Fifty Shades of Fault Done Gone, Girl

I'm eating lunch, or what passes for lunch, at the old juke joint this afternoon (technically yesterday), and looking for things to read out there on the magic internets. From one of the recent entries on the Paris Review's blog, I come to an article posted by the Guardian, about the Sydney Writers' Festival*. Apparently the Guardian did a live-blog of the festival (the 2014 edition), so I start scrolling through the entries to see if anything catches my eye—and what does the trick is an embedded tweet by someone called Courtney Robinson, who said, "Hey poetry slammers, that wasn't guerrilla or contrarian, it was fucking rude.” (Turns out I can’t go back that far in her Twitter feed to embed this one.)

Now, two things about that tweet. First, no tiny URL getting in the way of the thought and breaking up the rhythm. Second, take a look at what I quoted (or embedded, if I can manage to make that nubbin of technology work for me) and contrast what this tweet both contains and does not contain, with what the vast majority of other tweets do and do not contain. This one contains no numerals standing in for words. It contains no abbreivated words. It does contain a single thought, expressed in one—complete!—sentence, with correct punctuation.

Oh, and the F-bomb, too. Can't forget that. That's the interesting part. Take out the F-bomb, all you have is a tweet complaining about something the writer thought was rude. Is the writer being rude right back to the people by whom she was affronted? Sure she is. Is that being fair? Hey, who the fuck am I to judge? Her F-bomb emphasizes the degree to which she felt the poetry slammers were being rude, and, provocatively, encourages them to reevaluate their behavior in light of the way it made other people feel.

Not that the poetry slammers probably received any of those signals, but I digress in order to point out why I thought the F-bomb was interesting and not just a bit of profanity used in a gratuitous way; and it did another part of its job too, making me interested in what else the tweeter (Twitterer?) had to say. I click over to her Twitter page, and the most recent tweet says, in extra-large letters, "All aboard the lube mobile." Below the words is a picture of some kind of service van, taken by a photographer in traffic a bit behind the van. Below the words LUBE MOBILE is an illustration of a hand holding a wrench. It's probably safe to assume that this is some sort of automobile maintenance or repair service.

But the name of the service can be read in a dirty way, and I appreciate it when people allow their minds to work that way, both because of the tongue-in-cheek humor and because of the willingness to acknowledge sexuality. And yet that still isn't even the main point of this meandering post. (Although a secondary point is that this is another one of those instances where one random link leads to another and then ultimately points me at something interesting that I would not otherwise have encountered.)

That main point would be the tweet immediately following the one about the lube mobile. (Admit that you're laughing about the lube mobile. Even if you won't laugh out loud, or admit it to anyone else—admit it to yourself. Do I really need to paint you a picture of what's going on in the back of that van, after hours?) That tweet, which is slightly less elegant than the one addressed to the poetry slammers, reads, "I can't decide whether to read Fifty Shades of Grey or not, to hate read/ or just more deeply assess pop culture. Thoughts?”

I can't decide whether to read Fifty Shades Of Grey or not, to hate read/ or just more deeply assess pop culture. Thoughts?

— Courtney Robinson (@courtney_ro) February 7, 2015

This may be the first time in my life that I have ever wanted to respond to a tweet and then actually considered signing up for the service just to be able to do so; and though I did not do that, I do have thoughts, because I am in something of the same boat. Over the past year, we have played Gone Girl and The Fault in Our Stars, and beginning this coming Thursday, we will be playing Fifty Shades of Grey. The novels that spawned these films are three of the most popular novels of the last three years. Without having read any of the books or seen any of the movies, I have developed strong feelings of distaste for them.

This is mostly due to the fact that they are all wide release films that have no business playing at an art house—even a fake art house like the one to which I sell my labor for a pittance. Part of the dislike for Gone Girl is because it contains Ben Affleck, someone whose acting skills I find lacking. Part of the dislike for The Fault in Our Stars is because John Green and his entourage elected to rent one of our auditoriums for a friends and family screening of the film before it opened in Indianapolis. Though I suspect that many of his sycophantic followers would doubt the veracity of this claim, the following is true: John Green is not Jesus. And word around the campfire is that author E.L. James was difficult to work with during the making of Fifty Shades of Grey, which is a novel that started life online as Twilight fan fiction and supposedly contains quite a lot of bondage porn wrapped in what everyone I have talked to who has read it has described as really bad prose.

