A Rant With Which I Happen To Agree

Spotted on Shelf Awareness:

"Some tough bookstore love from Gawker's Hamilton Nolan: "You think the owner of that book store doesn't know what you're doing? Oh, they know exactly what you're doing. You say you 'love' books? You say you enjoy perusing the soothing aisles of a book store, so lovingly curated by a book store owner who spends his or her life ensuring that the very latest and most interesting book selections are there, presented for you in the most interesting possible way? You like that a lot? Yeah. So you can go home and order that shit online.... Book stores do not exist just to show off book covers so you know what you want to order from Amazon! You ungrateful bastards!"

I do love a good rant. Of course, my language is more temperate, but I do agree with the sentiments.

I am, I admit, slightly weird. (Only slightly, you understand.) Although I am very progressive politically, I do have a side of me that would be quite at home wearing a monocle and having a scotch at my Gentlemen's Club. Call it my "Inner Old Buffer," if you will.

Had I lived in a different time I would no doubt have spent my days bemoaning the passing of steam engines. I do remember mourning the change from the pound note to the pound coin. I was suspicious of microwaves, doubtful of computers, and swore I would never blog. Now look at me. My wife claims that she needs only to sow a seed in my mind and wait... perhaps wait a while... for the eventual harvest.

I love books. The smell of their pages, the heft of them, and the fact that they colonize my house. I do not own an e-reader, and probably won't until they stop publishing printed books the way they've stopped producing video tapes. And one thing I will mourn, with all my soul, is the coming extinction of the book store.

Practically everyday I see the obituaries written, venerable book stores closing their doors. I will miss spending a quiet hour or two in their sanctuaries, leafing through volumes whose titles or covers take my fancy. (Unlike the anonymous browser being excoriated above, I do not troop off to order from Amazon--though I am not so pure as to never visit a library in search of something I think I might love.)

Do you love book stores? Do you have a favorite?

Another great Bookstore

One of the things I enjoy most while traveling is wandering into new (to me)bookstores. Our trip last week to Vancouver, B.C., was no exception. After an incredible Malaysian meal at Banana Leaf in Kitsilano, we wandered next door to Kidsbooks. It was large and bright and well laid out. And, being Canadian, it had a number of surprises. I think Canadians,for example, are more likely to carry books on unusual subjects written by Brits. (At least, I have never seen some of the following titles in a U.S. bookstore.)

Here's the list of books I found interesting:

Out of Shadows by Jason Wallace. (This & the following are by British writers, set in Africa).

Hacking Timbuktu by Stephen Davies

More Brits, whom I have heard of:

Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson

Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud (author of my beloved Bartimaeus Trilogy)

Two Canadians, who sound fun:

Word Nerd by Susin Nielsen

Neil Flambe and the Marco Polo Murders by Kevin Sylvester

Finally, two Americans who were getting some play in the store displays:

Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai

Jack Blank and the Imagine Nation by Matt Myklusch

What is it about these books that made them so compelling to me?

• Oftentimes, it was the title; Hacking Timbuktu; Shooting Kabul; Word Nerd; Neil Flambe! Me, oh my-oh!!


• The cover art. If a book's cover was yellow, red or blue and it was facing me on the shelf, my eye was arrested by it. Out of Shadows and Jack Blank are two cases of this.

• If I was familiar with the author's name. I loved the Bartimaeus trilogy by Stroud, so I was duty bound to pick up this book. As for Winterson, I heard of her in the 80s with such titles as Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body. Tanglewreck also has a great cover. I had to pick it up to see what she was doing as a children's writer.

I guess I'm a contrarian, but I'd much rather find and read some of the above books than the mega-bestsellers who suck up all the air. How do you choose the books you're interested in reading?

Where's your Favourite Book Shop?

I had a nice jaunt to San Francisco last week. My wife and I were celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary (yes, we were child bride and groom) and we decided to make a splurge of it. We stayed in the Union Street Inn, a lovely B&B, the best part of which was drinking white wine and sampling cheeses during the pre-dinner hours in the sun-dappled garden. At times like this I give in and admit I am a complete hedonist: I could spend my life sitting in gardens, reading books, and sipping tea and other libations. I swear to you I was switched at birth. If there is some Panamanian-born Duke somewhere who actually pines to do 8 loads of laundry a week, please contact me as soon as possible.

One of the other pleasures of the trip, beyond being in the presence of my beautiful wife and being free of the constant cries of "Dad?!" from every quarter, was a revisit to the City Lights Bookstore. City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It has all sorts of Allen Ginsberg and Beat poet history and is a lovely warren of book stacks with a sweet, sweet selection of books. If you want your international fix--Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern--you'll get it there. It's not the sort of place you see the likes of a Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck screed, nor anything mass-market--though they did stock Steig Larsson's Millenium trilogy. (Yay for them!)

I love grazing in indie book stores like this one. Nobody bugs you when you wander in (hello, Borders? Can you change your egregious policy of having your wired handmaidens stalk customers through the store with "can I help you find anything?" bleating like a broken record?!) and you get the feeling they wouldn't mind if you browsed for hours. In fact, I liked it so much I bought the t-shirt.

In Portland, we have Powell's which is, no joke, a city of books. Sometimes I come over a bit faint when I pass through Powell's--it's like falling into the world's largest smorgasbord after you've already had a substantial dinner. My own local, in Multnomah Village, is Annie Bloom's which is much more manageable--sort of the cheese and wine in the sun-dappled garden effect. I hope these type of book shops never go out of fashion. The world would surely be a much less lustrous place without them.

Where's your favorite book shop? Let me know so I can add it to my book tour itinerary. (One can but dream, eh?)