Cell Phones and Bookstores

I realize that bookstores are not libraries and that the same limits on loud talking that govern well-run libraries do not apply to bookstores. However, since bookstores and libraries generally draw "customers" from the same crowd, common sense tells most of us that loud talking in the bookstore aisles is frowned upon by all but the rudest among us.

This letter to the editor of the Washington Post got me to wondering if that kind of thing bothers others as much as it does me. Apparently, it does bother the heck out of Rockville's Denny Freezer.

To Washington-area bookstore owners who may wonder why they're losing market share, I offer a suggestion: no discernible cellphone policy.

I love books, and I used to love the look, feel and smell of bookstores. But now, with the exception of some independent bookstores that do discourage cellphone use, it's no longer fun to look for books in a bookstore. It's very hard to get acquainted with a book when there's a constant stream of people roaming by while yakking on their cellphones.

Why they want to be in a bookstore anyway is beyond me; look around next time you're on Metro -- if you see someone reading a book, it's probably me. Most others have no need to carry a book because they're either yakking on their cellphones or carefully studying their screens for inspiration.

There are no cellphones to contend with when I shop for books on the Web!

DENNY FREEZER

Rockville

I know it's hopeless to expect that people who are oblivious enough to shout into their cell phones in public places will ever see themselves as the asses they are, but I do wonder what the rest of you "normal" people think. Does it bug you, too?

Banned Books = Increased Sales

It looks like the Korean Ministry of Defense is learning one of the laws of human nature the hard way. When you tell someone that they cannot do or have something, that object or action suddenly becomes very intriguing to them. They suddenly develop a consuming interest where none existed before the banning.

According to The Korea Times that is exactly what is happening to the 23 books that the Ministry has blacklisted as "subversive literature" not to be read by its servicemen.

It has banned its servicemen from reading and bringing them into barracks since July 22, alleging the books in question praise North Korea while criticizing the Korean government, Seoul-Washington alliance and capitalism.

Ironically, however, the blacklisted books have begun flying off shelves. Some on and off-line bookstores capitalized on the unprecedented ``frenzy'' by placing the publications at the forefront.

...

According to on-line bookstore Aladdin (www.aladdin.co.kr), ``Bad Samaritans,'' written by Prof. Chang Ha-joon, was selling roughly 10 copies a day but demand has increased in recent days to reach 457 copies on Aug. 1 alone.

``There was almost no demand for `Guerrillas in Samsung Kingdom' until recently but now it's selling very well,'' said an Aladdin officer Keum Jung-hyun. ``Some published in the past had almost no demand until recently. But the announcement sparked demand for them as well.''

Rather than killing off these books, the Korean government seems to have increased their sales by a factor of 40 or so. Now everyone in Korea is curious about why their government fears these books and they will be read by many more people than would have otherwise been the case if they had just been ignored by those in charge.

You have to love it.

The Big Lock-Out

The problem with Blogger's overzealous software-policeman seems to be almost over - at least for now. In an attempt to kill off spam blogs, Blogger unleashed a program that supposedly was capable of identifying the blogs and automatically locking them down. Unfortunately, there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent blogs swept up into that net at the same time.

To Blogger's credit, the problem was resolved pretty quickly and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Book Chase is back under my control as of sometime this morning.

There does seem to be another issue out there, however, that is still affecting Blogger users, a conflict between Sitemeter, Internet Explorer 7 and Blogger that makes it impossible to open up the blogs via IE7. Sitemeter is the meter of choice for many bloggers, including me, so I'm hoping that someone is actively working on this problem. This one could actually turn out to be the bigger problem because there are three separate companies and pieces of software involved but I'm hoping that one of them takes the initiative to get this figured out soon.

It's a tough decision for Blogger users: delete Sitemeter and lose all the valuable feedback that comes from the service or limit the number of readers having access to their blog by keeping IE7 users shut out. It's kind of a no-brainer because readers are the most important thing to bloggers, but it is painful to lose Sitemeter even for a little while.

What a mess...

EDIT- As of ten p.m., Houston-time:

Although the Sitemeter site crashed a couple of hours ago, it does appear that they have now resolved the coding conflict they caused with IE7 sometime yesterday evening when they were doing some code revisions in their software. I think they took a pretty tough hit, both in reputation and number of users, because a whole bunch of Sitemeter users appear to have yanked their meter from their blogsites. It's a tricky business.

A Tale out of Luck

Country singer, and national icon, Willie Nelson has teamed up with Mike Blakely to write A Tale out of Luck, a western novel with a bit of a mystery thrown into the mix.

Hank Tomlinson has probably fared better than most Texas Rangers who were suddenly thrown out of work when the Rangers were disbanded in Reconstruction Texas following the Civil War. He operates the Broken Arrow Ranch and owns most of the businesses in Luck, the little town that he founded in order to attract the services that were not in the area when he began his new life as a rancher.Things are going so well, in fact, that he has just brought a Kentucky thoroughbred back to the ranch that he hopes will make him a bundle in breeding fees.

But when Jay Blue, Hank’s son, and Skeeter, the orphan taken in by Hank as a youngster, do a poor job on guard duty one night and the new mare disappears, things change for Hank and the people of Luck, Texas in a big way. Barely one step ahead of Tomlinson and his anger, the boys race off, determined to recover the lost horse, and find themselves in the adventure of their young lives.