So what’s to like? I know that Gone Girl is a Missing Wife Thriller with lots of Shyamalan-esque twists, and I have read intimations that the prose is not especially literary. The Fault in Our Stars is a YA tearjerker, and if the novel is anything like the film, the ending is a soft, fluffy cheat—though perhaps not an unexpected one, given the point of view from which the story is told. Of the three, it’s the one I think is least likely to be terrible, and I’ve been trying to convince myself to buckle down and read them all, so that I can find out whether or not my hating on them is indeed valid.

And I’m open to all three, on their merits, regardless of what I have heard going in. If anything, the fact that I have the lowest possible expectations for all three novels greatly increases the chances that I will like all of them more than I thought possible before I began. I read Twilight in the same spirit, and came away from it with a firm confirmation that the prose is quite bad. On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer does have a solid grasp on pacing, and the story was interesting enough to keep the pages turning at a brisk clip. If I read these other three novels and find that any of them contains some hidden quality I hadn’t remotely expected to encounter, I will have no problem acknowledging that.

Based on the first two thirds of Gone Girl, however, I am fairly sure that I will have nothing to acknowledge about that novel. The problem, however, is not so much with the prose as with the fact that the two main characters, Nick Dunne and his wife Amy (the gone girl), simply aren’t very sympathetic characters. Amy, in particular, is a despicable human being. There are plot twists galore, which is mostly the point, and those twists keep the pages turning; but I’m not rooting for either of them, and in a book like this, if the prose doesn’t keep you hooked, and you don’t care about the characters, then all the plot twists in the world are just special effects. And because it relies so heavily on twists and misdirection, I am certain that it will be basically unreadable a second time. Once you know what happens, all you have left is 500 pages of post-internet vernacular that is, I think, as non-lyrical as it is possible for prose to be.

Reading The Da Vinci Code was a similar experience. I thoroughly enjoyed that novel the first time around, but once all the plot mechanics were laid bare, a second reading revealed that, for all of his talent at doing research and assembling the elements of a good yarn, Dan Brown simply isn’t a very good writer. The book wasn’t bad, but it doesn’t stand up to a second reading because it has nothing left to reveal of itself apart from an unstable foundation. I think that great books need to stand up to second and third and fourth and fifth readings, that they need always to reveal new things each time you read them.

Gone Girl does not pass muster in that regard, and I suspect the same will be true of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Fault in Our Stars. Remember that tweet I mentioned, many paragraphs ago? Courtney Robinson couldn’t decide whether or not to read Fifty Shades of Grey as something to hate read or as a way to gain further insight into current popular culture. I’m not going into any of these books hoping to hate them. Just because I suspect they are whatever negative thing I think they will be doesn’t mean that I want them to be. My purpose is probably more along the lines of the gaining further insight into popular culture idea (though it is true that I am not expecting any of them to fill me with pride at the current state of popular culture in this fading republic).

Either way, my thoughts on her question ran quite a bit longer than 140 characters, so it wouldn’t have done me any good to sign up for Twitter after all.

*—After I finished this post, I went back to add the code for the links, and I realized that the path from the Paris Review blog to the Courtney Robinson tweet was more protacted than I remembered. This is the post on the Paris Review blog. The link in the second bullet point led to this article posted by the Guardian, which had a link to this story at the bottom of the page. At the bottom of that page was this link to the story about the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and about halfway down that page was the Courtney Robinson tweet to the poetry slammers, which led me in turn to the tweet about Fifty Shades of Grey on her Twitter page.

The Pledge of the Independents

The Abbey Bookshop, in Paris, has launched some kind of Facebook campaign to encourage folks not to buy books from Amazon or any of its lackeys, due in part to the ongoing tussle between Amazon and Hachette. (Just Google "Amazon Hachette," and you'll be up to speed in about 0.36 seconds.) I don't support Facebook, or the way it assimilates people into its collective (especially when those people go about indiscriminately sharing unsourced information just because it sounds good), but every now and then you have to make this kind of exception. So I am sharing a link to the Abbey Bookshop's Facebook page for the Pledge of the Independents.

