You Never Know Whom You Might Meet in a Bookstore

Shopping in a bookstore demands a certain level of concentration and the ability to tune out the distractions created by your fellow shoppers. I like to lose myself in at least a couple of pages of any book that I'm considering for purchase and, if I can't find a nearby chair, I'll stand in place for however long it takes me to decide if a book is coming home with me or not. Once while browsing in London's Foyles Bookshop I even stood shoulder to shoulder with actor Michael Caine for at least five minutes before I glanced over and recognized exactly who was starting to crowd me.

But the experience that this Arizona bookstore customer had is one that really defies the odds. According to Forbes.com, it was a case of victim and thief meeting for the second time at the same bookstore.

A woman whose purse was stolen and the thief who took it inadvertently stood next to each other at a Prescott bookstore - she to complain about the unauthorized use of her credit card, he to get some cash.

The 59-year-old victim went to Hastings Books and Music on Tuesday to tell the store that someone had stolen her purse and used her credit card to buy $200 in DVDs.

Minutes later, while the woman was standing there, a man came up to the counter and tried to return eight DVDs in exchange for cash. The two didn't recognize each other, and the woman even politely made room for the man when he walked up.

I have a feeling that the thief, who obviously suffers from a stupidity problem, was the more surprised of the two. The good news is that police arrived quickly enough to catch up with the jerk as he tried to make his escape. No, you really never know just whom you might meet in a bookstore.

'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey

Tim Brookes had his life changed forever in 1973 when, as a young Oxford student, he met an American girl from Iowa who personified all of the traits that he saw as the best that America had to offer. So infatuated was he with the girl and what she represented to him, that he came to New York City that summer with $90 worth of traveler’s checks and the determination to hitchhike across the country and back to an Ontario tobacco farm where he had a summer job waiting. Almost as an afterthought, Brookes applied for a position at the University of Vermont and, against all odds, was eventually offered a position at the university that he still held in 1998 when he decided to relive his 1973 hitchhiking adventure.

Twenty-five years after that first trip, Brookes found that he was not exactly living the dream that he saw for himself back in 1973. He looked in the mirror and saw a twice-divorced middle-aged man who had been working hard for more than a decade to be a good husband and father in his third try at marriage. He was “trudging grimly through the valley of the shadow of debt,” had a mortgage and credit card debt, was paying child support, and was working 50-60 hours every week just to stay even. In other words, he was living an existence that typifies the one that most of us know only too well.

Brookes, even in the days prior to September 11, 2001, had the feeling that America had changed in ways that directly impacted the nature of its citizens in a negative way. So, with financial backing from National Geographic magazine, he devised a plan to judge for himself how much Americans had changed in the last twenty-five years. (The magazine also provided a photographer who traveled sometimes ahead of Brookes and sometimes behind him, although very few of his photographs are actually used in the book.)

Brookes did make it all the way to the West Coast and back to his Vermont home, just as he had planned to do. And along the way, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the abundance of kindness from strangers that he had encountered on his first trip was not a thing of the past. The book, in fact, is filled with stories of people who go out of their way to help Brookes just when he most needed the kind of help they had to offer.

But A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow is not quite the adventure that I expected to read when I first picked it up because, for his second trip across the U.S. as a hitchhiker, Brookes makes so many concessions to his age and financial backing that the trip more resembles a controlled experiment than it does a trip left to chance. He travels with a cell phone by which he can almost always contact his photographer to meet him when he has the urge to cover ground more quickly for a day or two. And he has enough cash or credit this time to pamper himself with a motel when his body demands a break or to ride the bus when spots the right connections.

Despite that type of thing (and Brookes, to his credit, makes the concessions an integral part of his story), I did enjoy learning about the people and places that Brookes came to know while crossing the country. And, frankly, being of a similar age, I can sympathize with the knee problems that he described and am impressed that he had the courage to tackle the trip at all.

Rated at: 3.0

"Revenge of the Bloodthirsty Lesbians"

I'm sort of impressed with the way that current authors have reached the level of celebrity that gets them mentioned in the "entertainment" sections of newspapers these days. I say "sort of" because I'm not real sure that I want to read about my favorite writers while having to dodge the latest tripe on Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

But from the Times of London comes word of a feud between two of the best crime fiction writers in the business today, one of them a personal favorite of mine, Ian Rankin.

There is no mystery to solve: Ian Rankin did it, in an interview, with the word “lesbian”.

Britain’s bestselling crime writer found himself condemned as “offensive” by a leading female rival yesterday after suggesting that women authors, and gay ones in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. The acclaimed writer of the Inspector Rebus novels said in an interview last year: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

Speaking to an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Val McDermid quoted the remark almost word for word, attributing it to “a very prominent Scottish male writer”. She then dismissed it as “arrant rubbish”.

...

