this option is for the slightly heavier reader who wants to commit to six Chunksters over the next twelve months.
Do These Books Make my Butt Look Big? - this option is for the reader who can't resist bigger and bigger books and wants to commit to six Chunksters from the following categories: 2 books which are between 450 - 550 pages in length; 2 books which are 551 - 750 pages in length; 2 books which are GREATER than 750 pages in length.
Mor-book-ly Obese - This is for the truly out of control chunkster. For this level of challenge you must commit to eight or more Chunksters, of which three must be 750 pages or more. You know you want to.....go on and give in to your cravings.

For a list of some of the books that fit this challenge, see the book suggestions page.

I know the rules say there is no need to list your books ahead of time, but if I don't there will be no accountability, so here are the ones I plan to finish during the challenge:

1. Ulysses (maybe doing it as part of a challenge will help me actually finish the thing)
2. Drood
3. Wolf Hall
4. The Secret History
5. Queen Margot
6. A Conspiracy of Paper
7. Gone With the Wind
8. Middlemarch
9. The Library of Shadows

The "Flabbergasted" Trilogy: A Review

2010-12-26T13:16:00.000-06:00

The so called "Christian fiction" genre has grown steadily over the past several years, boosted by the fact that stores devoted solely to Christian books have been opening as fast as other brick-and-mortar bookstores have been closing. The problem with most of these Christian novels is that while they do have religious overtones and far less sex, language, and violence than mainstream fiction, they are typically not very well-written stories. One notable exception is the Flabbergasted trilogy by Ray Blackston.

Flabbergasted is Blackston's debut novel, and it gives the name to the trilogy that ultimately followed. Set in Greenville, South Carolina, Flabbergasted is one of the best beach novels I have ever come across. The characters are vividly drawn and definitely grow on you as narrator Jay Jarvis and his friends navigate the Southern singles scene by, of all things, visiting various church singles Sunday school classes. Not a bad idea for those tired of the online dating sites.

I was well into the book before I realized that it fell into the "Christian fiction" description, because unlike many others of its kind, it was not dogma converted into a novel. And when the subject of salvation did finally appear, it was written with humor and subtlety, something many Christian writers (and preachers) lack. From girls who church-hop looking for husbands to missionaries with a fondness for throwing food at people, this is an entertaining group of characters, not some fictionalized hellfire-and-brimstone sermon.

The second book in the series is A Delirious Summer. The premise is similar to Flabbergasted, but with a twist. The narrator this time is Neil Rucker, a missionary on furlough for the summer looking for a wife in the wilds of Greenville, where he encounters many of the same people Jay Jarvis met in the first book. He quickly finds that Carolina beaches may be even more dangerous than the Amazon jungle, and watching this young man try to navigate the Greenville social scene is a lot of fun. Allie, Darcy, and Alexis form one of the most hilarious (if sometimes dangerous) trios I've read recently.

The final novel in the series is Lost in Rooville, and it is here that Blackston falls a little flat. For most of the book the characters are lost in the Australian Outback, and while there are entertaining parts, taking the setting outside of South Carolina hurts the story somewhat. We do get to see the resolution of these myriad relationships that started in the first too books, however, and that combined with the familiar and likable characters makes it worth reading.

So if you're looking for some well-written, funny, and sometimes enlightening novels for those long winter nights, check out the Flabbergasted trilogy, particularly the first two books. If nothing else, you'll never look at dating the same way again.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-20T17:36:00.000-06:00

A Christmas video...great song, great band.

Hope everyone has a great holiday. Back to the book reviews after Christmas.

The World's Most Beautiful Bookstores

2010-12-18T08:36:00.004-06:00

On this Saturday before Christmas I thought I would give the bookstore lovers out there a few ideas for their 2011 vacation destinations. If you're looking for a bookstore pilgrimage, try any (or all) of these three:

El Ateneo - Buenos Aires

El Ateneo Bookstore originally opened in 1919 as a theater named Teatro Gran Splendid. In its configuration as a theater it seated over 1000 people, and was converted into a cinema in the late 1920s. In 2000 it was leased by a bookstore conglomerate and was renovated for used as a bookshop. It is estimated that over 1 million people visit the store each year. Interestingly, the former theater boxes now serve as small reading rooms. This may be the most beautiful bookstore on the planet, and is one of the many reasons to travel to Buenos Aires.

Selexyz Dominicanen - Maastricht, Netherlands

This amazing store is housed in an 800-year-old, former Dominican church that was being used to store bicycles. It is the perfect use for the building, transforming it into a Cathedral of Books and a must-see for book lovers traveling in the Netherlands.

Livraria Lello - Porto, Portugal

Unlike the two previously mentioned bookstores, Livaria Lello is not in a building converted from other uses; it has been a bookshop since 1881. It has a beautiful staircase and more wood panels than you'll find in an English country manor. Definitely worth the side trip if you're visiting Lisbon, or anywhere else within driving (or train) distance.

And as a preemptive comment to the legions of Powell's Bookstore (Portland, OR) fans who will feel slighted by the list, Powells is an amazing place...but it's not that beautiful.

A Great Christmas Movie: The Godfather

2010-12-17T10:00:00.000-06:00

In an earlier post on books adapted to film, I wrote that The Godfather may be the only example where the film is clearly as good or better than what was also an outstanding novel. With Christmas a week away, it is worth noting that The Godfather is also a fine Christmas book/movie. Everyone includes Miracle on 34^th Street and It's a Wonderful Life (along with a few newer additions like Scrooged and Elf) on their best holiday films list. But the one that no one seems to include is not only a fine holiday film, but one of the best ever made in any genre.

At first glance, The Godfather may not seem like a typical Christmas classic, what with the Mafia and murders and such, but a closer look reveals that it touches on most of the things that we supposedly care about during this festive time of year, and what we want in our holiday films and books:

1. A Christmas setting. At least part of the film, and in fact one of the most pivotal parts, occurs during the Christmas holidays: the scene early in the film where Don Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) is shot by rival gangsters. At roughly the same time, consigliere Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall) is kidnapped by men from the same crime family that shot the Don, and what is he doing? He's Christmas shopping. Before being released he is taken to a diner near a lot selling Christmas trees. It couldn't be more holiday-friendly if the Grinch walked into the scene with Tiny Tim on his back.

2. Christmas is one of the only times of the year that many people go to church. One of the final scenes in the film show the baptism of the nephew of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino). The scene shows an entire Catholic baptism ritual, in both Latin and English. It doesn't get much more church-like than that, even with the assassination of the heads of the five New York crime Families intercut throughout the baptism.

3. The holidays are about family. We constantly hear about how the holidays are a time for family, and our Christmas films must mirror that. Well, there has never been a film more centered on family than The Godfather. Everything these characters do is done in the name of family, usually to the exclusion of any outsiders. At one point, Michael Corleone warns his brother Fredo (played by John Cazale): "Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever takes sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever." That ranks right up there with "God bless us, everyone" in the Pantheon of holiday sentiments.

So when you sit down this Christmas season to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and Frosty the Snowman, don't forget The Godfather. It's a holiday offer you can't refuse.

Captain Alatriste: A Review

2010-12-16T21:02:00.001-06:00

Acclaimed Spanish novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte is probably most well known for his bestselling novel The Club Dumas (and the ill-advised film version starring Johnny Depp). However, he is also the author of a wonderful series set in 17th century Spain, the first installment of which is titled Captain Alatriste. If you thought the swashbuckling novel died with Alexandre Dumas, think again.

In many ways, Captain Alatriste is almost a Spanish version of The Three Musketeers, combining real history with fictional adventure in a way that both entertains and informs. As with the Dumas classic (and all good historical fiction), true events are often bent to fit the flow of the story, but who really cares? You're not studying for an exam on the Golden Age of Spain; you're escaping the modern world to roam the streets of 1620s Madrid, sword in hand.

Perez-Reverte is a very skilled writer, and his words bring Madrid of 400 years ago to life on every page. In 300 pages he gives us ominous masked figures, Italian assassins, rogue priests, the Inquisition, a war in Flanders, painters, poets, and royalty, and the coolest swordsman this side of Aramis (or was it Porthos?).

The plot conforms to the traditional swashbuckling adventure tale: the famous but down on his luck soldier Captain Diego Alatriste is hired by three mysterious (yet obviously important) men to murder two Englishmen who have traveled to Madrid. When Alatriste and his fellow brigand (the aforementioned Italian assassin) encounter the pair, Alatriste is so impressed by the fact that his opponent asks that his friend be spared (while asking no quarter for himself), he stops the Italian from killing the other Englishman and then leads the pair to safety. This good deed earns Alatriste both gratitude and enmity from some surprising people, and how he navigates his way through the maze of alliances keeps the pages turning.

The pace of the story is handled expertly; there are breaks in the action at just the right points, and the action returns before the narrative has a chance to become tedious. Alatriste is a flawed hero, but he is a hero nonetheless, a man who holds to his standards of loyalty and honor in a time when allegiances shifted with the wind. And the fight scenes are so realistic you can almost hear the clash of steel on steel.

Captain Alatriste sold more than one million copies in Spain alone, and it has become an international bestseller as well; the five installments that follow it have also been hugely successful worldwide. So if you enjoy adventure tales along the lines of The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, you will certainly not be disappointed by Captain Alatriste.

Now into the fray...

The Thirteenth Tale: A Review

2010-12-13T15:36:00.000-06:00

I have to admit at the outset that I doubted Diane Setterfield’s debut novel The Thirteenth Tale could live up to the hype surrounding it. In various reviews it had been compared to everything from Dickens to the Bronte sisters to Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind (this seemed the most outrageous claim to me, loving that novel as I do). After reading it I can honestly say that it lives up to the hype.

I am by no means saying that Setterfield is Dickens, nor that The Thirteenth Tale is The Shadow of the Wind. Neither is true, and Setterfield never claimed this for herself or her novel. But in a world where we love to stuff people, books, and everything else into neat little categories, invoking these literary greats when talking about The Thirteenth Tale is understandable, because it is one beautiful read.

This is one of those novels that literally has everything you could want jammed into its 416 pages, and yet it all works. There is mystery and history and ghosts and danger and romance and books and feral twins and even two heroines, and all of it weaves together perfectly. Maybe best of all, you won’t guess the ending midway through (I thought I had…wrong). And yes, in that list of things a few sentences ago I included "feral twins;" got your attention now?

The publisher’s blurb on the inside flap of the book says: "The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading…a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied upon the shores of your everyday life." That’s one bold guarantee, but Setterfield delivers.

This is the kind of book that deserves to be read in front of a crackling fireplace in a comfy chair over a long weekend; a storm raging outside would be a nice addition, but isn’t critical. What is critical is that you make sure there are no pressing items on your calendar, because you won’t get to them once you start this book. It is a literary escape of the very best kind.

Early in the novel, there is an exchange between the two main characters, the elderly reclusive author Vida Winter and her young, naive, would-be biographer Margaret Lea:

"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."

Vida shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."

Vida is indeed one hell of a storyteller, and so is Diane Setterfield.

On Re-Reading Books

2010-12-12T11:39:00.000-06:00

Late last night (or early this morning, depending on your point of view) I reread Helene Hanff's wonderful book 84 Charing Cross Road (you can see my review of it here). After I was finished, a thought occurred to me: why did I just read a book (slim though this volume is) that I've read at least ten times before, when there are so many other books out there I haven't read yet?

It doesn't seem all that strange when we watch a favorite movie so many times we can quote the dialogue word-for-word, or when we listen to the same song or album repeatedly. But with books it is a bit different. Watching films and listening to music are essentially passive forms of entertainment; with a book there is a serious commitment of time, and the inability to do anything else while reading. You can use a power saw or fry chicken and listen to Beatles at the same time; try doing those things while reading A Farewell to Arms and you may end up in the hospital.

I believe there are several reasons we go back to the same books over the years. For one, we know what we're getting. There is nothing worse than spending hours or days reading a book only to find out it wasn't really worth the time, especially if the ending was a disappointment (for a good example, see my review of The Historian here). With a book you've read and loved, you know you will not be disappointed.

Another thing about rereading a well-loved book is that in many ways it is like visiting an old friend. I find that the books I tend to read more than once have especially strong and well-written characters in addition to a good story. Spending time with these characters again is like running into an old college roommate. You may not want want to live with them again, but it's enjoyable spending a few hours together.

Finally, the books I reread almost always give me something new each time I read them. Whether it's a passage I somehow didn't catch before, or an event that speaks to me in a new way, there's always something fresh about them. For example, I have read The Razor's Edge every year for more than 25 years, and each time I get something new out of it. The book hasn't changed, but my life has, and the novel reaches me in ways at 45 that it never could have at 20.

So while I encourage everyone to read as many books as they possibly can (it's the key to a well-rounded life), be sure to take the time to go back and read the books you loved again. They'll wait for you and welcome you home every time.

Christmas Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Book Collector

2010-12-09T19:28:00.018-06:00

As everyone knows, books make a great Christmas gift: they're portable, don't require 12 AAA batteries, and you don't have to stay up all night putting them together. There is no limit to the choices you have, either. From coffee table books to a favorite athlete's biography to the history of the Boer War, there's something for every taste and interest.

For the serious book collector on your list the choice of gifts is equally wide open, but you'll need to work a little harder. While your 17-year-old nephew may be satisfied with the new autobiography from Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, your bibliophile aunt probably won't, even if she did rock out to "Sympathy for the Devil" at Altamont back in '69.

What follows are a few ideas sure to warm the heart of the book collector on your list. Some are truly collectibles, while some are simply books any bibliophile would likely enjoy.One thing worth noting is that for books to be collectible you should always get first printings of first editions, and if they are signed by the author the value only goes up; for these copies check AbeBooks, Biblio, or Alibris.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1 by Mark Twain. This is the first in a planned three-volume set that, following Twain's wishes, was not to be released until 100 years after his death. Unlike a typical biography, this one meanders and rabbit-trails back and forth through the periods of Twain's life, with both humorous and insightful results. A must for any Twain fan.

Book Finds: How to Find, Buy, and Sell Used and Rare Books (3^rd Edition) by Ian C. Ellis. This is the one time a later edition is better than an early one. Book Finds is a crash-course on book collecting that is valuable to novices and seasoned collectors alike. It covers everything from how to identify a first edition to grading the condition of a book. It also gives sound advice on both buying and selling and includes a list of what the author believes are the 1000 most collectible books as of the time of the 3^rd Edition's release in 2006. The best thing about Book Finds is that it is written in a very readable style, in spite of the technical aspect of some of the information.

Subterranean Press Limited Editions. For the collector who loves the horror or fantasy genres, the specialty publishing house Subterranean Press has high quality signed limited editions of popular titles by well-known authors (from Jim Butcher to Ray Bradbury) at an affordable price. These are not to be confused with true first editions of these titles, but they are highly sought after by collectors nonetheless.

Heart-Shaped Box (signed) by Joe Hill. Unless you've been hibernating for the past couple of years, you know that Joe Hill's real name is Joe Hill King, son of Stephen King, and if his first few releases are any indication, he should have a run of success that will eventually rival his dad's. Signed first editions of Heart-Shaped Box are already selling for $70 at the low end, and when you consider that the average price of Stephen King's first novel Carrie in a signed first edition is $3000 and up, $70 will look like a great investment a few years from now. And just for the record, Heart-Shaped Box is a great read.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee. The San Francisco author who started as a clerk at a San Jose bookstore during his freshman year of college and continued in either book selling or as a publisher's sales rep for the next thirty years gives us a glimpse into the world of the bookseller that few knew existed. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop takes the reader on a fascinating journey from the first papyrus scrolls and the great Library of Alexandria through the e-book and mega-chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble. Mixed throughout this 3000-year odyssey are Buzbee's own journey, his love of books, and some laugh-out-loud moments. By the time you finish the book, you will definitely want to sneak a peek into the back room of your local bookstore, hoping to see some of the things he has seen.

