Dueling Bookstore Headlines

Wandering the web for the last few minutes has provided me with a variety of headlines, some of which seem to contradict each other.  This is what I mean:

Independent bookstores in Houston are doing well

Indie Bookstores Aren't Surging Everywhere

Twenty pct. of bookstores closed up shop last year

Customers Save a San Francisco Sci-Fi Bookstore, at Least for Now

Barnes & Noble will spin off college-bookstore business

I'm not sure what to think about the Houston headline because, on the one hand, two or three of the city's indy bookstores do appear to be doing well.  But, on the other hand, part of the problem is that it's only two or three; and I estimate that the number of independent bookstores in this town has dropped by at least fifty-percent in the last five years.  

In fact, the one nearest me just closed up shop last month after its new owners could only afford to keep the doors open for about one year.  And, the topper is that very, very few new bookstores are being opened around here because the financial gamble involved is so large that few people are willing to risk it.

So, the second headline makes some sense, and the third one comes as no great surprise.  The fourth headline, concerning the San Francisco book store being bailed out by its customers, shows just how precarious the continuing existence of independent bookstores really is.  (We're talking a well-established bookstore here, not some newbie.)

And then, there is the inevitable Barnes & Noble headline highlighting one of that company's recent decisions to unburden itself of the college bookstore business.  Seems like B&N, by shedding college bookstores and the Nook business, is trying to get back to the core business that at one time made it such a dominant bookstore chain.

Time, I suppose, will tell which of the headlines are true, which are false.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

When Nina Sankovitch lost her elder sister Anne-Marie to stomach cancer, she also lost the person with whom she most regularly shared new books and authors.  Sankovitch, her two sisters, and her brother were lucky to have grown up in a home in which books were so appreciated, but now one of them would be missing from the conversation.  It was only after three years of living life at a frantic pace in which she tried to live both for herself and for Anne-Marie that Sankovitch finally decided to try something different in order to deal with her grief.  She would read a book per day for the next 365 days – and she would spend two or three hours writing a formal review of each and every one of those books.  Believe it or not, she did it - Tolstoy and the Purple Chair tells us how she managed it and what she gained in the process.

From the beginning, Sankovitch set a few firm rules for herself:

·      She would read only one book per author,

·      She would not re-read any books she had already read,

·      She would limit her choices to books that were no more than one inch thick, ensuring that they would, for the most part, be in the range of 250-300 pages each,

·      And she would only read the kind of books she and Anne-Marie would have likely enjoyed together if her sister were still alive.

In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch devotes time to Anne-Marie’s story, to what it was like growing up in her family, to how she dealt with her sister’s death both before and after beginning her reading year, and to many of the 365 books she read that year.  Reading enthusiasts will be intrigued by the book choices that Sankovitch made during the year, as well as by how often, and how regularly, she was able to find something in those books that spoke to her personally about the grieving process.  Readers seeking new ideas about dealing with the grief associated with the loss of a family member are likely to be equally enthusiastic about the Tolstoy and the Purple Chair because Sankovitch is frank and open about her own experiences following Anne-Marie’s death – starting with the question that so often haunted her: “Why do I deserve to live?”

Nina Sankovitch

Coming in to her year of reading, Sankovitch knew exactly how lucky she was that her family was willing to support her effort to find comfort through such a time-consuming project.  As she says in the book’s second chapter:

“For years, books had offered me a window into how other people deal with life, its sorrows and joys and monotonies and frustrations.  I would look there again for empathy, guidance, fellowship, and experience.  Books would give me all that, and more…I was trusting books to answer the relentless question of why I deserved to live.  And how I should live.  My year of reading would be my escape back into life.”

She found what she was searching for.

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

I know it's crazy for someone from Houston to whine about the winter weather...but I. Am. Sick. Of. It.  It's about 43 degrees out there today, but throw in a steady rain, and it's miserable for all concerned.  I made a quick grocery-run for my elderly father this morning, and now that I'm home, I don't intend to go back out there for any reason.

