one year :)

The life of a bookseller is like a magnetic poetry set. I know the day will involve words, but which ones and in what order has always yet to be arranged. No phrase (or day) is identical. It keeps things interesting that way.

I have been a bookseller for about four years now, and one year ago today I began working at the Booksmith. When I worked at Hearthside Books in Alaska, I could never really answer what I wanted to do after I completed my Masters in Children's Writing at Simmons College. What did I want to do at the time besides write children's books? Stay in the bookstore. But is that what some one with a Master's degree should do? NO, people would say. You should do something more worthwhile with your talents. But the minute I stepped back into the book store life here, after one year in the publishing industry, it was like coming home. Unlike many other jobs out there, I literally use my degree every day. And, it's so amazing to hear customers telling others, "She gives great recommendations for kids' books. Ask her."

Book selling is not a lazy job nor is it standing behind a cash register all day. My brain is constantly working with shelving books into a giant Tetris puzzle (more commonly known as the shelves that have a specific order to them), speaking with customers and unraveling the mystery about which book they saw on display two months ago about animals... (it was the Chicken Thief), what book would be good for a reluctant reader who is trapped in the world of television, what book would be challenging for a ten year old who can read a 200 page book in one sitting, and much more. Of course there are days when I'd rather hide in a box in the back and read, especially when overly demanding persons come in, when it's so loud in the kids' section I want to go ask for ear plugs, or when my allergies invade my insides, but alas.... Though, I am well stocked in books -- new and old -- for when I am not on the clock.

Over this past year, I've also been exploring the world of book buying. Learning from our fabulous book buyers and publisher reps has been an amazing experience. It's always an interesting puzzle to be constantly thinking: would our customers enjoy this? A few books don't make it and are returned to the publisher to seek out a home elsewhere. Others turn into favorites and it's a marathon just to keep them on the shelves.

Do I love my job? Absolutely! The best part? Introducing new books to readers, kids telling me about their favorite books, and customers asking for me because I gave a friend of a friend the perfect recommendation -- it's the appreciation there and presenting something that is highly worthwhile.

The communications department.

I've cultivated my forgiveness and tolerance in the face of it.
I can't really change it anyway, without making what might appear to be intrusive efforts.
I've had some success in wrestling my mind into a postition from which it seems to be just a new facet of human nature; perhaps the technological evolution has fostered, and is finally revealing, a hitherto hidden part of our special human makeup.

Because I don't think it's likely that very many of our ancestors would walk into a quiet hall, or cave, and chatter away to an absent person at full volume, for more than ten or fifteen minutes, oblivious to the dozen other occupants who are holding their silence all the while.
Besides the obvious problem with it, it just wouldn't have been safe.

So somewhere humans are getting the idea that we can turn off our perceptions and move about freely in the world, in the full expectation that things will fall into place for us just before we get there. I don't agree, but here I am at the register, and there you are standing ten feet away, telling your phone that you shouldn't be talking in the store anyway, and you're about to get in line, so we need to finish this up. But you really need to talk about next week's lunch date, and you need to give a half-hearted pep talk about that promotion. And before you know it you aren't waiting to get in line, you are on your way out of the store, and if someone out there gently but firmly removed your phone from your ear at that moment and put a few questions to you about your super-recent past, I have serious doubts as to whether you would remember me at all, or the ill-fitting grey suit that I might very well have been wearing, or the fact that I was trying out my impression of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean during the entire transaction, or the fact that I had put twelve cloves of garlic in your bag along with the book, dropping them in one at a time with dramatic flourishes, counting them off like I were Mr. Bean silently imitating The Count on Sesame Street.

Because you didn't laugh, in fact you hardly even looked at me, and I worried that maybe I wasn't being funny. But then I thought, no, no, I'm actually really very funny.

Two Things

First thing:  Amongst the death knells being tolled for the physical book, I'm noticing an  interesting phenomenon.  When, lately, have books, publishing, who's reading in what format been so much in the news??   There are the stories of Borders and Barnes & Noble (what IS with that Noble, anyway?)  and their corporate woes.  There are the e-reader devices analyses daily.  There are the publishers-as-dinosaurs essays.   There are comparisons to the time of Gutenberg on many a tongue.  Really, it's quite exciting that books and reading are such big, big news.  I'm quite pleased to be part of something so newsworthy.  Meanwhile, at the store, we're excited about great new books out for the fall and our absolutely stellar line up of author readings this season.   No matter the format, authors are still the ones writing books, and you can meet and greet them at Booksmith soon.   Check out our website, brooklinebooksmith.com, for the incredible lineup.

 Second thing:  Every week there are stories in the media about budget shortfalls in towns and cities all over the U.S.  If everyone who purchases online paid the sales tax which should be paid, the deficits would be far less.  It's become quite astounding to me that there is still argument about this.  The online retailers claim it would be an insufferable burden for them to collect said sales tax.   To that I say, ever heard of level playing field?  You can set up your sales program to charge the appropriate sales tax just like we little folk do in our bricks and mortar stores.  What thrall must the internet giants have over legislators to keep this folly afloat?  To be trite but emphatic, give me a break!   All those millions of dollars of internet sales, sales tax free,  are a real factor in gutting the budgets of states nationwide.  It's not the only factor, certainly, but it is a significant one.

Okay, I'm checking out for a couple of weeks.  My daughter is getting married soon, and I must ramp up my Momzilla-ness.  So far my girl has not exhibited Bridezilla-ness, but we still have time.  Happy Fall!

Fall. Gather your nuts.

So, If you're like me...and I can only assume you are...

you are getting

very excited

about fall.

Enough of this "beach reading sunny happy sweaty shavey shorty sunscreeny" business. Finally we can get back to sleeping without swimming in our own fluids. We can get back to being maudlin and autumnal and avuncular and no more pastels!

(avuncular?)

It is time for sad literature. It is time for literature. and turtlenecks. and run-on sentence fragments. And overcrowded Targets and too many reasonably priced Tupperware storage solutions!

Peanut butter and apple cidery-whiskey burned leafs and early bedtimes and temporal INSECTICIDE.

Per Peterson overtakes Stieg Larsson. Welcome back H.P. Lovecraft over Eckhart Tolle. Eat Pray Love bends to Tolstoy.

I cease freckle acquisition, and begin the hunt for a good Trapper-keeper.

Fall means rebirth of the interior.

Time to find a good book to beat you up.

I want to stay here.

My downstairs neighbor just told my wife that she should get another job.
She said that having a teenager live rent-free in our apartment with us, in exchange for taking care of our children while we are off at our full-time jobs, is a luxury, and that we should be paying for child care like everyone else does, so if we can't afford to do that now then she should just go out there and get, you know, another job.

The person who takes care of my two beautiful children is in danger of being pushed out of our lives, the pawn in some pathetic little condo association flare-up. Our landlords are backing us up 100%, and we will now,
oh it feels sweet (and awful) to be saying this,
be staying there out of spite.

You know, for the kids.


For the kids. If you are a thinking person in America today, you probably have either a lot of ideas, or else absolutely none, about what is right for the kids. No lie, kids are in a tough spot. Our expectations for our children are at the same time astronomical and in the gutter. Directives concerning the emotional, mental, and physical health of children are ricocheting pinballs, and parents are stranded out there under the observation glass waiting, and by now needing, to get whacked with it over and over by the Parental Panic Industry whose various hands are tapping out a diabolical rhythm with the paddles.



With all of that on my mind, there's one more problem with which I'm wrestling today, and it's right here in this store. Nobody has bought a copy of a certain young Irishman's novel. Skippy Dies by Paul Murray is an honest, compassionate look at the world kids find themselves in today, and how they make sense of it. So there's a lot of unnecessary medication, prescription drug abuse, an ocean of pornography, startlingly casual sex acts, eating disorders, bullying, and celebrity fetishes. Behind that there's parents trying to buy off or coerce their kids into growing up into what they consider to be the right sort of person, the sort who will make them feel like they themselves haven't turned out to be the wrong sort of person. There's the fear - and actuality - of sex abuse by the teachers (the setting is an Irish Catholic boys' school), and the blind greed of the administration, willing to risk the education of a generation of young minds for the cause of maintaining the brand image of the institution. There are disturbing World War I historical revelations, and deep thought about the topography of the universe, and illicit schoolboy science experiments that attempt to reach parallel universes and beyond the grave, and for much of the book you're bouncing around inside the head of: a sociopath, a sex symbol, a geek, a cynic, a sweet naive boy, a tortured genius, and a young teacher whose stunted maturation and inability to take risks have brought him back to the site of his own troubled schoolboy years, and will introduce him to worlds of hurt. They will all have opportunity to change everything, but only some will find the way.

The narrator is supremely confident in his rendering of these characters, and the questions he puts to them via the unfolding of his plot are the questions that we are all asking all the time.
How can children comprehend the world and themselves when we are relentlessly surrounding them with ways to wall themselves off from everything? And now that we're worried that they're each capable of going off at any second and shooting the place up, how can, or should, teachers really connect with them? And is love, which floats in the margins of every page in this book, a force that can puncture the bubble of unreality we each construct around ourselves?
Or is it, as one kid puts it:
"...love, if it exists at all, does so primarily as an 'organizing myth', of a similar nature to God. Or: love is analogous to gravity, as postulated in recent theories, that is to say, what we experience faintly, sporadically, as love is in actuality the distant emanation of another world, the faraway glow of a love-universe that by the time it gets to us has almost no warmth left."