“I’ll tell you what pisses me off more than almost anything: when people say, ‘As a woman, how do you feel about writing on violence?’ Have you ever heard a male crime writer being asked, ‘As a man, how do you feel about writing about violence?’

“There’s a profound disassociation, it seems to me; as if somehow it’s wrong for us to be writing about violence against women, as though somehow we need permission to write about violence against women.”

...

Rankin defended himself at the festival yesterday, saying that his original comments had been intended as part of a broader discussion about the younger generation of crime fiction writers. “It’s not just about lesbians. It seems to me that to get into the Top Ten it helps, if you are a woman, if you write quite violent books. It helps if you are a man if you don’t.”

...

Some women crime writers have argued that what they produce is less gratuitous than the violence in books by men because it tends to emphasise the consequences of abuse and killing. Others suggest that the visceral style of so many female crime writers stems from their greater awareness of the threat of sexual violence.

The article contains some graphic descriptions of recent novels written by women crime writers. In fact, they are so graphic that I avoided quoting the descriptions, so see the article to judge for yourself the kind of thing that Rankin was describing.

There have been some great literary feuds in the last few decades, of course, and they are always interesting to follow because of the way that they expose the minds of those involved. This particular feud appears to be far from over although Rankin doesn't really seem to be all that interested in it.

Stephen King Mistaken for Vandal

No one can say that Stephen King has lost his sense of humor or the love of pulling a good prank. A bookstore owner in the Australian Outback got a glimpse of the man and his personality recently.

Stephen King, the bestselling author, was mistaken for a vandal in the Australian Outback while secretly signing copies of his own thrillers in a book shop, according to local media reports.

A customer at the Dymocks store in remote Alice Springs raised the alarm after noticing a man walk in off the street and begin writing in several books, manager Bev Ellis told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"As the owner of a bookshop, when you see someone writing in one of your books you get a bit toey [touchy]," Ms Ellis said.

"So we immediately ran to the books and lo-and-behold here was the signature in several books.

"We sort of spun around on our heels, [saying] 'where did he go, where did he go'?"

Ms Ellis said she found the American horror writer standing in the fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket across the road in the small desert town and went over to introduce herself.

Gotta love it...

Is Listening to a Book Cheating?

I have a casual relationship with audio books, especially now that I don't do as much daily driving as I used to do. I would never listen to an audio book from one of my favorite authors instead of savoring the printed version of their work and non-fiction audio books are a real struggle for me because I sometimes need to read the facts contained in non-fiction several times before I really comprehend them or they sink in for good. But, on the other hand, I find that thrillers, detective fiction and spy novels are perfect for the audio book format.

Despite the fact that I finish an audio book about every three weeks, I still feel somewhat guilty about listing them as part of what I've read for the year. In fact, although there are 14 audio books included in the 100 titles that I've read so far in 2007, in the back of my mind I still only count the 86 books of which I've actually turned the pages. And don't even start about the abomination of abridged audio books. I won't touch one of those unless there is nothing else to "read" within 10 miles of me and I'm on foot.

Susan Reimer, in her Baltimore Sun piece, talks about audio books and how they seem to be splitting some reading groups wide open.

I hesitate to admit this in polite company, but if I didn't listen to books, I wouldn't read at all.

I have a daily commute that is almost an hour in each direction and for many years have spent the rest of my time driving kids hither and yon.

During that time, I bet I "read" 500 books. Books that I would not have had the time nor the inclination to read if I had had consumption or two broken legs.

...

I thought it was just my book club, but apparently there is a real schism in book groups over the issue of whether you read the book or have it read to you.

And I thought abridged was cheating.

To settle this, I went to a higher authority: Carla Hayden, executive director of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.

"No, it is not cheating," she said. "In fact, I think we should appreciate the fact that we have so many ways now to enjoy literature."

Any such distinction, she said, makes reading seem like a chore and a book something to be suffered through.

...

"To hear an author read it can be magical," said Hayden. "You can hear the voice the authors were hearing in their heads when they were writing those words." Certainly, there are some cognitive differences between hearing a book and reading the words in it. We experience it differently depending on which part of our brain is lighting up. But, as Hayden suggests, the pictures in your head are probably going to be the same.

For fiction, I agree that the "pictures in my head" are very similar to the ones that I would experience from reading a book rather than from listening to it. But I find that my mind wanders from an audio book to more important things, like avoiding other drivers and not running over pedestrians, for much of the time. Even when listening to them around the house while doing chores, I only come to realize that I've tuned the reader out when I suddenly begin to listen to the words again. My comprehension level is much higher for the written word than it is for the spoken word that allows so many distractions to seep in. I suspect that some readers find just the opposite to be the case and that probably explains the split of opinion regarding whether or not listening to an audio book is somehow cheating yourself of the real reading experience.

The Guardians

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