Booked to Die by John Dunning. All of the books in the mystery series featuring Denver cop-turned- rare book dealer Cliff Janeway are wonderful, but the first is still the best. It is a rare combination of murder-mystery and real-world information on books and book collecting. This is one you can give in paperback as a stocking-stuffer if your book-crazy loved one has never read it. But if you want to go the extra mile for a signed first edition, be prepared to pay. The first print run was only 6,500 copies (compared, for example, to the 12 million first run of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), so the book was scarce right out of the gate in 1992. A signed copy will cost anywhere from $700 up to $2500 depending on condition. Feel free to buy two and have Santa bring me one of them.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I will recommend this book until the day I die, and then I'll be buried with a copy. It touches on such diverse topics as forbidden love, the Spanish Civil War, and the innate need we have for books. It layers all of these things on the mystery of why a disfigured man is burning all of the copies of books by Julian Carax, an obscure author whose novel, The Shadow of the Wind, was discovered by main character Daniel Sempere when he was 10 years old. But be sure you have a lot of free time when you start this one; I stayed up all night reading the last 250 pages. Signed first editions can be found for around $200, but this is one book that every collector needs to have, signed or not.

If none of these choices sound quite right for your collector's Christmas stocking, you can always pick up a nice first printing of The Sun Also Rises for around $20,000 or a signed The Great Gatsby for $17,000. It's easily worth the price to (carefully) hold a piece of literary history in your hands. Just don't be upset when you only get socks or mittens in return; Christmas is about giving, after all.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

2010-12-08T09:00:00.000-06:00

When is the last time you wrote someone a letter? Not an e-mail or text message, a real, handwritten with pen and paper, mailed in a stamped envelope letter. That's what I thought. And while this may seem an odd question to pose on a blog about books and reading, I think that they actually go quite well together.

We have become so addicted to instant communication that the very idea of writing someone a letter seems as ancient as 8-track tapes (if you don't know what those are, ask your mom). Even the speed of text messages and e-mails isn't fast enough for some people, giving rise to a host of abbreviations that I can't even begin to keep up with. And whether we realize it or not, there is a great danger in the loss of the letter.

The danger is that we will become the first generation in history to leave no written record of ourselves. If George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Ernest Hemingway had only used e-mail, would we have the same record of them that we possess through their letters and journals today? If Jefferson had sent text messages to Adams, think what would have been lost to history.

I realize the irony of saying this as I type an article that people I have never met will read. But will anyone go to the trouble of printing the article and filing it away for posterity? Not likely. Because it's just one of possibly hundreds they'll at least scan over the course of the day. It may have good information, and they may even put some of it to use, but no one will keep the article.

Even if they did, it is still not the same as a letter. A letter is a personal thing, even more now because we receive so few of them. They matter because they are personal in an increasingly disconnected world, and because they take time and effort (just like reading a book...see, the two can go together).

Here are a few suggestions for getting your letter writing started, and at the same time leaving a tangible, personal record that you really existed:

1. Choose a few friends or family members who are most likely to agree to begin a written correspondence with you. While it is not critical that someone respond to your letters, it helps if you have an actual correspondence going. This worked quite well with a friend of mine until I moved to a house only a few blocks from hers. It makes more sense if there's a little distance involved.

2. Use good stationery and a quality pen. Don't just scribble off a note like you're making a grocery list. This has its place, of course, but not in this instance. Take the time to make your writing legible, something we have done less of since the proliferation of computers.

3. Write about what's happening in your life, but try to leave out the mundane things we often include in text messages and e-mails. Use this opportunity to delve into deeper things, either about the world, or your relationship with the person you're writing to, or just about yourself. If, for example, your great-grandson someday reads these letters, you wouldn't want him to think great-grandpa was nothing more than a boring complainer.

4. While many of your letters will go unanswered, keep writing them. You will ultimately derive as much pleasure from writing the letters as you will receiving one in return. Be prepared, however, to receive e-mails in response to your letters. It takes a while to change people's habits.

In the end, one of the greatest benefits of letter writing is that, like keeping a daily journal, it forces you to slow down and think about the events of the day and your part in them, and all of us can benefit from slowing down a little. So think of someone you care about, turn off your computer, and write them a letter. You'll both be glad you did.

Best Opening Lines

2010-12-07T15:38:00.000-06:00

I realized this morning that my last two posts contained the first lines of two great novels, which got me to thinking about great opening lines from other books. What follows is certainly not an exhaustive list; it is simply a list of my favorite opening sentences, almost all from novels I have actually read (this means leaving out classics like "Call me Ishmael" from Moby Dick). Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments section:

"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time." - Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

"Boog warned me about Washington, but until I saw the rich lady set her pugs on the dinner table, I didn’t take him seriously." – Larry McMurtry, Cadillac Jack

"Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn." – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." – Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

"I guess by now there can't be too many people anywhere who haven't heard about Billy Clyde Puckett, the humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football." – Dan Jenkins, Semi-Tough

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving." - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"Jude had a private collection." – Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

"Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path had been lost." – Dante, Inferno

"Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V of his mouth." – Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story." – Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel’s Game

"Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table." – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

"It was a pleasure to burn." - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up." – Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Oprah Scares the Dickens Out of Her Book Club

2010-12-06T20:57:00.000-06:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...and for the millions of readers who religiously follow Oprah Winfrey's book club recommendations, it is now the scariest of times. Her latest selection is not something expected like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom; this time she's gone double retro, picking Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities AND Great Expectations. All across America, readers are breaking out in cold sweats, flashing back to their 10th grade English class.

Sure, everyone says they've read Dickens. In reality, most people only know him through the various film versions of A Christmas Carol and the Cliff Notes of Oliver Twist that helped them squeak by with a C in English Lit 101. My advice to those who are hesitant to take this challenge: stop worrying and just do it. Rather than having a feeling of dread, we should all applaud this choice of two of Dickens' finest novels.

Charles Dickens is one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and although some of the language and customs in his books can be hard to follow at times, his humor, social commentary, and amazing characters are all timeless. Dickens was also the first true entertainment superstar; his novels were serialized in newspapers and magazines, causing circulation to skyrocket by their presence alone, and then still sold in huge quantities when later bound in book form. People lined up outside his publisher's office waiting for the latest installment of his most current novel, and thousands on both sides of the Atlantic attended the readings he gave from his books. That's right...people paid to listen to him read.

So while I often don't agree with Oprah's picks (the Eckhart Tolle period was particularly tragic), this time I believe she hit a home run. And if, as has been the case with her other picks, millions of people end up reading Charles Dickens because of her recommendation, lovers of great literature everywhere owe the lady a debt of gratitude.

Dickens for the holidays...truly the best of times.

The Historian: A Review

2010-12-05T10:20:00.000-06:00

W. Somerset Maugham opened his classic novel The Razor's Edge with the line "I have never begun a novel with more misgiving," and that sentiment certainly applied to me as I began reading Elizabeth's Kostova's novel The Historian. Having now finished her mammoth debut novel, the feeling really hasn't gone away.

The premise of the novel had grabbed me from the first time I read the publisher's blurb: a search across Europe, spanning three generations, in an effort to discover if Vlad Dracula, the historical 15th century impaler, might somehow still be alive. The market has been flooded with vampire books over the past several years (particularly in the Young Adult market), but a really good Dracula novel is always entertaining, and that was my hope for The Historian. Well, it was good...and it also wasn't.

As noted above, Kostova started with a really good premise. Stories with exotic locales, danger, and tried-and-true villains are typically a good way to spend a rainy afternoon. She also has a particular talent for historical detail; I came away from this book feeling like I was ready for a final exam on 15th century Eastern European history. And the clues that the main characters find along the way do a commendable job of moving the plot forward.

However, it is very difficult to care about these characters, given their two-dimensional limitations. Where Kostova excels as a historian (which is where her background apparently lies) she fails at creating characters we can relate to and empathize with. In addition, the dialog fails except when relating historical events, and to make matters worse, the book is nearly 650 pages long; it would have been better at half that length.

The biggest problem with this particular "Dracula" novel, however, is a complete lack of both Dracula and any type of suspense. At no point in the book was I even mildly alarmed, let alone actually scared, and a Dracula that's not scary is like chicken-fried steak without gravy: it may look like the real thing, but it's not.

I normally write reviews of books I think readers will enjoy. In this case I felt compelled to warn readers not to spend 650 pages worth of their valuable time on a book that is simply not worth it. If you want Dracula (or vampires in general), you're better off sticking with Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sometimes the original is still the best.

Best Villain Poll and the Hawk vs Ranger Result

2010-12-03T09:12:00.001-06:00

About 10 days ago I wrote a post about the debate I've encountered as to which literary sidekick is cooler/tougher/sexier: Hawk from Robert Parker's Spenser series or Ranger from Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books (I also threw in Sherlock Holmes' partner just for fun). The results are in:

Hawk: 47%

Ranger: 38%

Dr. Watson: 16%

I think the best thing to come out of this experiment has to be the number of readers who had never heard of Hawk or Spenser or read any of Robert Parker's novel's, but are now interested in doing so. I also got a few complaints because I did not include Robert Crais' character Joe Pike.

Now for the next poll (posted to right side of the page). Having considered cool/tough/sexy good guys, perhaps it's time now to consider villains, but not simply bad guys (there are lots of those), but genius bad guys. I have selected the first three that came to mind: Professor Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis), Diogenes Pendergast (from the Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child novels), and Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter.

Much like the way I chose Hawk over Ranger, I asked myself a simple question: if I could choose only one criminal mastermind to help me corner the market on all things evil, who would I want? Oddly enough, it's the character about whom the least is written: Moriarty. After all, Sherlock Holmes did call him the Napoleon of Crime.

And as with Hawk and the Spenser books, if you've never read any of the Preston/Child novels, you're definitely missing out.

May the best...I mean worst...man win.

The Best Selling Book of All Time

2010-11-27T19:12:00.000-06:00

If you ask people to name the best selling book of all time, some will say "The DaVinci Code" or one of the Harry Potter books, but most will correctly name the Bible as the all-time best seller. Amazingly, in spite of the great sales numbers, it is also the least-read book in America today.

Don't get me wrong; most people in America own a Bible, and a large number own more than one. But to borrow the line from a less biblical question, 90% of people don't read the Bible, and the other 10% lie about it. Even many regular churchgoers in the Bible Belt only dust their copy off long enough to carry into Sunday services; they then toss it into the back seat of their SUV until the next week.

We weren't always biblically illiterate; only a generation ago most Americans were at least familiar with the majority of the Bible stories, if not the theology. That's not true anymore, and if you think I'm exaggerating, consider the following responses to some simple Bible knowledge questions:

In the first book of the Bible, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, "Am I my brother's son?"

Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients.

Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
Samson slew the Philistines with the Axe of the Apostles.

Lot's wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire at the night.
Noah's wife was Joan of Ark.

It was a miracle when Jesus rose from the dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.

Keep in mind that these responses came from children ranging from elementary to high school, most of them in a Catholic school. How much worse would the average "man on the street" do, since many can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map of the U.S.? But that's another rant for another day.

I raise the issue of Biblical illiteracy because it goes hand in hand with our growing illiteracy overall. Whatever your religious affiliation, the fact is that many of our laws are based on the Bible, and much of the great art and literature of the Western world was inspired by the Bible. Not knowing anything at all about the Bible is as unacceptable as knowing nothing about the Constitution, Shakespeare, or Michelangelo (all three of these owe the Bible at least some debt for their content).

So here's a challenge: try reading the Bible for 15 minutes a day, focusing on things like the lives of Moses, David, and Jesus. Try either the New International Version or the New Living Translation (rather than the King James Version) as both are extremely readable. And before you misunderstand my goal, I'm not trying to convince anyone to convert; rather, I'm trying to convince everyone to read.

Whether you're Anglican or Agnostic, Buddhist or Baptist, I think you will find that by reading this best-selling book, your literary, historical, and cultural literacy will improve considerably. Plus it's got wars and romance and treachery and heartbreak and redemption, just like a good novel. And if you read close enough, you may even learn the amazing fact that while God isn't a Republican or a Democrat, he is a reader. After all, he gave us a book.

Hawk or Ranger: Who is Cooler/Tougher/Sexier?

2010-11-20T19:38:00.000-06:00

There's a debate that has come up occasionally among my mystery-loving friends (typically the females) as to which sidekick is cooler/tougher/sexier: Hawk from Robert Parker's Spenser series or Ranger from Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books. Now I actually have a way of determining an answer, albeit a totally non-scientific one.

I have posted a poll on the right side of this page that allows you to vote on your favorite: Hawk, the mysterious, wise-cracking, semi-criminal, always dangerous heartbreaker who has saved Spenser on more than one occasion; or Ranger, the mysterious, serious, ex-military, always dangerous heartbreaker who saves Stephanie Plum in almost every book.

I understand that the results could be skewed by the fact that many younger readers may not be familiar with Hawk. If that's the case, go right now and buy some of Parker's books. You won't be sorry.

As for my own vote, I made the decision this way: if I was trapped in an alley in Hell's Kitchen with only 4 bullets left and the Westies bearing down on me, who would I want by my side (at this point who's sexier really doesn't seem all that important)? Hawk, 100 times out of 100.

And just so the readers who like their sidekick a little more Victorian don't feel left out, I added a third choice to the poll: Dr. Watson of Sherlock Holmes fame.

May the best man win.

Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day

2010-11-19T19:54:00.000-06:00

Here's an idea (and a link) that I think is worth sharing. Saturday December 4th is the first annual "Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day."

Organizer Jenny Milchman explained the goal of the event in an interview with Shelf Awareness: "We all know how much children love books. We've all heard them beg for a story, and seen their faces light up as they listen to one. But we think less about how a child would love the place so many books come from.

"A bookstore can lead a child to a book, with guidance and interest from booksellers, in a way that no website or digital device can. It's a place to read, dream, and play. A world of stimulation, and a refuge in a stimulating world.

"In order for bookstores to thrive and flourish in the future, children have to experience the unique pleasures they offer today."

She's summed it up much better than I could, and it's hard to believe no one thought of doing this before. Let all of your friends (and your local booksellers) know about this event.

Remembering Robert Parker

2010-11-18T19:27:00.000-06:00

It's been almost a year since Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser detective series novels, died at the age of 77. Since 1973 Robert Parker has published 38 Spenser novels (and there are additional completed ones awaiting release), and particularly through the early books single-handedly saved the hardboiled detective legacy of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald.

It is not going too far to say that nearly every author writing detective fiction today owes a debt of gratitude to Robert Parker. Writers from Dennis Lehane to Robert Crais have acknowledged this fact in interviews, and for you Janet Evanovich fans, just understand that Spenser's Hawk paved the way for Stephanie Plum's Ranger.

It is no secret that Robert Parker idolized Raymond Chandler, and in what had to be one of the greatest experiences of his life was asked to finish the manuscript for "Poodle Springs," a novel begun by Raymond Chandler before his death in 1959. He later wrote "Perchance to Dream," the sequel to Chandler's classic "The Big Sleep." His work on both of these novels is only fitting, as Parker long ago joined the ranks of the Big Three of Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald.

I first started reading the Spenser novels over 25 years ago, and since that time the trio of Spenser, Hawk, and Susan Silverman have been my companions through long winter nights and lazy summer days. Through them I discovered the city of Boston, not necessarily as it is but as Spenser (and Parker) saw it, which is likely better by far. And I identified with Spenser's unique combination of romantic cynicism.

Various critics have said that some of the books, particularly in the mid-1980s, were not up to the standard set by the earlier novels, but that misses the point entirely. While some of the plots were better than others, what readers cared about was the characters; over the course of the series we got to really know and care about them, and each new book was like a reunion with an old friend. The fact that there will be no new reunions after the final books he wrote are released is still hard to fathom.

I never met Mr. Parker, but I feel I got to know him somewhat in the only way one can ever really know an author: through his characters, particularly the inimitable Spenser. He said in an interview once that there were a number of similarities he shared with his famous character: they were both Korean War veterans, and both loved baseball, jazz, and fine food.

"He does a great many things I don't believe," Parker once said in an Associated Press interview. "I don't know if he's more violent than I am. But he's more willing to enact it than I am. Let's just say we're not dissimilar."

So to Robert Parker I say thank you, for everything. While he may be gone, readers and fans can be comforted by the fact that Spenser lives on, just like Hammett's Sam Spade and Chandler's Philip Marlowe. And through him a part of Robert Parker will live on, both for those of us who grew up reading his words and for generations not yet born. I can't think of a much better legacy than that.