It's a marvelously good book to read. It will make the final cut if I can only take five books with me to a desert isle,
or to a new home.

I want to stay reading this book forever.

Skippy Dies
by Paul Murray

Getting Used To It, Or, Nuggets From The UBC Desk!

- People always "schlep" their books. A Few choose to "haul" or "drag". Once, a rather peachy old gent "lugged" his books. That was cool.

- Often, people really enjoy "schlepping" or "lugging" (as with the peachy old gent) their books in hugely enormous suitcases. Like really huge. Like ones you could use to smuggle a fully grown malamute across the border. Like, so huge, you'd think they'd been evicted from their dorm and are moving in. People really enjoy "hauling" around trunks filled with books.

- When a customer says "I've got some really great titles here for you! You're gonna jump out of your socks when you see these! Get ready!" Its usually a really bad selection of books. I mean, really, really bad. 1996 LSAT-stash bad. Bonfire-worthy bad.

- When a customer says "Man, I've got some real stinkers here. Whatever you don't take, and I imagine you won't want any of this, I'm going to schlep them to the edge of town in my hugely enormous suitcase!" Its usually really incredible stuff. Best-sellers and tip-in art books and pristine New Direction poetry books. Always happens. Always.

- The most frequently asked question I'm asked is "How are the books arranged." The second is "Where's you're toilet?" And just for kicks, the third is "Where are the movies?"

- Only once have I ever made a customer remove his shoes before stepping on our new rug. Its OK. I knew the guy. It was a gag. We laughed. Everything is cool now.

- On the surface, it would appear that the cooking section is not in any discernible order. This is false. They are arranged by smell.

- I totally bought the 3-D monster film book. It was in the B-mail. You had your chance.

- Oftentimes people will say "Shouldn't it be the Used Book Seller" and I say "Yes, you're correct. In fact, there's another floor below. There's an Olympic size pool down there. It's nice."

- The dollar books are the books that have been on the shelf a long time and are pulled to make room for the new arrivals. The dots on the bottom on the books allow us to determine how long a book has been on the shelf. When a dollar book doesn't sell, we secretly switch it with the staff's fine coffee and see if anyone can tell the difference.

- The staff can never tell the difference.

- The store credit is good for anything in the store, except the furniture and most of the staff.

- One time a customer said "The credit doesn't expire? Then I suppose this credit will out-live me!" to which I replied "That's a bit morbid, eh!" ... That was three years ago. Haven't seen the dude since.

- Prices are generally set at half the list price plus $0.50. That is unless our chakra charts dictate otherwise.

- The fourth most frequent question is "What's with all the chairs?" and almost always, when I reply "Ghostwriter convention" nobody laughs.

First Crossing

So, when you read a collection of stories with one uniting theme, you'll basically end up reading the same story over and over again, right?

All ten fictional short stories in First Crossing: Stories About Teen Immigrants revolve around the act of emigrating out of one country -- such as Cambodia, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Mexico, South Korea, Venezuela -- and immigrating into America. I was expecting the stories to overlap content, but as I kept on going, I was surprised as to how different each teenager's story was. How some girls longed for their home country and other boys followed their parents' dream of a new life right along side them. How each family immigrated for different reasons and in some very different ways -- one involved a boy wedged beneath the hood of a car next to an running engine, yet others were as simple as a very lengthy airplane trip. Some families moved due to better jobs on American soil. Some were moved by companies or opposition to the political powers that be. Others for reasons unknown -- except to the girl's birth mother, whoever she was...

Anyways, even though the fictional stories in First Crossing are united by the immigration process and the human desire to be understood, they all stand out boldly as their own complete narratives. Each award winning author writes in his or her own powerful way that does not work to ban immigration or to promote it. The focus of each story is on the teenager's life and their unique experiences that reveal the ugly truths and the humorous turns that life can give in an unfamiliar culture.

I wasn't expecting to want to read First Crossing from cover to cover. Rather, I was foreseeing myself to get through two or three chapters and then move on to something else in my towering-to-read-stacks. Boy, was I wrong! I couldn't put it down. Even when my body was screaming at me to go to bed or go make dinner, I had to finish each chapter and stop myself from starting the next.

Brookline High students, you have one week left to read this novel. Don't wait to the wee hours of the morning the night before school starts. You might just enjoy the multiple stories this book has to offer!