Who would I want to see?  Paul Hardin, Paul Krugman and Sam Lipsyte top a long list.  A weekend of events and several independent bookstores in the area, it sounds like paradise.

As I watched my kids drive away this morning (Kyle is driving them for the first time), I recalled a book I bought for Kelsey when she started preschool, Oh My Baby, Little One by Kathi Appelt, illustrated by Jane Dyer.   With tender rhymes, the mother explains how her love stays with her child through each of her preschool activities:

But even when I’m far away,

this love I have will stay

and wrap itself around you

every minute of the day.

With each activity-singing, playing, napping-the rhymes describe where the mother’s love is secreted with her child.

I read this book to Kelsey over and over again during her first year of preschool.  I inscribed it “Dear Kesley, This book is a special present to help you remember how much I love you when you are in preschool.  Love, Mom.”  After awhile we moved on to other books and it was stacked on her shelf.  I saved this book from numerous ‘donations to the library’ sweeps.  Now Oh My Baby, Little One sits on the bottom of my personal bookshelf.  I’m saving it to send to Kelsey for her first day of college, so she’ll remember that even if she’s hundreds of miles away, that my love will go with her.

• September 7th – Rare Lit Bird is sponsoring James Ellroy in discussion with Carolyn Kellogg at the Largo.
• September 16th – Aloud is selling tickets to its fall programs, headlined by a night with Jonathan Franzen at the Arotani/Japan America Theatre.  I heard the tickets are selling fast, so happy I won two at the the Lit Crawl last night.
• September 26th – West Hollywood Book Fair is an intimate version of the the LA Times Book Festival.  It’s full of author discussions and fun booths.
• October 2nd – Claire’s book signing!  Claire’s booksigning!  We’ll write more about this, but at Village Books at 2PM Claire will have her first local book signing for If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.  Check out her Facebook page about the book.
• October 6th – American Voices starts selling tickets to its next three programs next week, on October 6th Marlo Thomas will discuss her memoir, on October 29th Rick Springfield will talk about his book, and on November 8th Oliver Stone will discuss JFK with author James W. Douglass.
• October 14th – the American Experience Literary Luncheon six month series begins.  UCLA Professor Lynn Batten (I am one of his groupies) will lecture on a different book each month followed by Julie Robinson leading a discussion.  The first book is The Scarlett Letter, check the website for further dates and books.  Note:  there is a 10% discount for signing up by August 31st.
• October 22nd to 24th – The Beverly Hills Literary Escape is an opportunity to have round table discussions with a variety of authors, we’ll be posting more about this event, but for now, clear your weekend.

Not in Los Angeles but live somewhere with a variety of literary events?  Let us know and we’ll try to post them.

I found this video (along with other fun posts) on The Casual Optimist, it’s produced by Studiocanoe.  Studiocanoe has a selection of lovely videos on a variety of topics (mostly English oriented).  Here’s a description of the website:

Studiocanoe is the name of a creative project originating from Falmouth, Cornwall in 2006. It takes its name from the large, antiquated canvas canoe that several close friends would take out on the open sea to go fishing. The project incorporates music, field recording, photography, illustration and film, and while occasionally involving multiple authors; is mostly the work of Temujin Doran.

Enjoy!

Ronald's Recommended Books

Fortunately, on our way to dropping our daughter off at camp, we stopped at restaurant just across a parking lot from Books Inc; I ordered lunch and walked over.  I spent most of my 10 minutes at a small table dedicated to Ronald’s choices (Ronald is one of the booksellers at Books Inc.).  I’m not sure if it was his favorite books or the ones that were most meaningful to him, but I was struck by how much I felt I was getting a peek into the mind of a stranger by looking at the books he personally chose to recommend.  Anchee Min said that she felt like she knew Mao because she read what he read, in her opinion the best way to learn about another person was to read his books.  I didn’t think about the comment then, but it rang true as I perused Ronald’s books.  Having never met him, I would describe him as thoughtful and searching for a sense of balance in his life.

It goes without saying that Keith is right, it’s a lovely store.  Books Inc. isn’t huge, but there were a few bookshelves dedicated to each genre.  I found the choices in literary fiction and YA (the two areas I can evaluate fairly quickly) well chosen.  I didn’t have a chance to talk to anyone (lunch was going to be served), but I witnessed booksellers chatting with customers, a bright atmosphere, event and book club notices, and people buying books.

What did I find on the general recommendation table?  The Pig Comes to Dinner by Joseph Caldwell, the sequel to The Pig Did It, which I bought to give to Keith over lunch.

Here’s a review of Compass Books located in the San Francisco Airport and a sister store to Books Inc.

Books Inc.