84 Charing Cross Road: A Review

2010-11-14T23:03:00.000-06:00

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of the publication of what may be the most unlikely New York Times bestseller ever: Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road. It is not even a book in the conventional sense, but rather a collection of letters exchanged by Ms. Hanff and London bookseller Frank Doel (and other staff members) between 1949 and 1969. The fact that it is such a slim volume (only 96 pages) makes its runaway success in 1970 even more amazing.

But 84 Charing Cross Road is a perfect example of why you can't judge a book by its cover, its length, or the unorthodox nature of its content. Ultimately what makes the book work is what makes any book work, whether fiction or nonfiction: the relationships between the characters. And for readers today, the way the relationships develop are not simply interesting in themselves, but also because of the manner in which they happen. In an instant gratification, Twitter and Facebook world, the often leisurely pace of the letters between Helene and Frank are a window into an era we will sadly never see again.

The correspondence begins in 1949 as Ms. Hanff is searching for clean copies of used books she is unable to find near her home in New York City. This alone will seem strange to readers accustomed to using the Internet to find any book ever published, but before the advent of eBay and Amazon.com, books that went out of print could only be found through used and antiquarian booksellers, who themselves had to conduct exhaustive and time-consuming searches. She writes to London booksellers Marks & Co. requesting certain titles she cannot locate, and thus begins the 20 years of correspondence that makes up the book.

Helene Hanff was a prolific writer during her life, but her letters in 84 Charing Cross Road prove that she may have missed her true calling as a stand-up comic. Many of her letters are laugh-out-loud funny, made more so when juxtaposed with Frank Doel's typically proper and reserved English responses. Their exchange over a mix-up regarding a Latin New Testament is priceless, especially given that Hanff was Jewish.

The books she orders are a veritable Masters class in Literature, ranging from Chaucer to Virginia Woolf to Jane Austen. A lover of books could do worse than simply reading all of the titles mentioned in Hanff and Doel's correspondence. But had this just been an exchange of book orders and invoices it would not have grabbed the public's imagination in such a way that the book is still loved 40 years later, as well as having been adapted into both a play and a film. Helene goes beyond being a simple customer, becoming involved in the lives of the store's staff, celebrating their joys, mourning their losses, and caring for their physical needs in a very real way.

84 Charing Cross Road is at its core a book about lovers of books, and is at the same time one of the funniest and most touching books you'll ever read. Those who have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (a novel also comprised of only letters between the characters) will see how much that best-seller owes 84 Charing Cross Road. I am thankful their correspondence came at a time when people both wrote and kept letters; such a book would likely never have been possible in the era of e-mail, and that would have been a very great loss.

Some Thoughts on Audio Books

2010-11-07T20:33:00.001-06:00

It may come as a surprise to those who know my disdain (or more honestly, hatred) for e-books and e-reading devices that I actually like audio books. It really shouldn’t be surprising, however, given that e-books and audio books are two very different things. Rather than go off on my usual anti-Kindle, anti-Nook rant I will confine this post to the positives of audio books.

First of all, one thing audio books don’t do is rob authors of royalty payments. Since they actually cost more than the hardcover version, authors make more on audio books than any other format. These tend to sell fewer copies as a result, mainly being bought by libraries, but the author gets paid nonetheless.

Audio books are also great for those who, like me, have a long commute to work every day. Rather than spend 3 hours round-trip listening to talk radio idiots or the same old sports news, I can use the time to reduce my ever-growing reading list. And for those working in the ubiquitous cubicle farms of corporate America, and audio book can stave off death by boredom in a way nothing else can.

If you’re in doubt about purchasing a particular book, an audio book checked out from your local library can either confirm that it’s worth a hardcover purchase, that you should wait on the paperback, or that you should pass altogether. But you have to be careful that the book just doesn’t seem bad because the person reading the audio book isn’t that good.

Which brings me to the thing I love most about audio books. I had already read all of the Harry Potter books, Kerouac’s On the Road, and The Great Gatsby before I ever listened to them on audio. But listening to Jim Dale, Matt Dillon, and Tim Robbins (respectively) read these great books added a whole new dimension to my experience of the books.

So if you’ve never done so, give audio books a try. They can be a very rewarding addition to your reading life.

The Film Version of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" Will Boost Reading

2010-11-04T10:15:00.000-05:00

Two weeks from now Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, the seventh in the phenomenally successful Harry Potter film series, will be released to eager fans who have waited 16 months since the last film. Television, radio, and the Internet are awash with clips from the film and interviews with the stars, particularly "The Trio": Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson.

Make no mistake, the Harry Potter franchise is big business in a way never seen before. The books have sold over 400 million copies, and once the film series is completed in 2011, the films are expected to have grossed roughly 7 billion dollars. That's not a typo: $7 billion. While the Star Wars films posted huge numbers at the box office, the books that were written afterward dramatizing the films only appealed to a small audience. And while The DaVinci Code (inexplicably) sold a mountain of books, the film was less than spectacular. The Potter franchise is a double hit, made more impressive because this is a series of books and films that has continued to captivate audiences for more than a decade.

What may have been overlooked in the frenzy leading up to the film's release is the effect it is likely having on reading this fall. The Harry Potter book series may have wrapped up with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows three years ago, but millions of kids, teens, and adults are re-reading the book prior to the November 18th opening of the movie, and many others are reading it for the first time. Given the fact that Deathly Hallows is a 780-plus page book, this is no small feat.

Furthermore, the book/film relationship has sparked an ongoing debate among readers over what has been left out of the film adaptations, what has been changed, and whether or not it's a good thing. Hopefully, such a debate will move readers beyond the fairly simple fan loyalty stage to a point of realization that many films started out as even better novels. The film versions of The Maltese Falcon, The Godfather, and The Lord of the Rings were indeed classics; the books were no less so.

As good as the Potter films are, the books remain king in this relationship. For more than a dozen years, J.K. Rowling and her boy wizard have done something many thought impossible: they made reading cool again, for adults as well as children. Prior to 1997, who would have imagined that millions of children would attempt to read an 800-page book in one sitting, or that their parents would be anxiously waiting for them to finish reading so they could start?

Each year a new wave of these children discover the books, sometimes before seeing any of the films, sometimes after, and often just before the release of a new Potter film. With the Harry Potter books, Rowling opened up a world of imagination to a generation of kids who thought for anything to be entertaining it had to have a plug, a screen, or an Internet connection. And these kids (and hopefully their parents as well) will keep reading, if only in the hope of finding another book or series that grabs them the way Harry Potter did.

Even if Rowling never writes another word, people everywhere who love books owe her a debt of gratitude for making reading a novel something we, and more importantly our children, look forward to. The newest Potter film may or may not be the best in the series so far, but it certainly has brought attention back to the books once more. That's a win-win situation for everyone.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: A Review

2010-10-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

There has never been a more unlikely title for bestselling novel than The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. However, the runaway hit by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece Annie Barrows has captivated readers around the globe in spite of the tongue-twister title; the book spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers' List.

The narrative takes place immediately following World War II in both London and the English Channel island of Guernsey, which was occupied by the Nazis from 1940 through the end of the war. The story centers around Juliet Ashton, an author and columnist in her early thirties, and her correspondence with her publisher, friends and the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a group of islanders who used a love of books as way to survive the hardships of the German occupation.

By itself, the story would have appealed to many readers. What helps turn this book into a publishing mega-hit is that Shaffer and Barrows use a device seldom seen in fiction but used to great effect in books like Helene Hanff's 84 Caring Cross Road and C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters: the entire book consists of letters the characters wrote back and forth to each other.

The beauty of the letters-as-novel device is evident for several reasons. It gives the story a flow that lends to reading large chunks at a time (because there are no chapter breaks). It appeals to the voyeur in all of us; who doesn't love reading someone else's mail? And it makes it easy for the reader to forget that while the characters may have been based in part on real people and events, they aren't real people. As soon as we start believing that the characters really existed, the authors have won us over.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is captivating because of its story of perseverance in wartime and the discovery of love in unexpected places; the hardships the islanders endure actually help keep the story from being mere lighthearted fluff. But at its heart, this is a book about books and the role they play in our lives. It shows that you are never too old to fall in love with the written word, and that you can be dramatically impacted by authors bold old and new. Shaffer and Barrows have certainly accomplished this with their own novel, and in doing so opened up a new world to countless readers.

My Top Five Vampires

2010-10-29T08:22:00.000-05:00

In keeping with the Halloween spirit (no pun intended), I set out to compile a list of my favorite literary vampires. Along the way, I found that vampires tend to make more of an impression on the screen than on the page. Thus, only one of my Top 5 never escaped the pages of his novels, and two are solely film creations.

In any case, we have an ongoing fascination with these kings and queens of the undead, and some portrayals have been quite remarkable. Over the years writers and filmmakers have expanded, altered, and sometimes completely butchered (yes, I mean you, Stephenie Meyer) the vampire legend, but the following stand out for me.

1. Dracula. There's no way to do a list like this without the granddaddy of all vampires at the top. Bram Stoker's novel still stands as both a literary masterpiece and the finest depiction of the cursed Count. Many have tried to capture the essence of this character on-screen, from Gary Oldman's fine performance in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) to George Hamilton in the dreadful Love at First Bite (1979). In the end however, the original is still the best.

2. Selene (Underworld and Underworld:Evolution). Kate Beckinsale's portrayal of a werewolf-hunting death dealer made a whole generation of men rethink the notion that vampires aren't sexy. With a black Lycra bodysuit, blazing pistols, and just enough fangs to be menacing, Selene holds her own with any male vampire around. Her battle with both werewolves and rogue vampires adds an interesting twist to the typical vampire tale.

3. Lestat (Interview with the Vampire). One of the few Tom Cruise roles I actually liked; his film portrayal of Anne Rice's anti-hero was impressive, even to Rice, who initially did not agree with the casting choice. In the novel, Lestat is scary and sad at the same time, not easy for someone with Cruise's limited range. He also gives us the first real portrayal of a homosexual vampire; if you didn't see the attraction between Lestat and Louis (Brad Pitt), you weren't paying much attention.

4. Felix Gomez. Mario Acevedo's vampire-turned-private investigator may not be widely known, but with several novels out in the series, that will change. The titles alone are worth the price of the books: The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, X-Rated Blood Suckers, Jailbait Zombies, etc. Felix is an Iraq war vet (as is Acevedo) who was turned into the undead by an Iraqi vampire. Now he uses his supernatural powers to solve crimes, all the while agonizing over his reluctance to feed on humans. He's a hard case with a heart; think Spenser with fangs.

5. Santanico Pandemonium (From Dusk Till Dawn). Only Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino could create a smokin' hot lead singer of a Tejano rock band of vampires and then talk Salma Hayek into taking the role. And Santanico's last name is well deserved: all hell breaks loose at the end of her song, with the band fanging the customers while Pandemonium sets her sights on making Seth (George Clooney) her undead slave. Forget Ali-Frazier; Selene and Santanico in a bare-knuckle fight would break all pay-per-view records.

And yes, I purposely left off anything remotely related to the Twilight series. As Bram Stoker would tell you, vampires don’t sparkle in the sunlight; they burst into flames and burn to a crisp.

Happy Halloween.

The Coffeehouse Mystery Series: A Review

2010-10-28T07:23:00.000-05:00

If there are two things Americans can't live without, it's coffee and murder. This combination is one of several things that make the Coffeehouse Mystery series by Cleo Coyle so enjoyable. While Cleo Coyle also writes the Haunted Bookshop series under the pen name Alice Kimberly, in reality, both Coyle and Kimberly are the husband and wife team of Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini.

The first book in the Coffeehouse Mystery series, On What Grounds, introduces us to Claire Cosi, the manager of the historic Village Blend coffee house in Greenwich Village and her ex-husband Matteo (Matt) Allegro, an international coffee trader and the Village Blend's coffee buyer. They are an interesting pair, more like Maddie and David from Moonlighting than Nick and Nora Charles.

The Village Blend turns out to be more than a great coffeehouse; it's also a magnet for murder, but at least you can get a good Tall Vanilla Latte before you get put in a body bag. Claire and Matt solve the crime while still slinging double espressos and debating the state of their relationship, all with the help of their slightly eccentric staff and New York homicide detective Mike Quinn.

The plotlines in the Coffeehouse Mystery series tend to follow the standard cozy mystery format, complete with the classic locked-room murder (in the first book) and limited, understated violence. But like most successful series' (Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books come immediately to mind), the Coffeehouse Mystery novels are mainly character-driven. We care about the characters, and are as interested in their interaction while solving the crime as in the solution itself.

There are currently nine titles in the series: On What Grounds, Through the Grinder, Latte Trouble, Murder Most Frothy, Decaffeinated Corpse, French Pressed, Espresso Shot, Holiday Grind, and Roast Mortem. By this point many of these types of mysteries become predictable and repetitive; fortunately this one has not.

The novels are quick reads, and you also get a fun, yet informative, education on all things coffee. The back of the books even contain recipes of some of the deserts and coffee drinks made during the course of the story. By the end of the first book you'll know far more than your local Starbucks barista, and will have a greater appreciation of the greatest drink the world has ever produced.

Five Books for Writers

2010-10-26T09:32:00.000-05:00

My last post encouraged would-be writers to take part in the upcoming National Novel Writing Month. In keeping with that, a review of some of the better books on writing seems in order.

Countless books claim to give indispensable advice to writers on everything from how to create three-dimensional characters to how to get published, and more come out every year. Writer's Digest devotes an entire book club to these books, many of which are not worth the money, or the time, because their "inside information" is nothing more than you learned in 9^th grade English class.

However, there are a few books that every writer should read. Some contain useful nuts-and-bolts information on the craft of writing, and some are more memoir in nature, giving an insight into the writing life itself. Here is a list of must-have books:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. An amazing book, even if you're not a Stephen King fan. Part memoir and part instruction, King excels at both, creating a book that is impossible to put down. He also uses one of his own short stories to demonstrate his process for the thing writers hate most: editing. It's a rare look into the mind of one of the most prolific writers of our times.

Writing Fiction by the Gotham Writer's Workshop. This book packs a lot of great information into its 300 pages. Each chapter tackles a specific aspect of fiction writing (plot, character, etc), and each is written by published authors who are members of the Gotham Writer's Workshop, New York's acclaimed creative writing school. There are points within each chapter at which you are given exercises that allow you immediately put what you've just learned into practice. This interactive approach is much more valuable than the lecture and anecdote format of most books on writing.

Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. This book is so much a part of the culture of writing that most of the time it is simply referred to as "Strunk and White." It's the one most people never opened in college, but for the serious writer, no single book will be more helpful, especially when you begin the editing process. Interestingly, this is also a book highly recommended by Stephen King in his book, On Writing.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. By far the best book on the least-favorite part of the writing process. Editing your own work is extremely difficult, but the advice these two professional editors give will make your editing more effective, if not more fun. There are numerous illustrations for each point they make, all drawn from the hundreds of books Browne and King have edited.

Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa. This is an excellent book, especially for novice writers. Peruvian novelist Llosa gives instruction to the young novelist of the title in the form of twelve letters. The book is wonderfully written, so well in fact that you learn things about the craft of writing without even realizing it at first. Llosa also does something few writing instructors have the guts to: he tells writers to break the "rules." All in all, much more fun than a stuffy textbook. And if you’ve never read Mario Vargas Llosa’s work, but his name seems familiar for some reason, it’s probably because he just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

There are other books on writing that are very good, but you cannot go wrong starting with these five. They cover the full spectrum of the writing life and writing process, and won't take up much space on your bookshelf, either.

National Novel Writing Month

2010-10-24T22:33:00.000-05:00

Every November tens of thousands of would-be novelists take up the challenge of National Novel Writing Month in the attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. As National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, enters its 12th year, let's take a look at this literary phenomenon. And before someone says this is a blog about books, not writing...try having books without authors.

