First Look at New Maya Angelou Stamp

Here's what is said to be a first look at the upcoming Maya Angelou stamp that was in the news last week without an accompanying image:

Is This the Best Bookstore in the Country?

McLean & Eakin, Petoskey, Michigan

How do you define "heart" when it relates to a bookstore?  

I don't know either...but the five bookstores still in the running for "best bookstore in the country" must have figured it out for themselves.

According to the Washington Post, "heart," though, is not the only thing that the ultimate winner is going to be judged on.  Judges are also looking at "excellence in hand-selling, community involvement, management-employee relations and merchandising."

These are the cities and towns that can claim one of these wonder-store finalists:

Coral Gables, Florida (Books & Books)
St. Louis, Missouri (Left Bank Books)
Petoskey, Michigan (McLean & Eakin)
Portland, Oregon (Powell's Books)
Bellingham, Washington (Village Books & Paper Dreams)

There you have it.  I suspect that each and every one of these bookstores offers a wonderful experience for book lovers.  Too, I pretty much agree with Christina Nosti (Director of Events & Marketing at Books & Books) who is quoted in the article as having said, "Every bookstore in the world is special and has its own magic."

Good luck to everyone.

Read the Washington Post article here.

The Joy Luck Club - Finally

Some of you will remember that I promised myself last month that I would start working on what has become a rather permanent TBR stack, the one spread throughout the books on my bookshelves.  I say "rather permanent" because many of the books have been there since the mid-eighties, and they are in the same pristine condition they were in when I brought them home from the bookstore all those years ago.

I started the project with Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and was beginning to wonder if it would end up being one of those books I abandoned upon reaching page forty because it had not yet caught my imagination.  Well, it was a close call, but I made it past that self-imposed cut-off point, and I'm very much enjoying Tan's writing now (I'm on page 102 as I write this).

I suspect that it has been a number of years since most of you read The Joy Luck Club, so I will refresh your memories a bit.  The book is about four elderly Chinese women and the four daughters they raised in America after themselves coming to this country as young women.  

The book is neatly divided into four sections, with each section itself subdivided into four separate parts in which either one of the mothers or one of their daughters serves as a first person narrator.  The first and fourth sections are devoted to the mothers, and the second and third to the daughters.  The first 100 pages have carried me through the initial stories of each of the mothers and the first of the daughter narratives.  

Amy Tan as seen in first edition of The Joy Luck Club

What struck me this evening is that the first of the daughter-story (told in the voice of Waverly Jong), called "Rules of the Game," is a near perfect short story.  So I started to wonder which came first, a bunch of short stories or a novel.  And a look at the book's copyright page answered my question: short stories came first, and they were then cobbled together to form one of the most successful debut novels of the eighties.

On that copyright page, Tan thanks various magazines (The Atlantic, Grazia, Ladies' Home Journal, San Francisco Focus, Seventeen, and The Short Story Review) "in which some of the stories, in slightly different form, have already appeared."  I know that is a common approach, especially, I think, to first novels, but I have to wonder if Tan was surprised by the immense success that she found by combining all the stories into a novel.  

And I wonder why I never knew this about The Joy Luck Club before tonight...

Book Trailer of the Week: Life from Scratch

It's been a while since I've shared a book trailer here, so here's a new one that I find hard to resist - and this is from someone not at all into cookbooks or anything resembling a cookbook.




Now this book appears to be a combination memoir/cookbook, and I'm not even sure what the exact mix is or how many recipes might be included in the book.  What I find fascinating is the concept of cooking a meal from every country on the face of the planet as a way of rethinking (or resetting) one's life.

And the bonus here is that this is a beautifully photographed book trailer.  It worked surprisingly well on someone like me who would most likely have not even glanced at the book before seeing the trailer.  Book Trailers work...no doubt about it.

The Year of Reading Dangerously

British editor Andy Miller, fast approaching 40, was busy living life…very busy.  Married and the father of a small son, Miller spent a good portion of his days just getting to and from the job that made his lifestyle possible.  At home, his evenings were spent accomplishing ordinary tasks such as helping his wife put meals on the table and reading bedtime stories to his son.  All in all, not a bad life, but one day Miller came to the odd realization that for a man who made his living working with words, the only reading he did for pleasure anymore came from magazines, newspapers, and websites – and most of that reading happened during his almost-daily commutes.  Sadly, books were no longer a part of his life.

He decided to do something about that – and he shares the results of his efforts with the rest of us in The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Books Saved My Life.  Some may quibble with Miller’s choice of books, even with the word “great” in his book’s subtitle, but he made it through the year.  He read the books, and his life was changed for the better for having done it. 

Miller’s “List of Betterment” includes many books generally considered to be among the finest ever written, but it also leaves room for a few titles that will probably bewilder most American readers (Krautrocksampler and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, for example).  Not all of the rest of Miller’s reading was confined to acknowledged classics from previous centuries.  The list also includes relatively recent titles such as A Confederacy of Dunces, Catch-22, Beloved, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and One Hundred Years of Solitude (a title he pretty much despised). 

Andy Miller

The Year of Reading Dangerously, though, is more than just another book about books.  It is, instead, a mini-autobiography in which the author spends as much time recounting why he chose these particular books and relating them to his life experiences as he does discussing the books themselves.  His choices are personal ones, and he uses a Henry Miller quote to make that clear.  Miller (Henry), when speaking of “books that had remained with him over the years,” said “They were alive and they spoke to me.”  It follows that simply reading the book list reveals much about Andy Miller to the rest of us. 

Are you wondering what the “two not so great” books Miller is hinting at in his book’s subtitle are?    Well, one is Dan Brown’s rather infamous The Da Vinci Code and the second is another Dan Brown book that Miller, in the end, decides not to bother reading at all, leading to a bit of inaccuracy (he admits) in that subtitle.

Upon the completion of Miller’s dangerous reading year, he said, “I am myself again.  But I no longer tell lies about books.”  He doesn’t have to now.  And neither do the rest of us, if we decide to do our own reading as dangerously.

Jeff Kinney (Wimpy Kid author) to Open Bookstore in Hometown

The Wimpy Kid

There was a nice story in the Boston Globe Magazine this weekend about Jeff Kinney who is best known for all of his Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (favorites of a grandson of mine).  It seems that Kinney has taken it into his own hands to build a new bookstore in the little town he lives in, Plainville, Massachusetts.  

Kinney makes it clear that this is not some kind of "vanity project" and that he is not interested in creating  a "Wimpy World" with which to promote himself.  Rather, he is opening a bookstore to serve a community that is very short on bookstores (Plainville has only 8,000 residents and is, I suspect, at least 45 minutes from Boston on a good driving day.)

The author also gives us his take on tree-books vs. e-books, especially when it comes to children.  And, I love this, his take on working in the bookstore when he can:

I do plan to be an occasional part of it, but if this is about me, then it’s not going to succeed, or if it depends on my presence, it’s not going to succeed. I want it to succeed on its own merits. I think that I’ll make appearances, do things like teach a cartooning class or maybe down the line a screenwriting class. I am actually eager to work as a staffer there. I’d like to receive books and shelve books and maybe do some book talking of my own. That’s something that I’m actually looking forward to, maybe working the cafe occasionally. I never got to do that kind of a thing, and I think it would be fun.

Again, here's the link to the complete magazine article: Boston Globe Magazine