Town & Country Village

855 El Camino Real #74

Palo Alto, CA 94301

Tel:  650.428.1234

• Penguin Books celebrated it’s 75th Birthday!  Whenever I’m reading a classic, I choose the Penguin edition.  I like the notes, I like the print, I like the blank pages in front and back where I can take notes (actually could use a couple more of those), and I like that I have a bookshelf of matching black spines.
• New York Magazine published a cluster of articles about the emergence of independent bookstores in New York City noting that the area is “suddenly, unexpectedly in the midst of an indie-bookstore renaissance.”  With shout outs to great stores, the economics of book selling, a list of books to look for this fall and the favorite stores of NYC authors, it all makes for interesting reading.
• Think you’re a bibliophile?  There’s a new test for how much you really love books:  did your wedding have a literary theme?  When Non of A Thousand Screaming Rabbits married Jessica, our favorite YA bookseller the guests each received a book as a party favor, the table top decorations were books and the cake topper was a tribute to the bride and groom and their favorite books.  Scroll down this post (full of beautiful photography) for the literary pics
• Now I know what I’m getting Claire for her birthday!  Out of Print Clothing offers t-shirts with the original cover of several classics.  My daughter’s required reading for the summer is The Lord of the Flies, I asked her if she wanted a t-shirt to wear when her English class is discussing the book, I got the eye roll.
• Do we need another article on e-books vs. the paper book?  Yes we do, so we can play Bookavore’s drinking game.  “Will e-books wipe out/kill/decimate/pulverize/HULKSMASH/angry verb real books?” — one drink, or my favorite, “smell of a real book” — clean out the liquor cabinet, drink until you pass out, wake up next morning, puke, then continue drinking.  Happy drinking!
• The Guardian has pics of favorite bookstores and you can add your own shots.  Plus, I just returned from England and found this site very helpful for finding bookstores.  Posts about English bookstores will be coming in the next couple of weeks!

Enjoy the links!

My favorite line?  ”Is that your blood?”  ”Oh . . . yes, some of it.”

I feel fairly certain Jane would have loved this.

The bookseller was incredibly helpful.  While a good museum bookstore has a concentration of art books, what I have yet to find is a bookseller at a museum store.  Don’t take me wrong, people are often helpful at the stores, but they aren’t booksellers.  This woman was a bookseller who specialized in art.  I asked about an artist I heard about at the Getty Research Institute, Malvina Hoffman.  Actually, what I said was ‘there is an interesting artist that I’d love to find more information about and for the life of me, I can’t remember her name, but I’m sure her initials are MG.” (Note, the initials are MH, good grief.)   I apologized and said my memory has a new tendency to fail me, she replied “it’s only going to get worse” and then started pulling down books about women artists.  She went through several books while I told her Hoffman’s story trying to find something about my sculptor.  Coming up empty, I took her card to contact her the next time I start looking for books about Hoffman.  This is the store to contact if you need someone to keep an eye out for unique art books.

The art criticism and essay shelves were full of out of print gems.  Unfortunately, most of the books were pricey and I was too tired to evaluate if I should spend that much money.  In the end, I left empty handed, but of all of the stores I visited in San Francisco, it’s this little corner bookstore that I remember the most.

Crown Point Press

20 Hawthorne St.

San Francisco, CA

Tel:  415.974.6273

Every once in a while–say every five or ten years–I read a short story that blows me away. I still remember mulling over O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Maupassant’s “The Necklace” (the MOST agonizing story ever written) as a fairly young kid, and Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” when I was a bit older, moving on and up through O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle” (which is arguably more novella than short story).

But nothing in recent years has blown me away like the two stories I just read, both by Nathan Englander.

”Free Fruit for Young Widows” was my first exposure to him.  I’d never even heard of Englander before, but I stumbled across this short story in The New Yorker. (You can still read it online on their website.)  I thought it was incredible, so I checked Englander’s short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges out of the library.

The whole collection is worth reading but the first story, “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is simply one of the best things I’ve ever read in my life. Period. It’s compassionate, harrowing, funny, poignant, horrifying . . . all in a few pages. And should be taught in every high school in this country. (An aside: there’s a character in it who has autism–at least I think he does; it’s not stated–and it was the most original, compassionate portrayal of autism I’ve seen since Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.)

I’ve recommended these two Englander short stories to a bunch of people, ranging from Kim (who reads everything) to my father (who’s in his eighties) to my brother (who mostly reads scientific articles) and everyone has said it’s simply one of the best things he or she has ever read.

I don’t gush about a lot of modern writers, as anyone who reads these pages knows.  I was an English major in college, reading Dickens, Austen, Bronte and the like.  Most modern literature leaves me cold.  I don’t find the stories exciting or the people engaging.  It feels like the majority of short stories I read fall into the same pattern: a description of someone leading your basic life of quiet desperation, somewhat alienated from the people around him, with lots dialogue and details that sum up the meaninglessness of our daily pursuits, and a minor emotional epiphany at the end that leads to precisely nowhere.

But Englander tells a real story and he tells it like no one else.  His stories aren’t “familiar” but they are page-turners.  Frankly, I don’t need to recognize the boring, soul-sucking details of my own daily life in the stories I read: I’d much rather recognize something huge and painful about the way people torture and also love one another, about how compassion is the only healing force in the face of cruelty, about how parents can and should teach their children that, and about how we shouldn’t judge anyone until we know what his life has been.

Englander’s stories remind me of a beautiful and poignant quote from Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle:

“Heritage.  How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be savages–this to teach.  To look back and learn what humanizes–this to teach.  To smash all ghettos that divide us–not to go back, not to go back–this to teach.”

This is what Englander teaches.  Only he does it in the best way possible: by writing a story you can’t put down.