It has been said that virtually everyone dreams of writing a novel at some point in their life. Whether it's the first time they read a Hardy Boy's mystery or Tom Sawyer or Paradise Lost (well, maybe not Paradise Lost), everyone comes to a point while reading that they say to themselves, "I could have written that." For me, the dream started at about eight years old, the first time I read Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigator's series. Most people eventually abandon this dream, along with the dream of being President or an astronaut.

But as evidenced by the steady growth of participants over the years, NaNoWriMo proves that not everyone gives up the dream. It may lay dormant for long periods, but the pull is always there, like a siren calling them toward some distant literary rocks. For me, a harmless web search for writing sites in 2005 brought 30 years of dreaming, wishing, and procrastinating crashing into the scary reality of possibility when I discovered http://www.nanowrimo.org/.

When I first found out about National Novel Writing Month during that web search in October of 2005, I though it was the craziest idea I had ever heard. I had been dreaming of writing a novel since I was a kid, and had been working on one novel off and on for more than 10 years, and these lunatics were suggesting that you could write one in 30 days? I checked out the website, more to prove to myself that it was a ridiculous notion than with the idea of participating. I was completely wrong.

Chris Baty started NaNoWriMo in 1999 in San Francisco with 21 participants. He claims it was partly to have something to do and partly as a way to get dates. In 2009 over 119,000 people participated, with over 21,000 completing 50,000 words in 30 days.

The basics of the "contest" are simple. During the month of November, you write a 50,000-word novel, which comes out to roughly 175 pages. On a daily basis, this is 1667 words per day, which sounds a lot less frightening than 50,000. You must start from scratch (no trying to complete something you've already started), and you cannot, or at least should not, edit any of what you write before you finish; Baty says if you do not silence your inner editor, a legion of guilt monkeys will descend upon you. The goal is to push through to the end, regardless of how bad much of the book will be. When you have conquered actually finishing this rough draft, you can then go back and edit. The way you "win" is to reach 50,000 words by November 30th.

NaNoWriMo 2005 was the breakthrough for me. Just knowing that there were thousands of people around the world hammering away at their keyboards at the same time I was made me feel less alone in the process, and having a set deadline helped me stick to the daily word requirement. After 10 years slogging away, starting and stopping, and never getting anywhere on my own, it pushed me over the top. On November 30, 2005 the first draft of my novel God, Guns, and the Perfect Chicken-Fried Steak was complete, with just over 51,000 words. In November 2006 I finished my second novel, The Candy Man, while continuing the editing of the first. Will either ever make the best-seller's list? Probably not, but that's not the point. (And I have to admit I was a total failure from 2007-2009, not finishing in any of those years...2010 will be different).

This method may not be right for everyone, but if you need a push, this is the way to go. There are forums and encouraging e-mails from Chris Baty, and all over the country local groups meet once a week during November to write together. In some ways, it's like a big party that ends not with a hangover, but with a finished novel. Each year also features guest authors giving words of encouragement throughout the month.

One word of caution, though. As with any writing class (and the contest is essentially a hands-on class on speed novel writing), there are benefits and drawbacks to NaNoWriMo. Writing a novel is a monumental task, especially if you have never gotten beyond page five in spite of years of trying. The daily word-count goal breaks the process down to a more manageable size. Refusing to edit as you write the first draft allows creativity to run amok, whereas re-working the same sentence on page one 50 times will kill creativity in a heartbeat.

It is also a great encouragement to know that thousands of other people around the world are writing at the same time you are. For some, simply writing 50,000 words is enough, no matter how bad the plot, dialogue, and overall quality may be. There are people who have taken part in nearly every National Novel Writing Month contest since 1999. For many, it is a month-long excuse to meet friends at Starbucks while pretending to hammer out a few hundred words. For some it's exactly what Chris Baty originally envisioned: a way to meet girls.

The danger is that for those who do take it seriously, the adrenaline of the speed-writing format can be so addictive, and the camaraderie so strong, that they cannot write any time except November. It's a great way to get past your first novel-length piece of fiction or as a jump-start if you're blocked, but writing is something that's meant to be done every day. It's a way of life, not something done on a seasonal schedule like duck hunting.

If only as a writing exercise, NaNoWriMo is something every writer should do at least once. It is only a starting point in the journey, not the destination itself, but if you're trying to finish a novel for the first time and need a push, there's no better route to go.

The Shadow of the Wind: A Review

2010-10-24T19:36:00.000-05:00

Rarely will a novel be critically acclaimed, a huge commercial bestseller and a cult classic, yet Carlos Ruiz Zafon accomplished this literary hat trick with his novel The Shadow of the Wind. First released in Spanish in 2001, and translated into English in 2004, The Shadow of the Wind is the first of a series of four planned novels revolving around the city of Barcelona. To date, the novel has sold 15 million copies worldwide, and the most common reaction of readers was that they were sad to see the story end. It is one of those books you wish would go on for another 500 pages, and one you buy multiple copies of to give to friends (I gave a copy to my uncle just yesterday).

The novel is the story of Daniel Sempere, who at age 10 is taken by his father, a Barcelona bookseller, to the amazing Cemetery of Forgotten Books. While there he chooses a book called "The Shadow of the Wind" by Julian Carax. He is so enthralled by the novel that as he enters adulthood he sets out to find every book Carax has written, but encounters a sinister obstacle. Every copy of every book the author has written is being tracked down and burned by a disfigured man who bears a striking resemblance to a character in Carax's novel. Daniel's quest to save the remaining copies is intertwined with the story of Barcelona and its recovery from the Spanish Civil War.

But The Shadow of the Wind is much more than a literary mystery. It is a Gothic masterpiece, filled with action, romance, mystery and, of course, books. One reviewer has called it a "love letter to books," because it examines the power of books to change our lives in ways we often don't even realize. One quote from the novel sums this up:

"Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."

This is not something we often consider in our electronic, Kindle e-book reader world. Books, real ink and paper books, matter. They challenge us to examine our inner selves and the world around us, and they can change us, hopefully for the better, while at the same time being a tangible creation, a contract of sorts between writer and reader. The Shadow of the Wind is such a book. It is a novel with a very strong soul, and books like this don't come around nearly often enough. It is a modern-day classic that everyone should read.

Time Was Soft There: A Review

2010-10-21T22:44:00.000-05:00

Jeremy Mercer’s 2005 memoir Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. is a book that in many ways defies conventional classification. It is obviously a memoir – it says so right on the cover – and it is certainly a snapshot of the famous Paris bookshop at the start of the 21^st century. But this entertaining and engaging book is even more than that.

The book chronicles the brief but eventful 9-month period that Canadian crime reporter Jeremy Mercer spent living at Shakespeare & Co., and in that sense it is a memoir. Mercer is a talented storyteller, and there were many points where the book seemed more like a novel than non-fiction. The only flaw in his delivery is a penchant for melodrama, particularly concerning the "death threat" that caused him to flee Canada for Paris in the first place. But the relationships, both good and bad, that he builds with the other staff and residents of the bookstore more than makes up for this.

More than an autobiography though, Time Was Soft There is also both a history and a current view of the bookstore itself. The original Shakespeare & Co. was founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919 and was the home of the "Lost Generation" of American writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce until it was closed by the Nazis in 1941 during the occupation of France. In 1951, George Whitman opened an English-language bookstore in Paris; after seeking Beach's permission he later renamed his store Shakespeare & Co. as well.

It is George Whitman's life story that truly drives Time Was Soft There; it is in many ways more about Whitman than Mercer. Whitman (who still lives at the store, though management of daily operations has passed to his daughter Sylvia) was and is an unabashed socialist, telling Mercer early on that "I run a socialist utopia that Masquerades as a bookstore." This worldview is the reason Whitman has allowed artists, writers, poets, and wayward travelers to live for short periods at the store and share in communal meals for more than 6 decades, with the only requirement being working around the store.

But despite his declarations of Marxist thought, Whitman is a bookman to the core. The lengths to which he goes to keep his beloved bookstore afloat are a testament to his love of books. He is single-minded in a way that few are these days, and the book faithfully shows both the good and bad side of the vagabond-yet-stationary life of both Whitman and his employee/guests.

Jeremy Mercer has given us what may be the final extended look at both George Whitman and Shakespeare & Co. during Whitman's lifetime. In its own small way, Time Was Soft There is a link in a chain extending back to Sylvia Beach's memoir Shakespeare & Co. and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. For lovers of books and bookstores, it is a must-read.

A Word of Explanation

2010-10-20T12:48:00.000-05:00

A few days ago I wrote about my pre-opening fundraising efforts through the community funding website IndieGoGo.com. Not included in the post (but visible on the Indie GoGo site here) was the various contribution levels and the discounted gift certificates related to those levels for those who contribute. Given the questions I have received from a few people, I should probably explain a little more about the "naming" of the contribution levels.

Rather than use some generic name for each contribution level, I thought it would be more appropriate to use author’s names instead (this is for a bookstore, after all). What I did not anticipate, however, was that some readers would have a problem with the ranking of the authors given their respective contribution amount. I hadn’t really thought of it as a Top 10 kind of list, but I suppose it is.

If you go to the Indie GoGo site, the levels break down like this:

Twain - For $20, you receive a $25 store gift certificate

Poe - For $40, you receive a $50 store gift certificate

Dumas - For $60, you receive a $75 store gift certificate

Shakespeare – For $100, you receive a $125 store gift certificate

Hemingway – For $200, you receive a $250 store gift certificate

Maugham – For $400, you receive a $500 store gift certificate

Dickens - For $800, you receive a $1000 store gift certificate

The objections to this "ranking" were mainly along the lines of "How can Shakespeare be listed so low?" and "Who the hell is this Maugham guy?"

Here is my rationale for the naming of the levels:

7. Twain had to be at the bottom because he’s my least-favorite of the authors everyone has heard of. I simply don’t like him much…sue me.

6. Poe is well known, and is the father of the modern detective novel, but he can be melodramatic and simply doesn’t rank above the others higher than him on the list.

5. While not as widely read today, Alexandre Dumas’ novels are all much better than the movie versions of them still being made, particularly The Three Musketeers.

4. I understand that Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare. But I’ve always leaned more toward novels than plays, so he gets put exactly in the middle. Besides, a lot of his stuff was just so-so.

3. Hemingway is one of my favorite writers, even if all his characters do ultimately die in the rain. He also won a Nobel Prize for literature and told good stories when intoxicated.

2. W. Somerset Maugham was, for those who don’t recognize the name, perhaps the most successful writer and dramatist of the first half of the 20^th century. He is best known for Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor’s Edge sold over 1 million copies in the 1940s. For me he ranks behind only one dead writer (and one living one, but that’s another story)…

1. Dickens. Nothing more needs to be said.

So there’s my reasoning. If you completely disagree, feel free to let me know by contributing at the author-level you think should be number one. My banker would be thrilled if a couple thousand of you Twain fans voiced your displeasure this way, but I’m hoping for 15 or 20 Dickens fans to step up and defend his honor. After all, it is the best of times…..

Bookstore Dreams Don't Come Cheap

2010-10-18T01:26:00.001-05:00

I entered this journey of opening an independent bookstore in North Texas fully understanding that it would be a costly enterprise. What I didn't realize was exactly how much personal equity I would have to bring to the table for the bank to loan me the amount I need to get the store up and running. I had always been told that it takes money to make money; I had never before heard that it takes money to borrow money. Lesson learned.

Thus I find myself in the position of having to raise some extra funds in order to access the bank loan. There are many different ways to do this, of course, but one interesting new method is called "crowdfunding." And the most popular crowdfunding website is IndieGoGo, which calls itself "a collaborative way to fund ideas, founded on the principles of opportunity, transparency, choice, and action."

It sounds like a solid idea, and I know of at least one aspiring bookseller (Janet Geddis of Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA) who used it with some success. Therefore, I am asking all my readers, especially those who care about independent booksellers, to click on the link to my IndieGoGo page here, contribute whatever amount you can, and tell your friends. I hope to be through this phase of the start-up quickly and to never have to blog about finances again.

Thanks, and back to book reviews shortly.

The Bookman's Wake: A Review

2010-10-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

Take a detective turned book dealer, a rare volume of Poe's The Raven, and a young woman with the improbable name of Eleanor Rigby, and you have John Dunning's second Cliff Janeway mystery, The Bookman's Wake. However, like the now-classic first installment, Booked to Die, there is much more here than a typical formulaic mystery novel, and if you're not careful you might just learn something about rare books (as well as the long-lost art of book printing and binding) on the way to the book's climax.

The novel begins with Denver ex-cop turned book dealer Cliff Janeway on his way to Seattle to bring the young Eleanor Rigby (yes, like the Beatles song) back to New Mexico for trial; she is accused of stealing a rare 1969 Grayson Press edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Then the real trouble begins, because Janeway is won over by the girl's claim of innocence and sets out to protect her from an unknown assailant who has been killing people for more than 20 years in an attempt to get the book. Along the way we get more insider information from Dunning (himself a rare book dealer in Denver) on the book trade, including some amusing rants about inscriptions and remainder marks. As with Booked to Die, Dunning accomplishes this "reader education" without ever slowing down the pace of the story.

The Bookman's Wake solidifies John Dunning's place as the master of the serial bibliomystery. A bibliomystery is one in which a book, manuscript, author, or bookstore is central to the plot of the novel; there have been quite a number of them, from the 1920s up to the present day. And while Lev Grossman's The Codex and Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas are both outstanding examples of stand-alone bibliomysteries, only Dunning has been able to successfully convert the genre to series form. For those who love both books and book culture, this is a very satisfying combination.

Though the plot is not as tight and the ending a little less surprising than Booked to Die, all in all The Bookman's Wake is still a fine mystery novel. Janeway remains one of the most interesting main characters in mystery fiction this side of Robert B. Parker's Spenser. And as is true with all of John Dunning's books, the time spent reading them is always rewarding.

The Prince of Mist: A Review

2010-10-12T22:46:00.000-05:00

Almost a decade before he burst on the international scene with the mega-bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, author Carlos Ruiz Zafon released his first book, a Young Adult novel titled The Prince of Mist. It was the first of four YA novels that until this year were only available in Spanish. Thankfully for Zafon's legions of English-speaking fans, these will be translated and released over the next four years, one each year. The Prince of Mist is the first of the newly translated books.

Most readers in the U.S. and U.K. know Zafon primarily through The Shadow of the Wind, which was both a critical and commercial smash, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide. And most of those readers likely thought it was also his first novel. But in 1992 Zafon published The Price of Mist, a book that in reality goes well beyond the Young Adult tag his Spanish publishers saddled it with. Zafon himself has said he did not write it for teen readers, but rather for everyone who loves to read.

The book is set in an unnamed country in 1943, in keeping with Zafon's habit of placing his books in the early to mid part of the 20^th century. To distance his family from the encroaching menace of World War II, watchmaker Maximilian Carver moves them from the city to a small coastal town. Right after this move his 13-year-old son Max and 15-year-old daughter Alicia begin to experience strange and troubling occurrences. Along with their new friend Roland, the nearby lighthouse keeper's grandson, they begin searching for answers to the mystery of the Carver's new house, a sunken ship that lies just off their coast, and a mythic and possibly demonic figure known as the Prince of Mist.

This book is considerably shorter at 214 pages than the 400+ pages of The Shadow of the Wind and the book that followed it, The Angel's Game. This is not surprising, as the plot of The Prince of Mist is not nearly as intricate as Zafon's two most recent novels. Nor does it have the same level of suspense that is generated in those two "adult market" efforts. But the novel is very, very good, and in it we get a glimpse of what Zafon will give us in those later books, particularly in his ability to use beautiful language to give the reader a real sense of mood and place.

In both The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game one of the characters says the following:

This was certainly true of those books, and it is equally true of The Prince of Mist. This is a book that not only gives us amazing writing but also gives a glimpse into the early development of one of the greatest writers of the past 100 years. Buy this book, give it to your friends, and read it with your children. It may be the best 200 pages you read this year.

People of the Book: A Review

2010-10-10T08:22:00.000-05:00

Geraldine Brooks is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March, but her follow-up effort, The People of the Book, may be even better. The novel is, interestingly enough, the fictional story of a real-life book, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the first Jewish religious books to contain images, written and illuminated at a time when only Christian texts were illuminated because both Jews and Muslims considered it idolatrous.