Amazon's goal of creating a commercial monopoly on goods and (increasingly) services has come to fruition in no small part because they cut their teeth selling books on the magic internets (and culling so much information from their books customers that they very quickly learned how to sell pretty much everything to pretty much everyone) and because they are willing to sell just about anything at a loss, as long as it means that they keep assimilating customers who don't care about anything except how cheap they can get whatever they want. (Walmart does the exact same thing, but with the added bonus of depressing wages in the communities where they plant their discount megachurches.)

Now that Amazon's shareholders have finally begun to bristle at the no-profits business model, Amazon has responded by squeezing yet another of its suppliers, Hachette Book Group. Most of the time when this happens, the supplier in question starts crying and tries to say no, but then is forced by Amazon to take another bump of X, shut the fuck up, and spread its legs. Hachette is putting up something of a fight, and it's starting to feel like they're building some momentum.

I'm not in book buying mode at the moment, but I have made the decision to buy what books I choose to buy from the local indie stores. We're not so fortunate here in Indianapolis to have a great independent bookstore like Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company, but Indy Reads Books and Bookmamas are not bad - and they can get you any new title that you need. Amazon needs to be made aware that its business practices are unacceptable, and that's why I'm sharing a Facebook link. (And no, the irony is not lost on me that I am sharing information about the shady business practices of one giant internet company by using the product of another giant internet company.)

Grain of Sand

I bought the new Stephen King novel at Barnes & Noble on Tuesday evening. I walked from the old juke joint over to the Barnes-that-used-to-be-a-Borders and got the book for 30% off its list price of $30. I was on the fence for a little while about whether I wanted to get the book at Barnes & Noble for a substantial discount or whether I wanted to support the local indie shop and get it for full price at Indy Reads Books. I stopped buying CDs at Best Buy (and related discount-offering corporate chains) years ago, but I can’t seem to kick the habit of buying books at...I hate to say Barnes & Noble here, but Borders is gone, and they ain’t coming back, so I guess I’m sort of stuck. I suppose I could drive way the hell out to Trader’s Point and shop at Books-A-Million, but I don’t like to be reminded that it’s possible to be a corporate chain bookstore and suck more than Barnes & Noble. Also, the selection of literary magazines at Books-A-Million is Darwin-awful. So I guess what I am really trying to say is that my name is John, and I have a problem. I can’t stop buying books at the least-offensive chain bookstore in the metro area, simply because there is no indie alternative here in Indianapolis. If I want new Stephen King the day it comes out, I. Have. No. Choice.

And yes, the correct next question is, “Do you really need that new Stephen King book the day it comes out?” If I am so excited about said new book that I plan to sit down and start reading it that same day, first chance I get, then the answer to the question is yes. But I’m still working on Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2004, and earlier this week, on the Tuesday in question, I was awfully close to the end of a new book of stories by Tom Perrotta, as well as about halfway through a book of poems I had high hopes for, but which is turning out to be way less metaphorical than I was hoping it would be. I wanted to be through with the Tom Perrotta and the book of poems, and a few days further along in the Ebert, before I set my sights on the new Stephen King. So, in point of fact, the correct—realistic—answer to the question is no. I did not need that new Stephen King book the day it came out.

Does it matter that I have been buying new Stephen King the day it comes out since early 1996? It might matter a little bit, but only if that sentence were true—and it’s not. I’ve had some misses in there. I’m not entirely sure what all of them are, but I never bought a new Dark Tower book the day it came out. The Colorado Kid had been remaindered by the time I got around to ponying up the couple of bucks needed to bring that one into the fold. I picked up a copy of Black House at some point, but that was also years after it came out. But I’ve been there on release day for most of them—and I even used to put aside whatever else I was reading at the time, so that I could start that new Stephen King book that very night, after I was through writing for the day. I kept going on those other books I was reading instead of jumping right into Doctor Sleep because I do, in fact, have a problem: I can’t stop checking books out of the library, and I spent a whole lot of years after college spending time and money buying a whole lot of books that I was interested in at the time, but then never read, and am now no longer interested in.

So no, I wasn’t going to lose that set of steak knives if I didn’t get that copy of Doctor Sleep on Tuesday. And yet I had to go over there, had to get it that day, and had to get it for that 30% discount—a whopping $9 off; and while that ain’t nothing, I am certainly not in the position where that $9 is going to make or break me. (If I were in that kind of position, of course, I would not even be considering the options for buying a hardcover copy of the new Stephen King book. If I were in that kind of position, I would, at best, put it on hold at the library and wait my turn for a copy. The hold list was, I think, at 277 on Tuesday. It probably got to just over 300 for a short while, because it’s down to 272 now, and there are a couple dozen books waiting to be picked up.) So why not spend the extra money that I’m not really going to miss, and do the local indie bookstore a solid by waiting a few days for them to get it and then buying a copy from them?

Well, that’s the $64,000 question, folks; and it’s been bothering me since Tuesday. It bothers me every time I look over at the shelf and see the copy of that Stephen King book, the one I haven’t started reading yet, the one that I won’t start reading until I finish a book about growing up in Jersey City that I just started last night—two full days after I bought the Stephen King book that I just had to have. I have no problem making charitable contributions to non-profits that I find valuable. I usually spend between $100 and $200 every year on some combination of donations and subscriptions to literary magazines (which are a kind of donation)—and if I had really given this Doctor Sleep thing some serious thought, I would have thought of the extra $9 I would have spent on the new Stephen King as a donation of sorts to the local indie bookstore where I made the purchase.

(And actually, you know what? I completely forgot about Big Hat Books in Broad Ripple. Indy Reads Books and Bookmamas are the two stores I think of immediately when I think of local indie bookstores—but both of those places deal primarily in used books. Big Hat Books, on the other hand, sells mostly [or maybe only, I really don’t go in there often enough] new books. So does Book Corner, but that’s all the way down in Bloomington. Much as I like Broad Ripple, I just don’t get up there all that often. But we’re going to check out Open Streets on Sunday, and that will put us within striking distance of Big Hat...which means that I’m probably going to have to stop in just to see if they have it, and to see if they have any kind of discount on it. And while neither Big Hat Books nor Book Corner are non-profits, they are both local indie places that are deserving of support—and Indy Reads Books most certainly is a non-profit.)

The release of a new Stephen King book is the only time I even think of rushing out to the bookstore to get a new book right away. (Generally speaking, I’ve been trying to buy fewer books while I read some of the ones I have bought over the years and don’t really need or want anymore. When there is a new release that I want to read, I rely on the library. There is often a wait involved with that, especially if the book is very popular—but as I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty much always in the middle of at least one book, and usually two or three. It’s not at all off-putting to watch the hold queue and make time for a new book when my spot in the queue comes up.) And even someone as prolific as Stephen King rarely has more than two new books out in a year. Publishers have always been wary of putting out more than one book a year, even by the most popular authors; and it would stand to reason that, in this depressed book-buying economy, those publishers are at least as wary as they’ve always been about glutting the market with multiple books by the same author.

Part of the reason for writing this lengthy missive was the hope that I would feel chastened for yet again doing my part to perpetuate the corporate price wars over new bestsellers; and in that respect I believe that I have succeeded. I will be reminded of it every time I look at my copy of Doctor Sleep, and I am sure that it will be on my mind when the next Stephen King release date rolls around. I should have thought of all of this years ago—after all, it’s been years since I bought a new CD anywhere other than Luna, and that pattern change hasn’t resulted in any lasting damage. It’s a little bit easier to justify an extra couple of bucks for a new CD than upwards of ten bucks for a book—but, again, not starving here. (Joke will be on me, of course. Dude will retire now that he’s gone and written his first-ever sequel.)

The other part of the reason for writing this lengthy missive (and for including this non-sequitur of a final paragraph) is to get back into the swing of writing a lot of words in relatively short bursts of time. November is nearly upon me, and that means National Novel Writing Month, when you have to bang out close to 1700 words a day to stay on pace. I have not been anywhere close to that kind of output since, well...last November—and this is my third stab at writing about this admittedly first-world problem that has been bothering me for the last couple of days. I wandered around some of the main points in the first two drafts before I figured out what I really wanted to say—which was the part about being chastened—but ultimately got it out of my system. (And as for part two, this little piece clocks in at 1749 words and took me a little over an hour to write.)

The New York City Bookstore Walk

This is the first of what could wind up being two or three posts about our trip to New York at the end of March—so when I say that “Monday was cold and rainy,” that’s referring to March 25th. I didn’t get as many pictures as I thought I would (and none at all on the cold and rainy day described below), but there is a batch from Central Park that I will get around to posting at some point.

