Presidents + Books = ?

Roosevelt wrote eighteen books in his lifetime. Jimbo Carter penned quite a few works of non-fiction, a collection of poetry, and even a few novels. George W. Bush is currently hammering out his memoirs on an underwood five typewriter (presumably). Clinton, Ulysses Grant, Reagan, Eisenhower, and Obama are just a few of the other First Dudes to have written autobiographies. Lincoln wrote his own speeches and was considered by many talented enough to have been a successful author. William Taft curated a killer vegan recipe anthology and William Henry Harrison, well, lets just say he didn't get very far into his romantic novel.

Aside from Lincoln and Roosevelt, it's interesting how very few presidents have used books to create a sense of transparency during their terms. Even in my lifetime (i'm 31), where seemingly anyone with the means to do so can get anything published at any time, quickly, we get a lot of before and after books but nothing DURING. Kennedy's Profiles In Courage was published five years before he was elected... Obama's books were conceived while still in the "getting to know you" stage with voters... Et al. Why is this? Is it a national security issue? Is it political strategy? How come the White House doesn't have its own publishing house? There could be a Chief of Literature Affairs, or Secretary of Books. In this age of sifted-through information and cable news, it would be great to have something straight from the source for once. Something I can read and quote from that isn't a blog post or a tweet. Granted I know being a president is a rather time consuming gig but I could really use a book that explains this whole health care situation.

Enjoy the last few hours of your long weekend everybody! We're open regular hours tonight! Stop by and buy a book. It doesn't have to be about a president.

Thoughts on Barbie, Intertextuality and the E-reader

Yesterday I was watching the Tyra Banks show (I know I know...don't judge) where she had Eve Ensler on to push her new book "I am an Emotional Creature". Tyra asked her her usual mind-bogglingly poignant questions...but once we got through that and Eve was allowed to speak I learned that Barbie was originally designed as a sex toy for men, and that up until 12 years ago one could not use the word "vagina" on television.

Then Eve went on to discuss her "free Barbie" project...a story she wrote where all the Barbies of the world can broadcast the thoughts of one forward-thinking little girl, who then mobilizes the troops towards a new feminism. I stopped what I was doing when I heard this, (because surprisingly enough I can do several other things while watching Tyra...) and had a little deja vu

Last week I finished reading Denise Duhamel's collection of poetry entitled "Kinky". It's a collection of poems about Barbie. This book is incredible in that it manages to be funny, historically accurate, engaging, challenging and magnetic.It also has a mental shelf life, because I have still been processing some of the poems. Yet, I cannot emphasize enough just how similar what Eve had to say about the doll was to what many of Denise's poems were saying about the doll. Now herein lies the itch I have...Eve Ensler is a well educated feminist...and I guess I am wondering If she was aware of Denise Duhamel's work...
What responsibility do artists and editors have to the great "conversation" of intertextuality?

One exciting thing that the e-reading offers, is the opportunity to hyperlink, within the text , to other texts. (Some authors link to the dictionary which is helpful when reading D.F. Wallace for example) I posture, that it could open the doors to a more fluid referential reading community, one wherein everyone is invited to the party, everyone is in on the joke....and if you see no hypertext...that too can signify a certain something...

Joe Amato, writes poetry that hyperlinks to other parts of his own poems -making his work fluid and mobile. I think we are going to see a lot more artists using this tool in their prosody.

For now, and until then, I'll hold authors responsible to do their homework. While watching Tyra.

And then a customer comes along and makes me want to read, desperately. If you want to turn a bookseller like me on, catch me as I'm passing throught the Used Book Cellar and say this:
"If you have the time, can you tell me what I should read next? It's been long years since I've read books, and I just started up again with Middlesex, and I'm nearing the end and feeling a bit desperate from the thought of not having a new book to pick up when I'm done, but also from not having any idea of what the book should be. If you have a minute." Scanned the shelves for two minutes and sat down next to him and gave him one minute each on Martin Amis, Jim Crace, Henry Miller, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Coe, Gary Shteyngart, John Steinbeck.

That's the kind of thing that makes me want to put away my sketchbook and pick up a novel for the midnight bus ride home.

Lobbing scissors at my office-mate Katie a moment ago, the thought crossed my mind that I don't read as much as I once did. I remember as a kid, staying up for twelve hours straight to speed-read David Copperfield. Because I had been reading The Lord of the Rings for the twelfth time, in bed, on the bus, in homeroom, even on my lap, hidden under my desk in the very English class in which David Copperfield had been assigned.

Has my reading habit slowed because of two young children in my charge? Because of late nights up in my studio, because of this full time job? How has it been squeezed out of my routine over the past years?

Can you ever read enough?
Working at the registers in the Booksmith for a decade, countless customers have scrolled before me, most of them repeats, many of them self-described book "addicts." And I would have described myself the same way, years past...
but maybe I've read enough? For now?

I've always thought experiences are tools. I'm a self-taught painter, and I think of all of those brush strokes as leading to the next, across paintings, across the gaps between paintings, and when you make enough mistakes and successes, they eventually work themselves out until you have a tool. Something that you can pull out of the kit and use appropriately, without thought.

Maybe that's what reading is for me, an accumulation of ideas,
stories, advice, cautions, that have worked themselves out.
Maybe right now I am just making use of them,
maybe accumulating more wouldn't help.

Someday that appetite will return, and when it does there's a list of recommendations a week long that I'd love to dig into.
In the meantime, tell my kids to stay asleep at night.
Tell the store to give me a month or two off.
Tell my hand to put down the brushes.

Katie blocked the scissors with a plywood shield. I don't want you to worry, or to think that I lob scissors at just anybody.

QUESTIONS!

Lately i've been devouring books by Jim Thompson and Kobo Abe (again) and in doing so, got thinking about how I never find, neither here in the UBC or elsewhere, certain authors (like the two above) used. Authors like Murakami, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor will every once in a blue moon trickle in but for the most part, seem to never come in. Even an author like Steig Larsson, who's books are selling at a phenomenal clip upstairs, are never seen downstairs, used. People just don't bring them in. Why is this? Do people buy certain books but never read them? Do people read books, fall in love, and then refuse to part ways? Are certain books traded amongst friends? Can we base the greatness of an author on whether or not you can find their books used? We have a lot of Charles Frazier and Jonathan Franzen used. Are they more awesome then, say, George Saunders (well...)?

The Flannery O'Connor one really astounds me as she's still taught in every English class and still sells well new upstairs...

I am thinking about doing some investigative work on this. I might make up a list of authors and then go around to various used book stores and see what I can find. Just a thought. Who's in?

Nom nom nom nom

Snatched up a copy of Vegan Planet in the Used Book Cellar. The spine is severely bent in one place and there's a little splattering on those pages (that is part of the charm I THINK.) I am doing some amateur forensics, trying to determine which recipe it is. Little orangey... so surveying the ingredients, I believe it's the Butternut Squash & Wild Mushroom Lasagna. All those hours watching CSI paid off at last.

And many pages are dog-eared. That's another cool thing about used books - these marks might lead you to the best parts of the book right away. Or not. One of the dog-eared recipes is cilantro heavy and I am one of those people that thinks cilantro tastes like soap. So maybe I will avoid those dog-eared pages. Or you can pass judgment on the previous owner which is fulfilling for about a minute.

Speaking of cookbooks, here are some shoddy pictures of the best and most perfect chocolate chip cookies from The Joy of Vegan Baking (1 of my 2 current staff recs).

Don't ya just feel the diabetes settling in?

Underbake them by a minute or two and throw them in the freezer and, bam, you in vegan valhalla. I also recently made the Blueberry Orange Bundt cake and my boyfriend and I ate it in under two hours. I am not sure if that's a testament to how indulgent we are or how tasty the recipe is. The texture was great - so fluffy and moist - something I've missed when I've attempted baking before.

You might be like, but how do you do that with no eggs? Oh, but did you know that when food was rationed during WWII that bakers had to get creative with binders, so a lot of subs are not just blindly chosen by some tasteless hippie wizard? That is a great fact you will find in The Joy of Vegan Baking.

Plus, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau also clears up the best applications of non-animal-based moisture-givers and binders. Which is useful when you are way more of an, uh, artistic cook. Baking requires so much precision that I had been bad at. Now I think I get it.

Hooray cookbooks!

Commuting, and E-reading

I try to walk to work when I can, but sometimes it's too cold and I'm too lazy. Sometimes I just like to people watch...I like to see what everyone is reading. I'm on the green line so usually the people have a Brookline Booksmith boomark...which always cheers me up in the morning.

I've seen a handful of people reading from the Kindle, or the Sony e-reader. I can never tell what they are reading, so they can hide their romance novels, but the downside is they can't show off that they are reading Joyce.

Isn't there an unspoken romance in seeing that a stranger is reading a book you love? Isn't there that moment where you think there may be a psychic connection? Or maybe you look to see how far along they are, and guess what part they are at by their facial expressions?

I think of what I would lose if I switched my library to the kindle...


-feeling comfortable taking a bath with a book
-taking the book to the beach
-leaving the book in the freezing cold, or scorching heat and knowing it will still work when I get to it
-dog- earring pages
-writing in the margins
-watching as the book blooms in thickness from handling
-the mosaic of fonts on my bookshelves
-my bookshelves
-knowing no one can ever go into the book and take out the words for some copyright problem


What else would you miss?

leave a comment or email me...this might make a cool t shirt. Check out our new black tote bags with the quote "books with pages since 1961" If I wasn't such a Luddite I'd post a picture...maybe one of my colleagues will... hint hint....