The main human character is rare book expert Hanna Heath, and the book's journey from Spain in 1492 to 1996 Sarajevo is unveiled through some very small items she finds while restoring the book: an insect wing, missing silver clasps, some salt crystals, a wine stain, and a single white hair. As Hanna pursues her scientific investigation of the book, a series of vignettes explain how these sparse items trace the history of the Haggadah over the past 500 years: from Spain at the time of the Inquisition to Renaissance Venice to Sarajevo in both World War II and the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

Taken by itself, the part of the narrative featuring Hanna and her efforts regarding the preservation of the book is much like any number of other bibliomysteries, from The Name of the Rose to The Codex to The Dante Club. There is the requisite love story featuring Hanna and the Bosnian Muslim curator of the Museum, a man who saved the book from the destruction of the National Library during the civil war. The numerous sections dealing with Hanna's strained relationship with her surgeon mother sometimes slow the pace down unnecessarily. And there is, of course, a plot twist at the end that is indeed quite surprising.

What sets this book apart, however are the vignettes about the book's history and journey. Each is like a short story within the novel and stands alone as outstanding story-telling in their own right, with fully formed plots and three-dimensional characters you really want to know much more about. And these otherwise disparate tales are woven into a timeline that dovetails seamlessly with the present-day part of the story, which is quite an accomplishment in itself.

Geraldine Brooks does an amazing job of pulling this ambitious literary endeavor together and guiding it to a very satisfactory conclusion. She once again exhibits the talent that was obvious both in March and her debut novel, and we can only hope that she will continue delivering novels this good well into the future.

Booked to Die: A Review

2010-10-07T19:55:00.000-05:00

Every so often a book catches readers by surprise; even more rarely that book becomes part of the very world it seeks to chronicle. Both were the case with John Dunning's Booked to Die, the first in the remarkable Cliff Janeway "Bookman" series.

Booked to Die is the story of a burned out cop named Cliff Janeway who quits the police force to become a rare book dealer. Janeway has turned in his badge; he keeps both his gun and his penchant for solving crimes. The mysteries now revolve around the new world of rare books he inhabits, which puts this book squarely in the genre of bibliomystery.

As I wrote in an earlier post, a bibliomystery is one in which a book or manuscript is central to the plot of the novel. The definition can be expanded to include mystery novels in which libraries, librarians, bookstores, booksellers, publishers and/or authors play a key role in the story. The genre existed well before Booked to Die, going back at least as far as Agnes Miller's The Colfax Book-Plate in 1926, but Dunning's contribution was a turning point, much like Springsteen's Born to Run (which helped both save and redefine rock music in the 70s). In many ways, Dunning opened the door for many of today's hugely popular bibliomysteries, from Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas to Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

What stands out in Booked to Die is not simply the solving of a mystery, though Dunning takes the reader on a non-stop thrill ride in doing so. This novel is unique because it gives the reader a behind the scenes look at the world of rare book dealers, as well as an education into rare books themselves, without ever bogging down the narrative. In the end, watching Janeway scout through a pile of books in an East Denver thrift shop is as interesting as witnessing the brutal fight that ends his career as a cop. And Dunning gives us some twists at the end that would surprise even Sherlock Holmes.

John Dunning is himself a rare book dealer in Denver, and Booked to Die made the leap into the real world of rare books in a way he never imagined. The initial print run was a minuscule 6,500 hardcover copies, at least in part because Dunning had not published a book in more than ten years. He says he doubted that even that small number would sell out; he was wrong. The book sold out overnight, and has since gone through at least five hardcover printings and more than 20 paperback printings.

That first hardcover print run is now one of the most collectible books on the market. Unsigned copies sell for as much as $800.00, and signed copies for a much as $2,000.00. With a novel this good and print run that small, Dunning should have seen this coming. Cliff Janeway certainly would have.

The Help: A Review

2010-10-06T11:03:00.000-05:00

The Help was certainly the surprise bestseller of 2009; more than a year later Kathryn Stockett's debut novel is so popular that the hardback version remains on the New York Times Bestseller List. On the surface it would seem to be an unlikely hit; even the plot description on the inside flap of the dust jacket sounds suspiciously like a "chick book." However, The Help is so much more than that.

The novel is the story of a small group of young white women and the African-American maids in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi. It would have been easy for Stockett to choose an extreme and write a romanticized antebellum-type novel like Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind or a hard-line civil rights story along the lines of Mississippi Burning. Fortunately, she does both, and neither.

The first thing that sets this book apart is that the characters, both black and white, are drawn as creatures of their time, with as little of our 21^st century hindsight layered on as possible. They wrestle with (and against) the ideas of civil rights, but not in a vacuum; it happens in the midst of their everyday lives while they raise children, go to church, hold down jobs, deal with husbands (both good and bad), and endure gossiping cliques. Men play a very secondary role in this story, but that is hardly even noticeable once the book has hooked you.

The three main characters are Skeeter, a white girl in her early twenties who wants to write a book from the perspective of the black maids, a project that meets with much more resistance from the maids themselves than Skeeter imagined; Aibileen, the maid who most supports Skeeter and recruits others to the project but whose main concern is the white children she cares for; and Minny, a maid who, while the most vocal and rebellious is also the most reluctant to tell her story to Skeeter.

Stockett uses a style in The Help that can easily lose a reader if not done well: she tells the story from the viewpoint of the three main characters, usually in alternating chapters. Fortunately she does a fine job with this device, and is able to move the narrative along at a fast pace while still showing multiple points of view. She also writes in a Mississippi vernacular when the maids are speaking, which takes a little getting used to, but in the end helps us easily identify the speaker simply by their unique voice.

For all its civil rights aspects, however, The Help is more of a story about women than race. It is the story of the many layers and levels of the relationships between these women, with each other, their children, their husbands, their community, and their times. It is rarely preachy and is always compelling. Best of all, it is a story you think about and talk about long after the book is finished, which is a feat all good novels aspire to but few achieve.

The Cellist of Sarajevo: A Review

2010-10-04T04:59:00.000-05:00

Author Steven Galloway's novel The Cellist of Sarajevo packs a lot of emotion into its slim 256 pages as we follow the sometimes-intertwined stories of four characters trapped during the devastating Siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s. Much has been written and reported about the large-scale atrocities committed during the war in the former Yugoslavia; this novel brings the vast human tragedy down to a much more accessible scale.

The story begins with the unnamed cellist of the title determining to play for 22 days in the exact spot where a Bosnian Serb mortar killed 22 civilians as they waited in line to buy bread. In using this episode, Galloway begins his narrative with a basis in fact: in 1992, cellist Vedran Smajlović did this very thing for 22 days. But this is not a story about Smajlović; the cellist plays a relatively small role given his prominent place as the title character.

This novel is rather the story of the other three main characters. In alternating chapters we follow the harrowing daily struggles of Arrow, a young female sniper serving with city's defenders; Kenan, a man who must make regular (and dangerous) hours-long treks across the ravaged city to get water for his family and a cranky elderly neighbor; and Dragan, a 64-year-old baker who, after sending his wife and son to safety before the siege began now uses his access to bread to convince his sister to allow him to continue living in her house.

As they navigate through this perilous existence, each copes in very different ways. The young woman has taken "Arrow" as her new name and identity in the hopes that when the war is over she may be able to return to the person she was before it started. Kenan, fantasizes about the Sarajevo of his youth throughout his journey across the city, while wondering if it ever existed the way he remembers it. And Dragan has simply isolated himself from everyone and everything he knew, ignoring even friends as much as possible. Ultimately, however, each has a change of perspective and attitude, each one impacted by the man playing his cello every day at 4:00 p.m.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a beautifully written novel that can at times become so filled with tension you have to stop reading for a moment. For many people it will be their first in-depth exposure to a vicious war of ethnic hatred on the European continent that raged for 4 years while the rest of the world looked away. It is also a story of survival and even redemption in a place where neither seems possible. It is a book you will continue to think about long after the final page.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane: A Review

2010-09-30T19:00:00.002-05:00

Katherine Howe's debut novel The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane was one of the surprise best-sellers of the past few years, made all the more so because of the strange title. In fact, the first time I saw the cover I thought it was about physics (fortunately I took the time to actually read the publisher's synopsis on the inside cover). Yet even clearing up the premise did not prepare me for how good, and original, this novel would be.

The story actually has dual protagonists: Connie Goodwin, a Harvard graduate student in 1991, and Deliverance Dane, a woman in late 1600s Salem, Massachusetts. And while Connie's storyline takes up the majority of the novel, the sections featuring Deliverance Dane (and later her daughter and granddaughter) are by far the most compelling. It is in these vignettes that the reader learns a great deal about life in Salem at the time of the Witch Trials, and the lives of women in that society.

The plot starts out in a very straightforward manner: during summer break from grad school, Connie moves to her late grandmother's house in Marblehead (near Salem) to prepare the long-abandoned property to be sold. While there, she comes across an old key in a family Bible; inside the key is an ancient scrap of paper with two words on it: Deliverance Dane. This begins a search to discover who this woman was, which leads to a search for her "physick book," which is in reality a spell book. Connie sees this original source material as perfect for her doctoral dissertation, if only she can find it and at the same time avoid the malevolent presence that seems to lurk on the edges of her perception.

In spite of the fact that Katherine Howe is herself a doctoral candidate in New England Studies, the vast amount of historical detail she provides fits seamlessly into the story. The obligatory love-story subplot is actually both interesting and vital to the resolution of the tale, and Howe's cliffhanger chapter endings kept me turning the pages long into the night.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane will definitely cause you to rethink the long-held, nearly mythic stereotypes we have about both the Salem Witch Trials and "witchcraft" itself. Yet it happens so gradually as the story unfolds that by the end you may find yourself believing in magic just a little more than you did at the start of the book. Regardless, it is a wonderful first novel by an author that we can only hope will have a long publishing career.

Joe Hill's "Horns": A Review

2010-09-29T01:01:00.001-05:00

Long before anyone knew he was the son of horror legend Stephen King, author Joe Hill's outstanding debut novel Heart Shaped Box made it clear that a major new voice had arrived on the literary scene. His second novel, Horns, shows that he was no one-hit wonder, and may ultimately have a career as successful and prolific as his famous father. And as he did with his first novel, Hill opens Horns with a hook that grabs readers right from the start.

Ignatius "Ig" Perrish wakes after a night of drunken chaos to find that two horns have sprouted from his head, and not just any horns: devil horns. But these horns are not mere ornaments; they've got powers as well, which is both a blessing and a curse for Ig. As he struggles with his new condition, he comes to understand that these powers can be used to find (and punish) the person who murdered his longtime girlfriend a year earlier, a crime for which no one was charged but for which Ig remains the prime suspect.

Like his father, Joe Hill is firmly planted in the horror genre. But Hill diverges from most horror writers in that he creates truly literary novels at the same time. His plotting is tight, and his characters, both hero and villain, are fully formed. In fact, what makes them so real is that none are completely hero or completely villain, just like in life. You find yourself caring about the characters because they are not cardboard cutouts of people, they're us (even with horns growing out of their heads).

In Horns Hill also delves into how we view religion, God, and most importantly Satan. He doesn't preach or cajole the reader toward a certain viewpoint, but by the end of the book even a Pentecostal preacher would find it hard not to have, as the Stones put it, some sympathy for the Devil. This may sound blasphemous now, but maybe not as much after reading the book.

If there is one "flaw" in Horns, it is the fact that some of the flashback sequences seem to slow the breakneck pace of the story. But perhaps this isn't a flaw at all, because it is the only time the reader has a chance to catch their breath. All told, Horns is an excellent second novel from a writer of great ability and limitless potential.

Great Books for Your Fall Reading List

2010-09-27T02:11:00.000-05:00

It's time for my First Annual Fall Reading List, one that anyone can stick to. I have included fourteen books, one for each week between now and the week of Christmas. Some are new, most are older, and a few are ones you should have read in college but didn't. You will also find that some can easily be read in one day, leaving extra time for a longer one.

With a few exceptions the list leaves off current best sellers for the simple reason that these are not yet out in paperback. This is important because while most, if not all, are available at your local library, many cities are drastically cutting library staff and hours, making obtaining these books more difficult.

1. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. If I continue this list for the next 50 years, this book will still be first out of the gate. It has moved into a tie with The Razor's Edge as my all time favorite. It touches on such diverse topics as forbidden love, the Spanish Civil War, and the innate need we have for books. It layers all of these things on the mystery of why a disfigured man is burning all of the copies of books by Julian Carax, an obscure author whose novel, The Shadow of the Wind, was discovered by main character Daniel Sempere when he was 10. But be sure you have a lot of free time when you start this one; I stayed up all night reading the last 250 pages.

2. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. A runaway bestseller in both hardcover and paperback, the story takes place immediately following World War II in both London and the English Channel island of Guernsey, which was occupied by the Nazis from 1940 through the end of the war. It centers around Juliet Ashton, an author and columnist in her early thirties, and her correspondence with her publisher, friends and the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a group of islanders who used a love of books as way to survive the hardships of the German occupation. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is captivating because of its story of perseverance in wartime and the discovery of love in unexpected places; the hardships the islanders endure actually help keep the story from being mere lighthearted fluff. But at its heart, this is a book about books and the role they play in our lives.

3. Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. Unless you've been living in a cave for the past few years or so, you already know that Joe Hill's real name is Joe Hill King, son of Stephen King, and if his first novel is any indication, he should have a run of success that will eventually rival his dad's. Heart Shaped Box is a great read, and much more than your typical horror novel. The characters are well written and three-dimensional, the pace picks up with each page, and in the correct places it is really, really scary. Hill's seconds novel, Horns, is an exceptional book as well, but not yet out in paperback.

4. The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. This novel packs a lot of emotion into its slim 256 pages as we follow the sometimes-intertwined stories of four characters trapped during the devastating Siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s. Much has been written and reported about the large-scale atrocities committed during the war in the former Yugoslavia; this novel brings the vast human tragedy down to a much more accessible scale.

5. The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion by Alice Kimberly. This is the fifth book in the Haunted Bookshop series, one that has both an interesting premise and a different twist on the mystery genre. Penelope Thornton-McClure owns a mystery bookshop in Rhode Island; she's the "cozy" side of the story. The shop is also inhabited by the ghost of Jack Shepard, a private investigator murdered in the store 50 years earlier; he's the "hard-boiled" side of the story. I've never seen the two mixed before, and never to such satisfying effect. And the four earlier titles in the series are easily as entertaining (reading them out of order is no problem).

6. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. Brooks is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March, but her follow-up effort, The People of the Book, may be even better. The novel is, interestingly enough, the fictional story of a real-life book, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the first Jewish religious books to contain images, written and illuminated at a time when only Christian texts were illuminated because both Jews and Muslims considered it idolatrous. The book's journey from Spain in 1492 to 1996 Sarajevo is unveiled through a series of vignettes explaining its history over the past 500 years: from Spain at the time of the Inquisition to Renaissance Venice to Sarajevo in both World War II and the ethnic wars of the 1990s.

7. 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Stylistically similar to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, this short yet amazing book consists of the real-life (and often hilarious) correspondence that took place over a 20 year period between New Yorker Helene Hanff and London bookseller Frank Doel. And for readers who came of age during the reign of Amazon.com, there was indeed a time when you had to write letters to booksellers to find used and out of print copies of books.

8. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham's finest novel, one of the best ever written, and one I'll soon be re-reading for the 26^th time. It's become an annual ritual for me, and each time I get something new out of it. Larry Darrell's search for meaning after WWI is just as timely and relevant to our world today as it was when Maugham wrote it over 60 years ago.

9. Cadillac Jack by James McMurtry. Not your typical McMurtry novel, Cadillac Jack follows the exploits of Cadillac Jack, an antiques "scout" always on the lookout for the next big score. We get an amusing look at Washington, DC in the early 1980's as well as a bygone era before Antiques Roadshow, when you could still hope to find a Ming vase for $2 at a flea market in Tulsa.

10. On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It was required reading in college, but most of us ignored that and simply carried it around to impress girls. Here's your chance to finally get to know Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, two icons of American literature. On the Road is one heck of a trip. This is also one of the few times I would suggest listening to the book on disc rather than actually reading it. Matt Dillon reads the audio version, and does a magnificent job.

11. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe. This was one of the surprise best-sellers of the past few years, made all the more so because of the strange title. The story actually has dual protagonists: Connie Goodwin, a Harvard graduate student in 1991, and Deliverance Dane, a woman in late 1600s Salem, Massachusetts. And while Connie's storyline takes up the majority of the novel, the sections featuring Deliverance Dane (and later her daughter and granddaughter) are by far the most compelling. It is in these vignettes that the reader learns a great deal about life in Salem at the time of the Witch Trials, and the lives of women in that society.

12. Flabbergasted by Ray Blackston. The first installment of a comic trilogy set in South Carolina, this may be the perfect beach novel. The characters are vividly drawn, and definitely grow on you as narrator Jay Jarvis and his friends navigate the Southern singles scene by, of all things, visiting various church singles classes. Not a bad idea for those tired of the online dating sites.

13. Brimstone by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. There really aren't any sub-par Lincoln/Child books, especially ones that feature FBI Special Agent Pendergast. This is not the first Pendergast novel, but is the first of what the authors call the "Diogenes Trilogy," three novels that can stand alone but should really be read consecutively. The other two are Dance of Death and Book of the Dead. Let's call it a thinking-person's thriller.

14. The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Zafon's semi-prequel to The Shadow of the Wind.The Angel's Game is the story of David Martín, a young Barcelona author with a troubled past who writes crime novels under a pseudonym. As he struggles with his love for a woman he cannot have, he also realizes that his talent has been sold to the highest (in fact only) bidder, and despair overtakes him. Then he receives a surprising and lucrative offer from a mysterious French publisher to write a book that will change people's lives forever. He accepts the offer, only to learn that his new situation is far more deadly than the first. This novel is the perfect way to end an autumn of great reading.

Adapting Books to Film

2010-09-24T10:11:00.000-05:00

For as long as there have been movies, filmmakers have been turning books into films. From The Iliad and The Odyssey to the plays of Shakespeare, Hollywood has always been ready to bring a successful (and even an unsuccessful) book or play to the big screen. They do this in part because people are more likely to see a film that is based on something they are already familiar with. This is why sequels, though often inferior to the original, still get made in large numbers. This built-in audience makes films made from books less of a financial risk, and Hollywood is more about money than art.

Given that books are a ready source of material for the movies, are there certain authors Hollywood is particularly partial to? Beyond the obvious classics (the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens), which authors have had the greatest number of their works turned into films? Following is a list of some 20th Century authors with the most book-to-film numbers (note: these do not include television shows, only motion pictures):

1. Stephen King. With 86 films made from his novels and short stories, he may indeed be The King of print-to-film success. Beginning with Carrie in 1976, film adaptations of his works have been huge commercial hits, including The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). While never as frightening as his books, the films made from Stephen King novels continue to scare the hell out of us to this day.

2. W. Somerset Maugham. This name will surprise many today, especially those who have never heard of him, but in the first half of the 20th Century, Maugham was the most commercially successful author alive. The 64 films made from his works also span the longest period of novel to film success: his novel The Explorer was made into a film in 1915, and most recently The Painted Veil was released in 2006. Maugham also likely holds the distinction of most books filmed multiple times: The Painted Veil (1934, 2006); Of Human Bondage (1934, 1946, 1964); The Razor's Edge (1946, 1984); Theater (1962, 2004); and Miss Thompson (1928, 1932, 1953).

3. Ernest Hemingway. At 29 films, he falls well back of the previous two authors on this list, but he is, after all, Hemingway. From A Farewell to Arms in 1932 through Night Express in 2006, Hemingway has been a fixture both in print and film for over 75 years.

4. John Grisham. With 10 books made into films in the span of 11 years, Grisham has one of the best ratios of any author. The Firm (1993) remains both a great book and a really good film, which is rare in itself.

5. J.K. Rowling. The list would not be complete with Rowling, perhaps the only author to have every one of her novels turned into a film (with the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows being made into two films). Her Harry Potter novels have set sales records that may never be broken, and the films may ultimately be the most successful series in history.

There will always be arguments about whether the film versions are better than the books from which they came (only The Godfather comes immediately to mind as an example of this), but the debate is part of the fun, as long as you both read the book and see the movie.

Friends of the Library Sales

2010-09-23T21:41:00.000-05:00

With cities around the country facing huge budget deficits, funding for libraries is often one of the first items slashed. One way to help your local library (and get great deals on books in the process) is to support the annual book sale held by the Friends of the Library in your town. And if you happen to live in a large metropolitan area, there is the added bonus of multiple sales every year, since each city has their own Friends of the Library chapter. At these sales you can find books, sometimes in like-new condition, at prices even lower than at the average garage sale.

There are a few things to know in order to make the most of a library sale, and the first is when and where they will be held. The best resource for library books sales is the website Book Sale Finder, which lists every book sale in the country by state. The site lists both annual sales and ongoing sales that some libraries have.

When researching an upcoming sale always look at the total number of books items and the percentage of donated items (this will also be listed on the Book Sale Finder site). The best sales will have at least 25,000 books; those with under 5,000 are often a waste of time. This is because the total number includes things like textbooks, VHS tapes, and vinyl records, and without a high number of total items, the number of books will be too small for a good selection.

The number of donated items is equally important, especially if you are a serious collector or reseller. Donated books are copies given to the Friends of the Library by the public. If 50% of the items are donated, that means that the other 50% are ex-library copies that have been removed from the shelves for one reason or another. While these are perfectly fine reading copies, most folks don't want a bunch of tattered, discarded library books on their shelves at home. Look for sales where at least 75% of the items have been donated.

The next thing you will want to do is check the hours of the sale. Most will start on a Thursday night and run through either Saturday or Sunday. Thursday nights are usually a "sneak peek" for those who have a membership in the Friends of the Library. Those who are not members can join at the door for anywhere from $10.00 to $35.00; it is a good way for the Friends to increase their membership and for members to have first choice of the books available. Prices for the rest of the weekend will usually be $2.00 for a hardcover book and $1.00 for a paperback. Many sales will use a sliding scale over the course of the weekend, with hardcovers dropping to $1.00 on Saturday or Sunday and paperbacks to fifty cents.

If you attend on a Thursday night or Friday morning, arriving at least thirty minutes to an hour early is essential; even then there will already be people in line. If the sale allows, you should bring an empty box or crate for the books you choose; most sales only have small plastic bags available for patrons' use. There will also typically be a map showing the layout of the sales floor. Look over this before the doors open so you can determine the best route to your areas of interest. Also, although most sales now accept checks and credit cards it is always best to bring cash just in case.

Finally, bring a large amount of patience with you. There will be a lot of waiting, both for the doors to open and during the checkout process (the books will be tallied at one table and paid for at another, and there are never enough volunteers). People will push and jostle, and it is entirely possible that a sweet little old lady will punch you in the kidney so she can get to that Janet Evanovich hardcover before you do. Such is the gentle passion of book lovers.

Banned Books Week 2010

2010-09-21T16:58:00.000-05:00

The 29th Annual Banned Books Week will be held September 25th through October 2nd, and will involve special events and displays at libraries and bookstores across the nation. Banned Books Week began in 1982 as a collective effort between the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers and the National Association of College Stores to raise awareness of censorship problems in the United States and abroad. Surprisingly, after 28 years, it remains the only national celebration of the freedom to read.

Although it receives little press coverage, book censorship of all kinds (including book burning), continues today. Challenges to the content of books come from parents, teachers, clergy members, elected officials, and organized groups, typically because of objections to language, violence, sexual or racial themes, or religious viewpoint. In 2009, the American Library Association counted 460 challenges, mostly in schools. The majority of cases, however, go unreported.

The American Library Association reports that 42 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been banned or challenged at some point, including nine of the top ten. These include The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses, and To Kill a Mockingbird (which ranked 4^th on the Top 10 most-challenged list in 2009). Since the first Harry Potter book was released in 1997, fundamentalist Christian groups have attempted to ban the series because of the use of witchcraft as a central theme. The most ironic banning attempt targeted Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which is itself about censorship and the destruction of books.

Independent bookstores have typically been in the lead in supporting freedom of expression, from City Lights Books' Lawrence Ferlinghetti publishing Alan Ginsberg's Howl to Shakespeare and Company's Sylvia Beach publishing James Joyce's Ulysses. Both books were banned, yet the bookstore owners pressed on, and in Ferlinghetti's case the result was a Supreme Court ruling that established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.

Examples of censorship such as those listed above are the reason that Banned Books Week is important, and why it is more than simply another marketing gimmick used by bookstores to generate sales. In a time when freedom of expression has been weakened in the name of both Homeland Security and political correctness, we must remind ourselves and our children that censorship still exists in America and that we must speak out against it.

The Haunted Bookshop Series: A Review

2010-09-20T06:24:00.000-05:00

For those who like a good mystery series the list of choices can be daunting. Several publishers (particularly Berkeley Prime Crime) release new installments each year in a plethora of mystery genres, from hard-boiled to cozy. One of the best of the last few years is the Haunted Bookshop series by author Alice Kimberly.

The first book in the Haunted Bookshop series, The Ghost and Mrs. McClure, presents both an interesting premise and a different twist on the mystery genre. Penelope Thornton-McClure is a young widow who owns a mystery bookshop in a small town in Rhode Island; she's the "cozy" side of the story (think Miss Marple). The shop is also inhabited by the ghost of Jack Shepard, a private investigator murdered in the store 50 years earlier; he's the "hard-boiled" side of the story (think Sam Spade). I've never seen the two mixed before, and the effect is surprisingly satisfying.

Thus far there are five titles in the series: The Ghost and Mrs. McClure, The Ghost and the Dead Deb, The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library, The Ghost and the Femme Fatale, and The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion. The most recent, The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion may be the best one to date, and is evidence that the series is not becoming too predictable or formulaic. Too many of these "specialized" mysteries go flat after a few years; this one has not.

The plot lines in the Haunted Bookshop series are all solid, and the violence is realistic, limited, and understated, which is a nice change from some of the gore-filled tomes put out today. But the novels are first and foremost character-driven. The best parts are the ones that feature interaction between Penelope and Jack, especially as they seek to overcome the "language barrier" between Penelope's 21st century vocabulary and Jack's 1940's street-wise slang and deal with the whole "I'm dead and you're not" obstacle to what might otherwise be a budding romance.

Each of the novels is a fast read, making them perfect for either end-of-summer beach reading or a rainy autumn afternoon, depending on what part of the country you're living in right now. You also get a peek inside the world of the bookseller (though not to the degree found in John Dunning's Bookman series) that is interesting in itself.

One last point about this series. Alice Kimberly is the pen name of Cleo Coyle, author of the very successful Coffeehouse Mysteries series. And Cleo Coyle is actually the pen name of the husband and wife team of Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini. You can find more info about both series' at their website.

Books About Bookstores

2010-09-19T03:36:00.001-05:00

There are those who love books, and then there are those who love books and bookstores. Here are three books that every bookstore lover will want on their shelf:

1. Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Company by Jeremy Mercer.

The title of Jeremy Mercer's book comes from a line in his book, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Company. He writes "hard time goes slowly and painfully and leaves a man bitter.... time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I'd ever felt." This account of his time living at the Paris landmark is as much about the characters that reside at the famous bookstore as the books themselves, but books are ever-present in his narrative.

Mercer was a crime reporter in Canada who felt forced to flee to France following a threat on his life in late 1999. As he runs out of money and faces the prospect of living on the streets of Paris, he is invited to live at Shakespeare and Company by the owner, George Whitman, an expatriate American who has run the store since the 1950's and who claims to "run a socialist utopia that masquerades as a bookstore."

Whitman is not, as he claimed early in his life, the son of the poet Walt Whitman, and his bookshop is not the same as Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, the store that published Ulysses and closed during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Rather, this store is the sister store to the famed City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and Whitman is a longtime friend of its owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Though Mercer is the narrator, and we learn much about his life before and during his time at Shakespeare and Company, Whitman is the central character of this book. We learn of his struggles to keep the store from falling into the hands of real estate developers, his unique ways of keeper the residents of the store fed, and his fascinating life story. Most importantly, we learn of his lifelong commitment to the idea that books are important, that they matter to us both as individuals and as a society.

2. Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins

This memoir tells the story of his time living in a book lovers dream: the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. With only 1500 residents and 40 bookstores, it is truly a bibliophile's nirvana, especially if you love old books. Collins and his wife relocated there from San Francisco with their young son in the hope of finding a more idyllic life, and their attempts to purchase a house in the town, while having nothing to do with books, is as hilarious for us as it was frustrating for them.

The centerpiece of the town, and the place book lovers will most want to visit someday, is Hay Castle, a centuries-old castle now converted into a rambling bookstore and owned by Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed king of Hay-on-Wye. After meeting Booth, Collins spent a brief period attempting, with limited success, to organize the American Literature section at the castle. The remainder of Collins' time is divided between revising his first book, wandering through the town's myriad of second-hand bookshops, and trying to navigate English real estate laws that would drive most Americans mad.

Sixpence House is an entertaining read that will have book lovers planning their next vacation around the annual Hay Festival, hoping to find a rare gem of a book in the mountainous stacks of Hay Castle. But make your reservations early; the event that former President Bill Clinton called "the Woodstock of the Mind" is Britain's little secret no longer, thanks in part to Sixpence House.

3. 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

But 84 Charing Cross Road is a perfect example of why you can't judge a book by its cover, its length, or the unorthodox nature of its content. Ultimately what makes the book work is what makes any book work, whether fiction or nonfiction: the relationships between the characters. And for readers today, the way the relationships develop are not simply interesting in themselves, but also because of the manner in which they happen. In our age of instant communication, the often leisurely pace of the letters between Helene and Frank are a window into an era now lost.

The books she orders are a veritable Masters class in Literature, ranging from Chaucer to Virginia Woolf to Jane Austen. A lover of books could do worse than simply reading all of the titles mentioned in Hanff and Doel's correspondence. But had this just been an exchange of book orders and invoices it would not have grabbed the public imagination in such a way that the book is still loved 40 years later, as well as having been adapted into both a play and a film. Helene goes beyond being a simple customer, becoming involved in the lives of the store's staff, celebrating their joys, mourning their losses, and caring for their physical needs in a very real way.

England after the end of World War II was subject to severe rationing that lasted for many years. Upon learning that her new friends couldn't get things like meat or real eggs, she began sending regular food parcels to them, especially at holidays. One such parcel caused her to send a panicked follow-up letter: she had sent a ham before realizing that the owners of the shop were Jewish and offered to "rush over a tongue." The staff (six in all) respond by sending her photos of their families, first-edition books, and teaching her how to make Yorkshire Pudding. Throughout this two-decade friendship she planned to travel to London to meet everyone in person, yet seemed to always be put off by some unexpected event.

84 Charing Cross Road is at its core a book about lovers of books and bookstores, and is at the same time one of the funniest and most touching books you'll ever read. I am thankful their correspondence came at a time when people both wrote and kept letters; such a book would likely never have been possible in the era of e-mail, and that would have been a very great loss.

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Review

2010-09-17T21:41:00.000-05:00

For book lovers, there's just something about books about books, and in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, San Francisco author Lewis Buzbee does something few writers would be able to: he makes the history of the book and the bookstore something you just can't put down. During his career, Buzbee has written both fiction and non-fiction, and he has the ability to paint a vivid picture with very few words. When he describes a favorite bookshop on a dark, rainy Tuesday in November, you can feel the biting wind and see the inviting warmth of the store beckoning.

The book is billed as both a memoir and a history, and perhaps that is what makes it work. Right at the moment the historical aspect could start to become tedious, Buzbee switches gears to the memoir side, giving readers a glimpse into the world of the bookseller that few knew existed. And he is no newcomer to the book world, having started as a clerk at a San Jose bookstore during his freshman year of college, and continuing in either book selling or as a publisher's sales rep for the next thirty years.

The history of the bookstore is obviously intertwined with the history of books and book making, and The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop takes the reader on a fascinating journey from the first papyrus scrolls and the great Library of Alexandria through the e-book and mega-chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble. Mixed throughout this 3000-year journey are Buzbee's own journey, his love of books, and some laugh-out-loud moments. By the time you finish the book, you will definitely want to sneak a peek into the back room of your local bookstore, hoping to see some of the things he has seen.

Buzbee makes a convincing case for how much we need bookstores, and he laments the decline, Harry Potter notwithstanding, in reading across America. Some may be surprised that a man who spent the better part of his life working in independent bookstores bears no grudges against the major chain retailers or Internet sites like Amazon. He does, however, have a few caustic words for the large discount and warehouse stores.

What is evident throughout The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is that Buzbee is a man who has a reverence for books ("book lust" is the term he uses most often). And his book lust is contagious. When you have finished this slim, 216-page volume, you may find yourself more likely to slow down and rediscover the joy of wandering through rows and rows of shelves on a rainy afternoon, stumbling upon that perfect book you'd never even heard of before.

What Makes Harry Potter So Magical

2010-09-16T12:15:00.003-05:00

With the release of Part One of the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows just around the corner (and the spike in interest in the books that comes with it), now seems like a good time to revisit this phenomenal series. J.K. Rowling has held the world spellbound for more than a decade, and done it while using story elements so ingrained in our collective memory that readers were amazed by the freshness of it. Albus Dumbledore may be the greatest wizard of all time, but when it comes to weaving a magical tale, he doesn't come close to his creator.

The good versus evil storyline has existed since the beginning of time; in fact, it is ultimately the basis of most of the world's religions. Stories of magic have existed almost as long, and the story of the orphan who overcomes great odds was popularized by Charles Dickens more than 150 years ago. Yet J.K. Rowling took these very well-known elements and through a gifted literary alchemy produced something both familiar and new at the same time.

Harry Potter himself could have easily been a one-dimensional character, the lone hero forced to confront the greatest evil the world has ever know. Frodo in The Lord of the Rings is such a character, never really growing or maturing during the journey, simply putting one foot in front of the other. But Rowling did something with Harry and the rest of the young characters that hadn't been done in children's literature: she let them grow up. Harry is 11 years old when we meet him, downtrodden by the Dursely's and unaware of his magical abilities. Over the next 7 years he grows in the same way any child does, through trial and error, having goods days and bad (sometimes very, very bad), and discovering who he is as a person, a friend, and a reluctant hero.

The other characters, particularly Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, also develop and grow throughout the series, and the romantic tension between them in the later books was yet another twist on "typical" children's literature. Rowling also makes the stories and characters real by having them deal with death in virtually every book. Death is a subject that rarely receives thoughtful consideration even in adult fiction, yet Rowling tackles it from the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

The way Rowling portrays the adults in the Harry Potter series is yet another surprising piece of magic. In most children's books, adults are either not present at all or are little more than bumbling idiots for the kids to outwit. The adults in the Harry Potter books are fully formed characters whose stories could likely stand alone if you removed the kids entirely. Rowling shows us the adults' strengths and flaws, glories and failures, and she does it from the perspective of the students in most cases; what they (and we) learn about Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Lupin, Snape, and others comes out in bits over the course of the narrative. And as in life, sometimes the kids seem more grown up than the adults and sometimes it's the other way around.

None of these things, however, would make the Potter books the best-selling series of all time (400 million copies in over 30 languages and still growing) if Rowling hadn't also written an amazingly compelling page-turner of a series. That it is both a great beach read and truly literature at the same time is all the more remarkable. She has woven the best parts of the hero-quest, magical fantasy, romance, Gothic suspense, social commentary, and even detective fiction into a tapestry that looks like nothing we'd even seen before.

J.K. Rowling may not be able to turn lead into gold, but getting both a generation of kids and their parents to put down the PlayStation and TV remote long enough to read a tale that spans 7 books and more than 4,000 pages is an even more remarkable feat of alchemy. She is without a doubt the greatest magician in the literary world.

The Angel's Game: A Review

2010-09-14T22:29:00.000-05:00

The success of a book can be a very strange thing. Some books are huge bestsellers but are written quite poorly, while others are critically acclaimed yet sell very few copies. And there are some that achieve a cult following, sometimes years after the author's death.

It is extremely rare, however, for a novel to be critically acclaimed, an international bestseller and a cult classic. Carlos Ruiz Zafon accomplished this literary hat trick with his novel The Shadow of the Wind. Released in Spanish in 2001, and translated into English in 2004, The Shadow of the Wind has been universally praised by critics around the globe and has sold 12 million copies worldwide. As for the cult following, it is one of those books you'll buy several times a year because you keep giving your copy away to friends.

Success, however, can be a writer's worst enemy, and huge global success even more so. For years now, the question has been when the second book would arrive and whether there was any way it could live up to the bar set by The Shadow of the Wind. We now have the answer to both.

First released in Spanish in 2008 as El juego del angel, the new novel is universally acclaimed by critics across Europe. It has already sold 1.6 million copies in Spain and has been a #1 bestseller in Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Norway, and several Latin American countries. The English translation of The Angel's Game was be released in the US in June 2009, and the trade paperback version came out earlier this year. Without a doubt, The Angel's Game was worth the five-year wait.

The Angel's Game is the story of David Martin, a young Barcelona author with a troubled past who writes crime novels under a pseudonym. As he struggles with his love for a woman he cannot have, he also realizes that his talent has been sold to the highest (in fact only) bidder, and despair overtakes him. As he nears the edge of the abyss, he receives a surprising and lucrative offer from a mysterious French publisher to write a book that will change people's lives forever. He accepts the offer, only to learn that his new situation is far more deadly than the first.

Although Zafon has said that the book is not a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind (even though it is set in Barcelona only two decades earlier and brings back a few of the same characters), his website describes it in this way:

"Set in the turbulent 1920s, The Angel's Game takes us back to the Gothic universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, the Sempere & Son bookshop, and the winding streets of Barcelona's old quarter, in a masterful tale about the magic of books and the darkest corners of the human soul."

This may be the best description, because at their heart, The Angel's Game and Shadow of the Wind share far more than locale, a few characters, and the amazing Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Both are, as one reviewer said about the earlier novel, "love letters to books." Both examine the power of books to change our lives in ways we often don't even realize. One quote that appears in both novels sums this up:

"Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."

This is not something we often consider in our digital, Internet-driven world, yet every so often a book comes along that stays with you long after you've finished reading it. You almost come to think of the characters as real people, and miss them when they are gone. These books challenge us to examine our inner selves and the world around us, and they can change us, hopefully for the better, while at the same time being a contract of sorts between writer and reader. The Shadow of the Wind was such a book, and The Angel's Game is as well. When I finished reading the advance copy of The Angel's Game, I found myself wishing it had gone on for 500 more pages, and hoping that the next novel doesn't take Zafon five years to write.

This is a novel with a very strong soul, and books like this don't come around nearly often enough. You should relish it, and then share it with everyone you know.

How to Identify a Book Club Edition

2010-09-13T22:30:00.000-05:00

Nothing is more disheartening for a book collector than discovering a perfect copy of a coveted volume only to find that it is a book club edition. Even worse, many novice collectors have paid exorbitant prices for book club editions that were sold by unscrupulous dealers as "first editions." With very few exceptions, like a Hemingway signature on the title page, book club editions are virtually worthless; even with such a signature the value is only a fraction of what a true first edition would be worth.

Fortunately, it is not difficult to recognize a book club edition if you know what to look for. Even though the dust jacket and print layout are the same, in most cases there are multiple identifying marks and characteristics that distinguish a true first edition from a book club edition.

One of the easiest ways to recognize a book club edition is by its size. Book club books are typically noticeably smaller than the original first edition. While nowhere near as small as a paperback book, the difference in size is obvious even when there is not a non-book club edition with which to compare.

The dust jacket can also help with identification, the most obvious clue being "Book Club Edition" printed at the bottom of the inside front cover of the dust jacket; this clear mark is most common in book club editions issued before the 1990s. Another telling sign is that book club editions do not have the retail price at the top of the inside front cover of the dust jacket. Recently, at least one British publisher stopped printing the retail price on the dust jacket of first editions, but this is far from the norm even in the U.K., and not done by American publishers.

One note of warning regarding dust jackets. Closely examine so-called "price-clipped" books (where the upper inside corner of the dust jacket has been cut out). In some cases there was never a price there in the first place, and the seller is using this tactic to make it harder to identify the volume as a book club edition.

If any doubt remains after checking the size and the dust jacket, the "blind stamp" can erase all doubt. A blind stamp is a mark on the back cover, and can range from a round indentation in the cover to a small yellow or white dot at the bottom of the back cover near the spine. If any such mark is present, the book is definitely a book club edition.

Taking all of these things into consideration will enable the book collector from ending up with a book club edition of a sought-after novel. As a reading copy there is nothing wrong with them, but as a collectible they aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

Collecting Signed Books

2010-09-13T03:21:00.000-05:00

For book collectors, a volume signed by the author is often the most treasured part of their collection. Owning a book that the writer held in his hands (if only long enough to scribble their autograph) gives a sense of connection between novel, writer, and reader that goes beyond the story contained within the covers. At least in part because of this, collecting signed first editions has become a specialty within the book collecting community which has exploded in recent years.

Before going into specifics about signed books, a few brief thoughts on book collecting in general are important, as they affect the value and desirability of signed books as well. As I mentioned in an earlier post, with nearly any collectible (and books in particular) condition is always key. A book in poor condition is almost never valuable, and for modern editions the dust jacket must also be pristine. Furthermore, first printings of first editions are generally the only ones of interest to the collector. Simply check the copyright page for the words "First Edition" at the bottom and/or a number sequence starting with a "1." Finally, when speaking of first editions and first printings, this always refers to the hardcover edition.

From a strictly financial standpoint, signed copies will almost always be worth more than unsigned copies, so in most cases you can expect to pay a higher price for these volumes; just remember that the rules regarding condition and edition outweigh almost any autograph. In other words, while a signed first printing of "Booked to Die" in Fine condition can be worth well over $1000, a signed copy of a sixth printing in Fair condition will likely be worth less than the original cover price. Also remember that signed copies of books by an author who is popular today may be over-inflated, and could easily drop significantly in value as time goes on.

Perhaps the best way to collect signed editions without any cost beyond the cover price is to attend signings by the author where you can have them signed for free. Many authors, particularly in the mystery genre, will do book signing tours every time they release a new novel; details can be found on either the author's website or the website of the publisher. They will also typically sign copies of their previous books, but check with the bookstore holding the event first. A common rule is that you can bring in a certain number of your older copies, but you must buy the new book at that store to have all of them signed (booksellers have to earn a living, after all).

If you don't live in an area that is usually visited by authors on tour, another way to collect signed first printings is to join one of the clubs offered by several independent mystery bookstores around the country. For example, both The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and Poisoned Pen Books in Scottsdale, Arizona offer book clubs that enable member to receive signed books (chosen by the store's staff) by mail on a monthly basis. These range from debut novels by a new authors to specific sub-genres like British mysteries. The biggest advantage here is that you get the knowledge of an experienced staff and still only pay the normal retail price for the book. Most of these signed books won't skyrocket in value, but some will; Tana French's 2007 debut "In the Woods" now sells for over $150.00.

Some authors will sign and return copies sent to them (even Hemingway was known to do this), but this happens far less often today than in the past, and is far more likely with new authors than established ones. Always check with the author or their publisher before sending anything, always send return postage, and bear in mind that every time you ship a book, even for as good a reason as this, you risk it being damaged during the shipping process.

If you are collecting older signed books (particularly by authors who are no longer living) the process becomes more complicated. The proliferation of so-called booksellers on the Internet has both artificially driven up prices for these works and made the phrase "buyer beware" more critical than ever, yet the diminishing number of brick-and-mortar rare bookshops often makes the Internet the only option. If you must go this route, check out sites like AbeBooks, and whenever possible only buy from dealers who are part of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. These tend to be exponentially more reputable than those you will find on eBay. Always ask for both detailed publishing information and photographs of the outside of the book, the copyright page, and the signature itself.

In the end, collecting signed first editions should be viewed in the same manner as any other hobby that borders on obsession. If you're doing it in the hopes of getting rich, it would be better to simply buy a lottery ticket. If you're doing it because you love books and respect their authors, it can be one of the most rewarding endeavors of your life, and can be a legacy passed down to future generations.

Location, Location, Location

2010-09-12T00:43:00.000-05:00

When collecting books, the first three things to consider are condition, condition, and condition. When looking at where to open a bookstore (as with any business), the three most important things are location, location, and location. As I go through the process of opening the brick-and-mortar incarnation of Somerset Books, the store's location has become something that occupies my thoughts even when I sleep.

In a perfect world my shop would be on the ground floor of a 200-year-old building and I'd live on the second floor (like the Sempere's in The Shadow of the Wind). Sadly, 200 years ago there was nothing here but miles of forest and open prairie, so that's not an option. And since I want to open the shop in my bookstore-less town, the options are reduced even further.

Currently the two best options are very different spaces. One is in the historic downtown area; it is the smaller of the two, and parking is something of an issue, but the rent is lower than in other parts of town and the Historic Downtown Association has been very active in revitalizing and promoting the businesses in the area. And although it's not 200 years old, it is one of the oldest buildings in town at 100 years old.

The second option has less character, but more space and more parking. It's in the ubiquitous shopping complex, anchored by a multiplex cinema and several chain stores. It's also at an intersection that has a huge amount of traffic, but how many of those cars simply drive right by I do not know yet. The rent is also, as would be expected, significantly higher.

On the surface the second choice would seem to be the logical one. But high rents can kill any store (as was the case with recently closed Legacy Books in Plano), and there's something to be said for a store's location having a little character in this cookie-cutter world.

Any ideas, suggestions, or personal experiences in this area would certainly be welcome. In any event, it looks like for now my sleep will continue to be filled with location-themed dreams.

Book Review: The Razor's Edge

2010-09-11T10:52:00.000-05:00

There are innumerable books that have been labeled "classics" over the years. Sadly, the very point at which a book receives this designation seems to be the point at which people stop reading it. In the case of the great English novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham, this "classic" label has long been applied to his book Of Human Bondage. Fortunately this is not as much the case with his best novel, The Razor's Edge, so we are all free to continue reading it.

The Razor's Edge is not simply Maugham's finest novel, however; it is easily one of the best novels of all time. I freely admit that I am an evangelist for this particular book, having read it every year since 1985. When I'm finished I give that copy to someone who has never read it and buy myself a new copy. Some have seen the 1946 film adaptation starring Tyrone Power, which was fairly true to the book, and almost 40 years later Bill Murray attempted an ill-conceived film version that was, in a word, awful. Neither film comes close to the greatness of the novel.

The Razor's Edge tells the story of Larry Darrell, a World War I flying ace who returns to his native Chicago profoundly impacted by the events of the war and unwilling to join in his friends' pursuit of money and leisure in booming 1920s America. Rather than enter the business world (as everyone expects him to do), he leaves his home and his fiancé Isabel and travels to Europe to, in his words, "loaf."

Loafing as Larry practices it is quite strenuous however, consisting of days working on a farm or in a coal mine and nights reading the great philosophers and mystics. He eventually travels to India and comes under the teaching of a guru who helps him greatly in his search for meaning. As these events transpire, back home Isabel has married Larry's best friend, the stock market has crashed, and the friends are ultimately reunited at the Paris home of Isabel's uncle Elliott Templeton.

One unique feature of this book is that Maugham inserts himself in the story as its narrator, giving the novel the feel of a memoir; indeed, after the publication of the book in 1944 there was no small amount of speculation as to the identity of the person Larry is based upon. While putting himself in the story is an unusual plot device, it allows for what are some of the best scenes of all: the interplay between Maugham's character and Elliott Templeton. And while Larry is certainly the main character, Elliott steals every scene he's in (this happened in both film version as well).

Although not as well known today as some of Maugham's other novels (including The Painted Veil and Up At the Villa, both of which have been made into films in the past decade), The Razor's Edge was a huge bestseller upon release, selling over a million copies in the 1940s; it has never been out of print since. It is as relevant today as when it was written nearly 70 years ago, and contains some unmistakable and prophetic parallels to our society today, from the dangers of a consumer society to the effects of war on those who fight it to the search for meaning through Eastern religions. It is also the only book I've ever read that makes the search for meaning both interesting and entertaining, which may be the most amazing thing of all.

