Here are a few things I’ve been looking at that I wanted to share:

  • 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!

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

So Kim’s been off exploring the United Kingdom (but she’s such a good person that she left a bunch of posts for me to put on the blog while she’s gone, so you probably haven’t even missed her).  Anyway, among the many cool and literary places she’s visiting is Bath, famous to most of us as the setting of many a Jane Austen scene.  I’m sure she’ll have a lot to write about Bath and Austen when she gets back, but until then you can get your Austen fix with the following video which is incredibly wonderful and funny and brilliant and nuts.  My brother-in-law sent this to me originally and I loved it on first sight.

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

I feel fairly certain Jane would have loved this.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

After spending the day at SFMOMA, I walked around a couple of corners and down a flight of stairs to quiet art gallery and bookstore, Crown Point Press.  The store is perfect for this neighborhood of galleries, a modern art museum, and the Academy of Arts.  With just under half the space devoted to books,  the offerings are used (as in ‘like new’ or ‘not newly published’) art books.  I found a Lichtenstein at SFMOMA that interested me, so I pulled out the catalogue from an exhibit of his work that occurred years ago and looked for similar paintings.  Once I noticed the price, $225, and the excellent condition of the book, I flipped through carefully.  The price made me wonder about whether or not I should take another look at the catalogues of art exhibits that I have shoved on bookshelves, maybe they are worth more than I thought.  More importantly, it reminded me that the exhibit catalogues are full of information, good ones aren’t just expensive picture books.  Crown Point Press has a wall full of luscious monographs and exhibit catalogues.

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

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,

Psst.  There’s a book giveaway contest going on over at my Facebook page.  If you like getting a free book now and then, or know someone who does, come on over and check it out.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:

I just discovered my favorite author of the decade.  Maybe of the past several decades.

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »