Thursday, May 19, 2011

All Sales Final—No Returns or Exchanges

These Borders stores have got to quit going out of business. They’re positively wrecking my goal of getting rid of more books than I acquire over the course of this calendar year. I have acquired eight new books this year, and five of them are from going-out-of-business sales at local Borders stores. Two of the others were gifts, which means that other than the Borders books, I’ve only bought one book this year. Unfortunately, the stack of books in the outgoing pile has just as many qualifications as the stack of books in the incoming pile. One I got from a girl at work who had two copies of it and gave one to me because we had been talking about it and I said I hoped to get around to reading it one day but didn’t want to buy a copy. Two are Consumer Reports guides that are only going away because I recently acquired newer editions (although I have not added those two newer editions to the stack of incoming books, which I suppose I should do since I’m counting the old ones in the outgoing pile—and which will make the incoming pile even bigger, damnit). The others are books I have owned for some time and have never read and decided to read because I didn’t think I really needed to own them any longer—and those are the ones I’m trying to get rid of first, books that I bought in the first place for no good reason except that they were in the bargain bin or the clearance section and I thought that one day they would be useful for something and that spending a buck or two on them would not be a problem.

Financially speaking, at least, I was correct. I’m not going to go broke buying ten bucks worth of books here and there at Half Price Books, or grabbing a bargain book now and then at Borders. The problem is physics. Books take up space, and I don’t have a lot of space in my house. I do, however, have lots of books for which I have no real use. Whatever interest I might once have had in film has plateaued. I still like movies, but I will never make a career of making them (or writing them); and that means that I really don’t have much use for a book about the Cannes Film Festival that was written twenty years ago. Biographies of George Lucas or Stanley Kubrick? They’re there. Do I need them? Nope. Have I read them? Nope. I suppose it’s possible that I will read them one day and find that I really do want to keep them, but my interests have shifted. I still have that biography of Rudy Giuliani, which I want to get rid of but can't bring myself to read. It's awfully long, and I just can't get my head around spending that much reading about a douchebag who is the second most successful person in history to make a career out of milking 9/11 for all it was worth (after Osama bin Laden).

We’re going on halfway through 2011, and I had hoped the outgoing pile would be significantly higher than the incoming pile by now. It probably doesn’t help that I have taken a break from reading books of my own that I want to get rid of because I have been slogging through Stephen King’s It, for what I think is only the second time ever, because I wanted to experience the vibe of it to see if that vibe was the same kind of vibe I have been thinking should run through a long novel I have been thinking about writing about Irvington. That, and I can’t seem to tame the stack of magazines that sits next to the stack of library books next to my reading chair, which I also can’t quite seem to tame (the library books, not the chair). I even reduced the number of magazine subscriptions I take, down to two from five (or three from six, if you count Film Comment, the new issue of which I buy every time it comes out, but which I do not have delivered to my home by the postal service), but—thanks again, Borders—I have recently added quite a lot of literary magazines that were on sale, and a couple I got in Kansas City at the Barnes & Noble at Country Club Plaza, which has the best selection of literary magazines I have ever encountered (except maybe for Elliott Bay in Seattle, but it’s been a long time since I was there, and I may just be romanticizing its excellence at this point, though I don’t believe this to be the case).

So Borders is giving it to me from both directions—punishment, perhaps, for all of those Rewards Certificates from back in the day. One of my credit cards used to be a Borders Rewards card (though the issuing bank has since ended that program), and I would earn a $5 Borders Reward certificate after accumulating a certain number of points, aggregated based on dollars charged to the card, not including interest or balance transfers. One time, there was an error—it’s been so long now that I don’t remember the source of the error—and a number of Borders Reward cardholders got a LOT of Rewards Certificates one month. I got so many that they came in one of those manila envelopes with a metal clasp at the top. Buried in amongst the Rewards Certificates was my credit card statement. The total value of the Rewards Certificates was just north of $800, if I recall correctly. The bank eventually decided that it wasn’t worth the time and trouble to try to get the certificates back from the people who got them; and they sent out a letter saying that we could spend them, but that we should limit how many we used at once, so as not to overwhelm the poor sales associates at the Borders stores. I don’t remember all of the books I added to my stacks with those Rewards Certificates. I imagine that it was the bank that paid for those certificates, though, and not Borders—so these going-out-of-business sales coming right when I’m really trying to reduce my inventory of books is just a coincidence. I think.

One of the guys at work is convinced that all the Borders stores are going to go away, and at first I resisted that idea on principle because I have always thought the Borders stores around here were superior to the Barnes & Noble stores. However, now that River Crossing and Downtown have gone away, I’m not sure I care anymore. Those two were far better than any of the others—the newest one at the Castleton Square Mall is horrible—and even though the one on the south side is adequate, I’m almost never down there anymore. From where I sit, it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore whether Borders exists in Indianapolis or not. Its best stores are gone, and if the one at Castleton is anything to judge by, any new stores they might build—not that I can imagine that they would build any new ones anytime soon—aren’t going to be much to write home about. And even though the Barnes & Noble is still there at Clearwater Crossing, I still have to find a new place to get Poetry and Film Comment because that Barnes & Noble doesn’t carry either magazine. They carry Zone 3, a five dollar literary journal published by Austin Peay State University, but not Poetry. You know who does carry Poetry? The Barnes & Noble in Avon, and the Barnes & Noble at that goofy Metropolis “mall” out in Plainfield.

There wasn’t really any point to any of this. I just felt like writing about it. It has taken a really long time to read (it clocks in at nearly 1100 pages), and it wasn’t nearly as good as I was hoping it would be. It’s from the pre-intervention phase of Stephen King’s career. The first half of Hearts in Atlantis, a post-intervention book, does the theme of the loss of childhood innocence way better—and in only about 250 pages.

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