A Bookman's Booktown

2010-09-10T08:28:00.000-05:00

Small-town West Texas is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about books, and even less so when thinking about a Mecca of books. But thanks to native son Larry McMurtry (author of such books as The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove), that is exactly what Archer City, Texas has become.

By his own account, it always bothered McMurtry that his hometown had no bookstores (and no library until he helped build one after his writing career flourished). Given that the town has only 2,000 residents, his frustration may have been unrealistic, but men with big dreams are seldom deterred by reality. Thus, when rent at his Booked Up bookstore in Washington, D.C., became too high he moved the store back home to Archer City after more than three decades in the nation's capital. What he created is nothing short of amazing.

Booked Up is not a "store" in the normal sense of the word. It comprises four buildings that take up the better part of downtown Archer City. Spread throughout these four buildings are roughly 400,000 books arranged, according to the comical description on their website:

"Erratically/Impressionistically/Whimsically/Open to Interpretation."

And don't ask them if they have a particular title in stock; they don't know, and wouldn't want to deprive you of the joy of browsing if they did. They're not being rude; the staff is actually very friendly. It's just a quirk you have to deal with when one of the biggest independent used bookstores in the United States has only two employees.

Those employees can almost always be found in Building 1, which houses the rare and signed books as well as the cash register. If you're looking for books on military history, you have to walk to Building 2 and then bring the book back to Building 1 to pay. It's a throwback to a time when merchants actually trusted their customers, as well as an assumption that someone willing to drive that far to shop for books loves books too much to steal them.

And drive you will; the nearest large city is Fort Worth, 110 miles to the east. The bulk of your drive will be on TX-199, the old Jacksboro Highway, which is not the most scenic route in America. But it's easily worth the two-hour trip, or even a three-hour flight from the East Coast followed by a two-hour drive, for both a look at the books and what you might find inside.

During my last trip to Booked Up, I discovered that McMurtry was right when he said they rarely get around to re-pricing their books after they've been shelved (it would be a Herculean task, to be sure). In Building 3, in the Foreign Books and Translations section, I discovered a signed first edition of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind on the bottom shelf in the back of the building. The price for a signed copy has risen in recent years to roughly $200.00, and I got it at Booked Up for $40.00, an obvious beneficiary of their inability to continually re-price all that stock.

McMurtry says he likes it that way, because the lure of finding a hidden gem keeps people coming to his store, keeps them buying books, and most importantly keeps them reading. Given that this Pulitzer and Oscar winning writer still considers bookselling his true occupation, I'm certainly not going to argue.

What Makes a Book Valuable?

2010-09-09T04:05:00.000-05:00

One of the most important things to know when collecting books is that "old" and "rare" are not the same thing. Many people assume that the age of a book is what determines both its scarcity and its value, but this is seldom the case. Antiques dealers are especially fond of putting high prices on books based solely on their age, but most antiques dealers are not book experts.

Rarity, and thus value, is determined by a number of factors. So while a book that's been in your family for generations may have great sentimental value to you, unless that book is a Gutenberg Bible or Shakespeare's First Folio it's probably neither rare nor valuable. There are several variables to consider regarding a book's value, and each is important:

1. Condition, condition, condition. Always buy a book in the best condition you can possibly afford. A book is not valuable simply because it's old, and a very old book in poor condition is worth little or nothing. For modern editions, the condition of the dust jacket is easily as important as the condition of the book itself when determining value. In fact, the dust jacket can account for up to 90 percent of the value of the book. For example, a "clipped" dust jacket (one where the original price on the inside cover has been clipped off) can cut the value of a book by 75 percent or more.

Books are graded according to condition. Typical grades include As New, Fine, Very Good, Good, Fair, Poor, Ex-Library, and Book Club Edition. You will often see "Near Fine" as well, and it is important to note that Book Club and Ex-Library Editions have next to no value except as reading copies. The problem, especially when purchasing books on the Internet, is that what one person calls Fine may in fact only be Good. If you are unable to personally inspect a book before buying it, at least ask for photographs of the dust jacket, binding, and copyright page.

2. In most cases, only the first printing of a first edition is of interest to collectors. This is one reason it is important to see the copyright page; especially for books printed in the past 20 years, the edition is typically clearly marked. There will be a series of numbers near the bottom of the page, and if a "1" is not visible, then you probably don't have a first printing. For example, you would want to see "First Edition" and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 or 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1. This is not true for all publishers, however, and it is worth the time and money to become thoroughly acquainted with the different ways some publishers identify a true first printing.

When speaking of first editions and first printings, we are always referring to the hardcover edition. The only exception to this occurs when the book has no initial hardcover run and is released only in soft cover. This is rare for literary fiction, but does occur more frequently in the mystery and science fiction/fantasy genres. When only a paperback first edition exists, the rules regarding condition still apply.

3. Unless a later book was particularly notable( for example, winning a Pulitzer Prize), an author's first book will always be the most valuable. This is typically because a first book is usually released with a small first print run, making the book scarce from the outset, and more so if the author becomes popular later. J.K. Rowling is a perfect example of this: the first UK print run of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" ("Sorcerer's Stone" in the US) was a tiny 500 copies, of which 300 went to libraries; a first printing now sells for tens of thousands of dollars. The final book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," had a first print run of 12 million, assuring that this book will never be collectible unless it has Rowling's elusive signature. A book must be either scarce or rare, or both, to generate enough interest to cause the value to increase.

4. Signed copies are, in most cases, worth more than unsigned copies, but the rules regarding condition and edition trump an autograph. In other words, while a signed first printing of "The Kite Runner" in Fine condition can be worth well over $1000, a signed copy of a fifth printing in Good condition will likely be worth less than the original cover price. Also remember that signed copies of books by an author who is hot today may be over-inflated, and could easily drop in value as time goes on. If you want to collect signed editions, the best way is to go to signings by the author where you can have them signed for free. Some authors will sign and return copies sent to them, but this happens far less often today than in the past. Always check with the author before sending anything.

One last thing to consider is that unless you are planning to become a full-time book dealer, you should stick to collecting books by authors that interest you. This way, even if the value of a particular book doesn't increase (or worse, decreases), you will still have a book in your collection that you actually want, rather than something you bought simply as a commodity.

The Bibliomystery

2010-09-08T05:52:00.000-05:00

There are many different genres (or sub-genres if you prefer) within the mystery novel category, and although many people read all types of mysteries, most will naturally gravitate toward one of these genres. They range from the hard-boiled detectives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to the more comedic heroines of Janet Evanovich and Cleo Coyle. One genre that deserves attention (and is a natural favorite of book lovers) is the bibliomystery.

A bibliomystery is one in which a book or manuscript is central to the plot of the novel. The definition can be expanded to include mystery novels in which libraries, librarians, bookstores, booksellers, publishers and/or authors play a key role in the story. Sadly, readers who love bibliomysteries must engage in a more arduous search for quality novels than those who read classic detective tales or legal thrillers.

There are several examples of good bibliomysteries from the early 20th century, among them "The Colfax Book-Plate," written by Agnes Miller in 1926, "Murder in the Bookshop," written by Carolyn Wells a decade later, and "Fast Company" by Marco Page (1937). These books deal with, respectively, murders surrounding a newly-discovered bookplate, the disappearance of a book valued at $100,000 (in 1936), and the theft of several valuable first editions. It's not necessary to go back 70 years, however; some of the best bibliomysteries were written in the past decade or so.

One of the very best bibliomysteries is "Booked to Die" by John Dunning (1992). "Booked to Die" is Dunning's first novel in his "Bookman" series, and it's a minor classic, especially if you're a fan of the bibliomystery genre or a book collector. It's the story of a Denver cop-turned-rare book dealer Cliff Janeway, and it will teach you a lot about the book trade while taking you on a mystery thrill-ride at the same time. Dunning is himself a rare book dealer, which makes the story even more authentic.

The list of bibliomysteries is not confined to detective novels, however. Some of the best feature protagonists who are ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances, all with a book or manuscript at the heart of the story. They include "The Book of Air and Shadows" by Michael Gruber, "Interred with Their Bones" by Jennifer Lee Carrell, "Ex-Libris" by Ross King, "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte, Alice Kimberly's Haunted Bookshop series, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's classic "The Shadow of the Wind," one of the best novels ever written in any genre.

So if you love books and mysteries centered around books, be sure to pick up one of the titles listed above. Every one is well worth your time.

Why Books Still Matter

2010-09-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

My last post dealt with the question I’m often asked of why we still need independent bookstores. Another question that often comes up when discussing my goal of opening a bookstore is equally alarming: “Do we really still need books?” In this instance, however, the question is deceiving, because invariably what the person means is do we still need printed books. Following the “success” of Amazon’s Kindle and copycat readers from the other members of the Axis of Evil (Borders and Barnes and Noble), barely a day has gone by without some media genius proclaiming the end of books on paper within the next 10 years.

But does this increase in the sales of e-readers and e-books really mean the demise of the printed book? In a word: no. One thing must always be remembered about the Kindle (and any other e-book reader): it is first and foremost an electronic gadget. Tech-craving consumers will buy anything new that will connect to the Internet. However, the fact that these same consumers will discard a perfectly good cell phone simply because a new version appears six months later should put the recent appeal of the Kindle in its proper perspective.

Both the manufacturers of e-readers (and the legion of people who bought them as gifts last Christmas, which was when the first sales spike occurred) assume that if books are offered in the same format as every other form of media, then people will automatically prefer that method. However, this is simply not the case. Games, social networking sites, and even to a degree newspapers are a good fit for computers, cell phones, and other hand-held devices; books are not, for several reasons:

1. Printed books provide a tactile experience. Music is heard, and films are both seen and heard, but books are experienced both visually and by touch. There is an aspect to the feel of books (the smooth glossy cover, the roughness and even smell of the paper) that provides a physical sensation that is both separate from and intimately linked to the story you are reading. We bond not only with the author (novels being the only art form that requires many hours of commitment on the part of the audience) but with the book itself.

2. Great novels, from War and Peace to The Shadow of the Wind were not meant to be read on a digital screen, no matter how much “like paper” they try to make that screen. Most of us spend our entire workday staring at a computer screen, plus additional hours in front of a computer or television after we get home. The last thing most readers want to do is spend even more time staring at a screen.

3. Books can be written in, dog-eared, loaned to friends, stuffed in your back pocket, browsed for on rainy afternoons, and then sold to a used bookshop for cash to buy yet more books. Try that with a Kindle.

4. Most readers (and we have always been remarkably few as percentage of the total population) like having a personal library. It may or may not contain highly collectible items like a signed Hemingway or first-edition Faulkner, but a bookcase loaded with books can be much more than a simple collection. It can serve as a timeline of our lives: the copy of Homer you read in the same college class as your future wife, that Robert Parker Spenser novel you read in the hospital waiting for your son to be born, that copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets you read to your daughters over a snowy weekend, and that biography of Maugham you discovered in a cool little shop in London. These are books you pass down through generations, even though they may have value only within the context of your own family. Once again, you can’t do that with an e-reader. The books in a Kindle don’t even exist except as bits of binary code.

Finally, we need only look to our own history to see that printed books will always find a way to survive. Books have weathered far greater threats than the Kindle for over 100 years. The book's demise was first predicted with the advent of radio, then with the arrival of motion pictures, television, video games, and finally the Internet and the iPad age. It was even thought that the launch of Penguin Publishing's paperback book line in 1935 would quickly spell the end of hardcover books; 75 years later hardcovers are still around. And given our attention span with gadgets in general, I think that printed books are quite safe.

Why Independent Bookstores Matter

2010-09-05T19:45:00.001-05:00

In my first post I mentioned that I am often asked if we really need independent bookstores in an electronic age. After my frustration at the question subsides, I explain why the answer is a very definite yes. There are many reasons why we still (and always will) need independent bookstores, but it really boils down to two basic reasons: economic and social.

As corporate giants like Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon continue to dominate an increasingly competitive booksellers market, independent bookstores find it harder than ever just to survive. Yet these locally owned businesses contribute far more to the local economy than retail chains, according to several studies by the American Bookseller Association.

Major retailers present some obvious advantages to consumers. Barnes and Noble, for example, offers everything from books to music to movies, and sell coffee as well. Their children's section is larger than many independents' entire store. And they offer deep discounts that smaller business often cannot match. Both Barnes and Noble and rival Borders offer a comfortable environment, with large overstuffed chairs where customers can browse through books before making a purchase.

But there are costs to such convenience that are not so obvious. National chains take far more out of a community economically than they ever put back in. According to a study conducted by the firm Civic Economics in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago, trading independent retailers for big-box chains weakens the local economy. This occurs because while local stores recycle a much larger share of their sales revenue back into the local economy, chains siphon most of the dollars spent at their stores out of the community, sending them back to corporate headquarters or to distant suppliers.

The study applies to all local businesses, not only bookstores, but bookstores are a part of the local economy, and therefore the findings are worth considering. The study found that spending $100 at one of the neighborhood's independent businesses created $68 in additional local economic activity, while spending $100 at a chain produced only $43 worth of local impact. The difference was due to four factors:

Local Payroll: The locally owned businesses spent a larger share of their revenue on local labor (29% vs. 23%), because they carried out all management functions on-site, rather than at a corporate headquarters.

Procurement: The local retailers spent more than twice as much buying goods and services from other local businesses. They banked locally; hired local accountants, attorneys, designers, and other professionals; advertised in local media; and where possible ordered inventory from local firms.

Profits: Because their owners live in the area, a larger portion of the local retailers' profits stayed within the local economy.

Charitable giving: The local retailers donated more on average to local charities and community organizations than the chains did.

Also, with regard to local sales tax revenues, Amazon.com sales effectively skirt sales tax collection entirely. None of us like paying taxes, but sales tax pays for the little things like our police officers, firefighters and teachers. Buying at a local independent bookstore keeps that revenue in your town where it belongs, serving the needs of your community.

Beyond the economic impact, the Andersonville study found that over 70% of the people surveyed actually prefer to patronize local businesses. Surveys have also shown that people prefer a more unique store and more personal interaction to the cookie-cutter, impersonal feel present in many large retailers. Sadly, many areas (including those as large as the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex), have no independent bookstore to patronize.

The personal interaction mentioned above is the other reason we need independent bookstores. It may be hard to believe in the age of Facebook and Twitter, but there was a time when our social activity wasn’t done from a distance in front of computers. Bookstores were among the places where people gathered to exchange and debate ideas on everything from literature to politics.

As important to readers as a lively discussion is helpful book recommendations from knowledgeable booksellers. Few of us can afford every book that catches our eye, so being able to avoid the bad ones is crucial. It is also a pleasant feeling in this increasingly disconnected society to see a familiar person who remembers that you like both the hard-boiled novels of Mickey Spillane and the occasional Agatha Christie. For me at least, ordering a book online can never replace ducking into a local bookstore on a rainy day, browsing down countless shelves of titles, usually ending up with a novel I’d never even heard of before that day, often based solely on the recommendation of the bookseller. It just doesn’t get much better than that.

Welcome to Somerset Books

2010-09-05T11:58:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the first post of the Somerset Books blog. I should start with a disclaimer: the picture of the bookstore on the right side of the page is not my store. It's the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, but it pretty much captures what I think most book lovers envision when they think of a bookstore, and what I hope my store will someday be.

My goal is to open an independent bookstore for the readers of the North Texas area and beyond. It boggles the mind that a metro area of 6 million people has no choice for books but the corporate Axis of Evil that is Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, and my aim is to change that. This blog will chronicle the process of taking Somerset Books from dream to reality, as well as thoughts on books, reading, and the trends currently shaking the book world today.

The most common questions I get lately are "Why do you want to open a bookstore?" and "Do we really need bookstores in an electronic age?" The answer to the first question is simple: there has never been anywhere I've been more at peace than in a good bookstore, so why not take what you love and make it your life? The answer to the second question is the subject of my next post.

Thanks for stopping by.