Yesterday was a much better day.  I think the high was probably in the mid-fifties, and even though it was very cloudy and overcast all day, we got no rain.  But the best part of the day for me, was that I spent it in Minute Maid Park (Houston Astros home ballpark) where the city's annual College Classic is taking place this weekend.  

Imagine this, baseball fans: sitting in a major league ballpark all day long, along with about 15,000 other fans, and watching three college games in succession.  I walked in at noon and left just after ten p.m...ten hours of baseball with only two 40-minute breaks between games.  That's what baseball fans imagine heaven to be.

Just for the record, these are the games played yesterday:

Nebraska 4 - Hawaii 3
LSU 2 - Baylor 0
Texas A&M 6 - Houston 0

Now, to Julian Barnes and reading:

The breaks did give me a little reading time so, after grabbing some ballpark food, I found a quiet corner and settled in with Julian Barnes's fascinating 2008 memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of.  Knopf, the publisher, characterizes this one as "a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction."

Along the way, Barnes (an agnostic) compares the way that his religious friends view death, and live their lives as they get older, to the way that his nonreligious friends do it.  And, honestly, he does not see a great difference between the two groups.  Barnes is frank about his own views and fears about dying, and gives the reader plenty to think about (especially those of us who are about his age).  Sounds cheerful, doesn't it.  I was tempted to discard it at about page 40, but decided to push through that barrier, and I'm glad I did.  This is turning into one of the better books I've read so far this year, in fact.  It's probably not for everyone, but I'm impressed with both the writing and the content...win-win.

Short Story Saturday: "Invisible" by Nik Perring or Caroline Smailes - Or Both

"Invisible" is one of the short stories from Freaks, a collection of short, short fiction from the pens of Nik Perring and Caroline Smailes.  All the stories are about "superheroes," real ones and imagined ones, and in that tradition, the authors have chosen not to identify which stories each has written.  Thus, the title of my post.

As they put it on the contents page:

Some of these stories have been written by Nik. Some of these stories have been written by Caroline. Some were written together.  But in the true spirit of superheroes, we couldn't possibly reveal our identities.

"Invisible" is one of the more touching stories in the collection.  In it, a young girl wants desperately to believe that she possess the power to make herself invisible at will.  All she has to do is follow the recipe, and no one will be able to see her.  Why she wants to become invisible will break your heart.

Freaks is a softcover original with an eye-catching, comic book style cover that contains fifty illustrated short stories.  Keep in mind that the entire book (U.K. edition), front to back, has only 135 numbered pages.  "Flash fiction" fans know what to expect already, and those new to this sub-genre of short story writing are in for a treat.  (Nik Perring's work turned me on to the genre a while back, and I am always on the lookout for more.)

One last thing...illustrations.  Half the fun of Freaks comes from the work of Darren Craske who provides illustrations for each of the fifty stories and did the book's eye-popping cover.  But here is a clue as to what Freaks is really all about.  This is the book's dedication:

To all who, if only for a moment, felt that they didn't belong.

Yes, we are all freaks - but we all have superpowers.  Make good use of them.

World Book Day - Remembering Some of My Favorite Books

Sadly, World Book Night will not happen in the U.S. in 2015. The huge book giveaway that has taken place in late April each of the past several years has been cancelled because of the difficulty of covering the massive costs involved.  It was fun while it lasted, and I will miss it.

But...this is World Book Day and the celebration continues in the U.K. and Ireland in a big way.  With that in mind, I will mark the day by highlighting some of my favorite books:

This 1985 (30 years, can you believe it?) novel was a breakthrough in more ways than one.  It transformed Larry McMurtry's whole career, instantly turning him into one of the hottest writers in the country, and he has never looked back.  McMurtry's portrayal of life in the American West was fresh and colorful - and it focused on the characters as much as on their exploits.  Literary Westerns...who would have thought that could be pulled off successfully?  My once-read, first-printing of Lonesome Dove sits proudly on my bookshelves.