Monday was cold and rainy. Jackson had thrown up the night before, after we got in, and was running a fever. Our plan had been to hit the museum with my uncle (who used to work there and remains “connected,” if you know what I mean) and then maybe spend part of the rest of the day looking for coffee shops and bookstores; but Jackson wasn’t going anywhere. You might think that would derail all of our plans for the day, but you would be wrong. We did have to cancel the museum (which was unfortunate, because my uncle had to catch the train home later that afternoon, and so would not be able to join us when we did make it to the museum, the following morning), but Mom was willing to look after Jackson while Amy and I went out.

I underestimated the walk, or we could probably have hit a few more places. If you plug the address of our hotel and the address of the bookstore I most wanted to see into Google Maps and then bang the tab for walking directions, you get a blue line that basically goes straight down Broadway for almost four miles, and the omniscient computer brainoids at Google think it’s going to take you an hour and sixteen minutes to get there on foot. In the Monday morning rain and grey. Fortified by crappy coffee. (I’ll mention the names of the coffee shops we hit during the trip at the end of this, but I won’t go into any details, because there aren’t any details worth going into. I did a better job of finding a good coffee shop in Covington, Kentucky, than I did on this trip to New York.)

I did not plug the two addresses into Google Maps until after we got back; by then we were curious about just how far we had walked, given that my pedometer had gone over 20,000. I knew roughly where St. Mark’s Bookshop was before we headed out, and that was it. A walk is a walk, though, and even if it was cold and rainy, it was still New York City. I might have passed on a walk here at home in weather like that, but here at home we don’t have Times Square. We don’t have the Empire State Building, and none of our libraries, to my knowledge, are watched over by lions on the steps. That’s what you run into when you slice through New York City down Broadway. Amy mentioned something about the U.N., too, but by the time that came up we were no longer in the mood to look for anything new.

The literary karma gods are going to lay the smackdown on me if I say that St. Mark’s was disappointing, so I definitely will not say that; but I was shopping for literary magazines, and despite having the most extensive selection of literary magazines I’ve ever encountered, many of the issues on the shelves were out of date—sometimes by a couple of years. I avoided looking at actual books because I’m still trying to get rid of more books each year than I bring in (and literary magazines still do not count), and so spent most of my time in an odd little zone there in the literary magazine section, trying to decide how much money I wanted to drop on how many magazines. I thought vaguely about how I would transport the literary booty back home, but guessed that that would take care of itself somehow.

(Interesting aside on train travel. None of our bags was ever inspected once, at any point on our journey. Between the three of us, we had eight bags on the trip out and nine bags on the trip back—because all the books and literary magazines I bought had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was an extra canvas grocery bag I picked up along the way. All three of us had a suitcase and a backpack, and the other two bags were my mom’s carry-on and my laptop bag. The ninth bag going back was the canvas Zabar’s bag I bought, which was filled to the brim with books and literary magazines. All of those bags went into our two roommettes on the train and into adjacent seats on the commuter train. The closest we came to checking anything was when they put the suitcases in the baggage hold of the bus on the Indianapolis-Chicago legs of the trip.)

I wound up spending almost fifty bucks on four magazines: Fence, which came to my attention by way of a response by its editor to a Boston Review symposium on binaries in poetry; Analemma, which I had heard of from a post on Vouched Books that offered a free subscription to that journal as a prize for posting a comment on its blog; Hobart, which I had never heard of, but which contained a short story called “Sex in the Afternoon”; and Fourteen Hills, which it turns out I may not have had any good reason at all for picking up. I could easily have spent another half an hour and another almost-fifty-bucks and taken home four more random issues.

Alas, though, it was getting late in the afternoon, and we were both starting to think we should get back and check on Jackson (even though Amy had already called to check in and heard from Mom that Jackson seemed to be fine). I had every intention of going directly back to the hotel, and so decided to take the most direct route, straight up Broadway. However...about two blocks away from St. Mark’s, straight up Broadway, is the Strand, which we had missed on the way down because we had drifted over to 2nd Avenue. I had wanted to see that bookstore too, along with St. Mark’s, but thought I had run out of time. Since it was there, though, and Mom had said that Jackson was fine, it seemed sort of silly not to go in. So we did.