Along the way they meet and befriend an albino Negro who captures and tames wild horses for the U.S. Cavalry and a young Apache warrior who has been critically wounded during the massacre of his people by the Calvary and a few ranch hands who were along for the ride, two people who will come to play important roles in their future.

Suddenly the folks in Luck, Texas, are faced with warring Apaches and what appears to be a lone Indian assassin from Tomlinson’s past who makes everyone nervous by peppering two people with arrows and scalping them before disappearing again. When a policeman from Austin comes to town to further complicate matters, things get a little hot for the Tomlinson clan before the book reaches its rousing climax.

Willie Nelson and Mike Blakely have touched most of the Western genre bases with A Tale out of Luck. There are bands of marauding Indians, cavalry troopers racing to the rescue in the nick of time, cattle rustlers, wild horses, a beautiful, world-wise but kindly saloon keeper, a jail escape, a bigger-than-life good guy, and an equally bigger-than-life villain to menace him. The authors combine these elements in a clever way, managing to include a surprise or two, so that the novel is a fresh and fun read even for those who have read dozens of westerns in their day.

A Tale out of Luck hits the bookstores in September and western fans should take a look because Nelson and Blakely make a good team.

Rated at: 3.5

Is This the Next J.K. Rowling?

I'm pretty oblivious to this kind of trend, being long past the age where I get caught up in the kind of frenzy that creates superstars like Harry Potter and his real-life mom. But I can't help noticing more and more buzz about Stephenie Meyer and her teen-vampire books. Is she The One?

The series was literally dreamed up by Meyer, a Mormon mother of three and graduate of Brigham Young University who lives in Arizona.

“It was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description,” Meyer wrote on her Web site, stepheniemeyer.com.

Meyer said the young couple she dreamed of were talking in the woods — a girl and a gorgeous vampire. After the dream those voices in her head wouldn’t stop talking, and she didn’t stop writing. The first in her series about teenage vampires, “Twilight,” was published in 2005.

...

In Meyer’s world, vampires don’t have fangs, nor do they turn into bats.

They can be out at daytime but not in direct sun, or else they’ll start to glow. The main character, Edward, can read people’s minds and other vampires have other special powers.

Parents of would be readers might be happy to know that the books are a mix of fantasy and romance but without foul language, sex or drugs in the plots.

It appears that Barnes and Noble management have jumped aboard the bandwagon and is preparing midnight parties for the release of her next book in the series. I'm sure that most booksellers are pulling for her because they miss the Harry Potter effect on their bottom line but I do have to wonder where the protesters are. You know, all those who were protesting the witchcraft in the Potter series. Are they OK with teenage vampires?

Consumption

Kevin Patterson’s Consumption is my third book in the 2^nd Canadian Book Challenge. Patterson, who spent some time in northern Canada working as a doctor, vividly portrayed a world I’ve often wondered about, but of which I knew very little, so I really lost myself in this one.

In almost whiplash fashion, Canada’s Inuit people were yanked from the traditional lifestyle they had lived for centuries into what should have been for them an easier life in the small Artic communities they had only visited in the past. In a scant three generations (Patterson’s book covers the 1950s to the 1990s), these people went from living “on the land” to watching their young people leave the Artic entirely in order to seek a lifestyle scarcely heard of by their grandparents. That such a rapid change was almost certain to be a destructive one does not lessen the impact of Patterson’s story of the Inuit as they move from a difficult, but successful, lifestyle to one of poverty and confusion, and on to a generation of children with material and cultural desires that can no longer be satisfied in the Artic.

Patterson tells the Inuit story largely through the eyes of Victoria Robinson, an Inuit woman who, when she developed tuberculosis at ten years of age, was taken from her parents and sent to Montreal for treatment. By the time that she was returned to her parents as a teenager, they were no longer living “on the land” and had moved to the small Artic town of Rankin Inlet. Victoria, now an educated young woman with some knowledge of the world, felt like an outsider when she was reunited with her family. She knew that she was different, and so did they. Her marriage to a Kablunauk, a white man, seemed inevitable to her parents, and the experiences of her bi-racial children reflect all of the pressures and desires confronted by young people who must abandon their own culture in order to have better lives than the one experienced by their grandparents and parents.

Consumption is a complex, multi-generational family saga filled with numerous characters, each of which contributes to fleshing out the world that Kevin Patterson has created. Patterson does not limit himself to a single point of view, including among his characters several Kablunauk who have come to the Rankin Inlet settlement for reasons of their own, some looking for adventure, some hoping to profit financially from what they find there, and others determined to accomplish some good by working to make the lives of the locals better.

Interspersed among the book’s chapters are short medical science essays attributed to Keith Balthazar, the town doctor who splits his time between Rankin Inlet and his apartment in New York. Readers might be tempted to skim, or even to skip, these essays but, by doing so, would miss many details and subtleties associated with the overall story. Like each of Patterson’s characters, the essays add bits and pieces of detail that help make Consumption into the moving novel that it is. It is near impossible for most readers to imagine the loneliness and isolation of the 1960s Artic settlements. Patterson not only makes it possible for us to imagine it, he achieves it in the most effective manner there is, by adding layer upon layer of detail and emotion until the reader comes to feel completely comfortable with the environment described and the people who live in it.

This is a remarkable first novel.

Rated at: 5.0