You Must Remember This is the novel that placed Joyce Carol Oates firmly and forever on my literary map.  I had been reading her novels for a couple of years before this one came along to astound me with the power and passion of Oates's writing.  The story, set in the 1950s, centers on the Stevick family, a family that appears to be almost perfect from the outside but is hiding terrible secrets - one of which involves the greatest sexual taboo of them all, incest.  After reading this one, I became a dedicated Oates-collector, and now have something over 100 of her first editions in my collection.  And she continues to surprise me with both the volume and the quality of her output.

Ball Four, Jim Bouton's 1970 autobiography, came along at the perfect time for me.  A baseball fan for ten years by 1970, I still looked at baseball and baseball players through rose-colored glasses.  Bouton changed all of that forever.  His stories about what the players were up to on the field and, more importantly, off the field ripped the blinders off the eyes of baseball fans forever.  Those same stories also got Bouton ostracized by his fellow ballplayers and unofficially blackballed from the game by its owners.  This is the classic baseball book.  Thank you, Jim.

Time and Again is a reminder of why I so much love bookstores.  One day in July, 1970, I was browsing a small bookstore in an even smaller town, and stumbled upon what is now recognized as one of the best time-travel novels ever written.  Up to that moment, I did not know of Jack Finney, and about the only time-travel book I had ever read was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.  All of that changed with this "illustrated novel," and now I am in constant search of well written time-travel novels and stories.  (The illustrations are mostly actual photos of the period the central character travels back to.)

Seldom has a book claimed my complete attention to the degree that Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides did back in 1986.  I was completey enthralled by Conroy's story, and I barely came up for food and water while reading it.  This is the only novel I have ever bought multiple copies of to give as gifts (over the years, I have probably given away close to 20 copies).  Conroy was not a new author to me in 1986, but this is the one that placed him on my very selective group of "must read everything they write" authors.  It's also one of the few novels I plan to re-read a few times.

Happy World Book Day, y'all.

Revival

Stephen King may no longer be able to scare readers like he scared them a decade or two ago.  It just doesn’t work that way anymore.  The truth is that the real world is now scarier than the horrors that anyone writing traditional horror fiction can match.   Who needs vampire hoards on the prowl to scare them when we have Islamist militants by the thousands beheading innocents or burning them alive inside cages?  Who needs haunted hotels, or pets and people rising from the grave, to scare them when every week we see pictures of the latest bombings that have blown people to bloody bits in the streets as they went about their daily business?  No, the fact, sad as it may be, is that novels like King’s Revival are almost a welcome relief from today’s real world.

That said, Revival is everything a reader has come to expect in a Stephen King novel.  It is a coming-of-age story in which evil intrudes on our narrator’s life even before he has outgrown playing in the dirt with his army of toy soldiers.  King does children, especially boys, very well, and the young characters in Revival are probably the best thing about the book.  King gets into these young heads to a depth that reminds readers that there are things happening in there to which the adults around them will remain forever oblivious. 

Little Jamie senses that there is something special about the young preacher who comes to town to take over the pulpit in his family’s church.  There seems to be some kind of weird connection between the two of them that the preacher feels just as strongly as Jamie, maybe even stronger than Jamie feels it.  And when the preacher leaves town, not too many months later, both of them shed a few tears during what they believe to be their final goodbyes.  But they were right about there being a special connection between them, because one day they will meet again - and when they do, things will get ugly, very ugly.

Stephen King

At just over 400 pages, Revival is probably a longer book than it should have been, but that is not all that unusual for a Stephen King novel.  The first segment of the book, the set-up, is Jamie’s story, one in which the reader follows the narrator from child to young adult, a portion of life that King is especially adept at describing and making real.  The book’s second segment (the overlong part) is not kind to Jamie.  Jamie, who drifts into the desperate lifestyle of a professional musician barely hanging on,  simply does not handle adulthood well.  And even though a chance meeting with the reverend probably saves Jamie’s life, his real troubles are just beginning because, in the third section of the book (the shortest of the three), Jamie learns that reconnecting with this man just might be the worst thing that ever happened to him.

The inside cover of Revival promises the “most terrifying conclusion” of a Stephen King novel ever.  Depressing, maybe…but terrifying?  Not if you watch the nightly newscasts.