Oh...man. The best bookstore I have ever been to is the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. #2 is up for grabs, though; and if it’s not Book Corner down in Bloomington, then it might well, after only one quick visit, be the Strand. In fact, during that one quick visit, I saw only one of the four levels. I’m not sure there’s any way to determine how many of the purported 18 miles of books I looked at, but it can’t have been much. I wound up buying a tiny hardcover copy of Fox in Socks to read with Jackson, and a paperback copy of Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, by Greil Marcus, the first—but not last—books that I would buy on the trip.

And then we really did walk back to the hotel, back up Broadway with a slide up 7th Avenue to take a gander at the Carnegie Deli. I was going to mention briefly the coffee shops we visited while we were in the city, but as I started to write about them, I realized that I might actually have enough for a whole post on just coffee shops. I wasn’t sure that was going to be possible, and so hadn’t originally planned on it; but now I think it can be done. Of course, it took me a month to crank out this first post about the trip, so who knows how long the subsequent posts are going to take?

A Wheel of Fate, A Game of Chance

It’s only a couple of days until National Novel Writing Month starts, so naturally, I need for something asinine to rear its ugly head and distract me from the marathon of writing that’s due to commence on Thursday. As luck would have it, I finished reading Clockwork Angels: The Novel this past Friday, and came across the following in Neil Peart’s afterword (referring to Kevin J. Anderson, the novel’s author): “Kevin also had fun weaving in many references to Rush lyrics, and though they will not disrupt the reading experience for those who don’t get them, they may entertain those who do. (Perhaps one day we’ll have a contest to see how many of them people can find.)”

As it happened, I was very much entertained by the frequent snippets of lyrics from the band’s songs; but I wasn’t taking note of each of them as I went along. That’s too bad, because you have to think that my odds of winning a contest like that would be pretty good—not because I’m such a Rush expert, but because the pool of entries would be relatively small. Without going back into the book a second time, I came up with fourteen songs off the top of my head (not including the songs from the album version of Clockwork Angels) that were referenced in the text. And then...yes...I went back and started reading the novel again—and got two more songs before the end of the first chapter.

It’s going to take me awhile to get through the novel a second time, but maybe while I’m doing that, someone else pursuing the same goal will wander by my little roadstop on the magic internets and leave a comment denoting how far they are in the novel and how many songs they have identified. (Just please don’t say which songs, since that would spoil the fun.)

A splendid mirage in this desolation...

In the Crannies and the Nooks, There Are Books to Buy

There’s always something. There’s always some goddamn thing that wrecks my plan to get rid of more books each year than I bring in. (Other than my own lack of willpower, which is manifested both by my inability to stop going into bookstores so frequently and by my all-too-frequent willingness to drop a buck or two on just about anything.) Last year it was Borders going out of business, but I really was doing well this year. Before this past weekend, I had bought all of two books so far in 2012. (I don’t count literary magazines, whether I should or not.)

Then we went to the Benton House Book Sale last Saturday. Amy was looking for some books for Jackson and, well, like I’ve said, I don’t have to be talked into these things. Jockamo and Lazy Daze are two of the collection points for the donations that make this book sale work, and I’ve perused the contents of those collection boxes at various times, while waiting either for pizza or coffee. I was sort of hoping, based on what I had seen in those collection boxes, that I would be as unimpressed by the rest of the books at the sale as I was by the ones I got to see beforehand, stuffed into shopping bags and shipping cartons and whatnot. (Either way, it was certainly worth at least a look.)

Alas. You put enough books together in one place, and spend enough time looking at them, and invariably you can spot a monkey reading a copy of Hamlet on the floor under a table in the back corner. Or no...wait...it would have to be your bull. Anyway...I was going along just fine until I came to a pocket paperback copy of Gone with the Wind that was both well bound and in pretty good shape. I normally cast aspersions on pocket paperback books, for reasons that mostly have to do with how cheaply they are made and how hard they are to read. (At least, they’re usually hard for me to read. The print is often fairly small, and I don’t have the best eyes in the world to begin with. Unfortunately, this seems to be getting worse as I get older.)

This one was in good shape, though. The pages fell open nicely, and the binding was not cracked, or even slightly creased, and felt solid enough in my hands that I was confident it would remain that why while the book was under my care. However, it was only one book, and even though it was a (relatively) nice one, it was something I could pass up. I have never read Gone with the Wind, and it’s one of those that I hope to get around to reading one of these days; but that’s what libraries are for—to hold the books you want to get around to eventually until the day comes when you finally get around to them. If it had been something I felt reasonably sure I would want either to read again or to keep forever, then that would have been something different.

The next thing that I picked up and found intriguing was a Modern Library trade paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s not something I’ve ever felt a burning desire to read, and I already have something by its author on my shelves (The Three Musketeers); but the Modern Library edition closed the deal. Modern Library editions are extremely well made trade paperbacks, with long introductions, often by other authors who have some sort of connection to the work they are introducing (such as Michael Cunningham introducing The Voyage Out, Arthur C. Clarke introducing The War of the Worlds, and Michael Crichton introducing The Lost World). The copy was not in very good shape, with a badly rolled spine and some discoloration on the pages; but it was not precisely in bad shape, either, and its Modern Library-ness made up for the other deficiencies.

At this point, I was considering two books I could easily have passed on; but I kept looking around anyway, because it’s places like that where you find the gems that both surprise and delight you. The gem for me, in this case, was a very fine trade paperback copy of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. Somebody out there is going to read this and think that Bolaño is overhyped, and they might be right; but I would disagree, mostly because I thought 2666 was great, but also because he is outspoken in his non-fiction and because his poetry can be a little bit dirty. He would be nearly as popular if he were still alive, but his untimely passing, at the age of fifty, pretty much cemented his status as a rock star. Now that I have a complete collection of the work of Richard Yates, Bolaño is the author I hoard when I find him in clearance bins and book sales.

There was no way I was going to pass up the Bolaño novel, so I went back and got the other two books I had been looking at, too. I maybe should have stopped there, but then I would not have found a hardcover copy of Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, an early collection of his short stories. I wasn’t entirely sure I did not already have that book, but I grabbed it anyway. I checked the Stephen King bookcase when I got home, and sure enough, no Skeleton Crew. (Yes, I have a whole bookcase, of the three-shelf sort, with nothing but Stephen King books in it—and it’s overflowing.) I also picked up a copy of an old issue of Granta, and by that point it was well beyond time for me to leave. Amy and Jackson had long since paid for their purchases and exited the sale. I dropped a whopping $2.50 on my four books and one magazine, and in one fell swoop undid the modest progress I had made this year in reducing my literary inventory. I suppose there’s always next year...

Trapped by the Desperation Between How It Is and How It Ought To Be

It started out innocently enough. I just wanted to hit Half Price Books on my way home from the old juke joint to check and see if they had any copies of We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver. I should just add it either to my hold queue or to the My List feature at the library, but it’s always possible that I’ll roll into Half Price Books one day and find a whole stack of them in the clearance section, going for a buck a pop. The clearance magazine section is always worth checking too, even if the meager-to-begin-with selection of clearance literary magazines has now dwindled down to practically nothing. (And you never know when you might find a National Geographic with an excellent map still inside it.)

But then I got to leave early (this past Saturday night), so I decided to roll into Barnes & Noble, too. Their selection of literary magazines was, as usual, underwhelming and disappointing; but I also made it a point to finally find their poetry books. For whatever reason, they had relocated poetry, from the high wall near the newsstand and perpendicular to the science fiction section, to somewhere else in the store; but my past efforts to locate that new section had always been unsuccessful. I thought I had checked every bit of the store each of those times, but I must not have done. Last night, I found the poetry tucked away on the outer wall of the children’s section.

And then I turned around and saw the philosophy section. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but sometimes, when I randomly pass by the philosophy section in a bookstore (which is actually possible, odd though it may sound), I’ll check to see which titles from the Pop Culture and Philosophy series they have in stock. Two titles caught my eye at Barnes & Noble on Saturday night—The Big Bang Theory and Philosophy and Green Lantern and Philosophy, though at $17.95, I was not about to actually buy either one. I did, however, make a mental note to check the library’s website when I got home, to see if they had either one. I also made a mental note to check the website for the series, to see what other titles had been added recently and which ones might be coming down the pipeline.

Half Price Books did not have any copies of We Need to Talk About Kevin, of course. Novels at the height of their popularity are not often to be found at Half Price Books if one shows up only randomly. There were all of two literary magazines in the magazine clearance section, and those were tucked into some slot for a different kind of magazine, the one specifically for literary magazines having some time ago been repurposed for something far less interesting. So, as is almost always the case when I go searching for these things in a post-Borders world, I went home empty-handed and underwhelmed—though at least a little bit excited about the possibility of getting The Big Bang Theory and Philosophy, and maybe the Green Lantern one too, from the library.

Except that the library did not have it. They have Green Lantern and Philosophy, a single copy of which is checked in at Central...but not the Big Bang Theory one. I can always fall back on the old standby of suggesting it for purchase, but that takes a really long time. What will probably happen in the meantime is that I will just forget about it. I still have a gigantic stack of library books waiting to be read here in my aboveground lair, so it’s not like I would have jumped right into it if the library had had a copy that I had been able to get my hands on right away.

But I did manage to remember my mental note to check the website of the Pop Culture and Philosophy series when I got home...and would you believe what I found? At #57 on the list, published last year...Rush and Philosophy. The Barnes & Noble website thinks they have found the book in stock up in Carmel, though that’s the only relatively nearby store that has it. Amazon’s price is $13.29 which is, amusingly, $6.66 off of the list price. Shipping would cancel out most of that savings—but would also save me a trip to Hamilton County, and so in the end is probably a push.

However, it also gets me back to the problem of buying things from Amazon and giving in to instant gratification rather than taking the road less traveled by and getting the damn thing from an actual bookstore where people who know things about books and literature toil (probably thanklessly) in an effort to maintain some semblance of an outpost of soul in this fading republic. Or I could just forget about it and suggest it for purchase by the library, too; and that would keep my books purchased total at one for the year, which is also good.

Not Buying Books in 2012

I had been going along so well with not buying books this year that it did not even occur to me until I got home from work on Tuesday night with the new Stephen King book tucked under my arm that I had in fact bought my first real book of 2012. (And by “real book” I mean a book and not a literary magazine, even though literary magazines take up space on bookshelves just like books do, except not quite as much.) I had set myself the goal of reading one book from my shelves (with the idea of then putting it in the pile to go to Half Price Books at the end of the year), one library book (to reduce the stack of them that seems always to be metastasizing insidiously next to my reading chair), and one literary magazine, each month this year—a goal that I seem to have pretty well in hand at this point.

I had finished all three of the things I set myself to read for April by the 15th; and now I am about 150 pages into the book from my shelves for May (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom) and have nearly finished the library book for May, a little pocket guide to the iPad 2 that I had hoped might be useful since Amy now has one of those gadgets. I even allowed myself a bonus book, yet another re-reading of what might be my favorite Bret Easton Ellis novel, The Rules of Attraction. The new Stephen King book, an eighth Dark Tower novel, will be a second bonus book after I finish the Ellis.

I even have a small stack of books from my shelves that are ready to be read and put in the discard pile, enough to get me through August if I stay on pace. The stack of library books is another story, though; at one book per month, it would take me almost two years to get through that stack. I may wind up changing the plan if I can convince myself that there’s no way I’ll wind up bringing in more books than I send out. That has been the goal for the books on my shelves over the last couple of years, but those damned Borders liquidation sales last year (and a hefty new Stephen King book) made the total for 2011 pretty much of a push.

The literary magazines will continue to stack up, but that doesn’t really bother me. Buying literary magazines serves a number of purposes, including supporting the creation of new literature, which is important to me. That’s voting with your dollars in a much larger sense than throwing down for a book. (And yes, I understand that buying an author’s book supports that author; but buying a literary magazine supports lots of authors, and there is almost always something interesting in each one. If you buy a stinker of a novel, you’re stuck with a stinker of a novel. When I read about novels that sound interesting, I check the library; and many times, I find that the library does not have a copy of the novel in its collection. At that point, I head over to the Suggest for Purchase link and fill out the form. So far, the library has added thirteen books to its collections because of purchase suggestions that I have made. That’s at least as good as if I went out and bought those books for myself, with the added bonus that maybe other people will check them out and then buy copies for themselves or as gifts for other people.)

Eventually I am going to thin the ranks of this mini-library I have accumulated in my aboveground lair. I have spent a lot of money over the years on books that I thought might be helpful when I finally became a Writer, books that I would take notes in and then come back to for research purposes when I needed to know something about British royalty, or wine, or the LBJ tapes, or the impeachment trial of President Clinton—or whatever. Becoming a Writer, however, has not come to pass in quite the way that I had hoped; and it also turns out that the magic internets are pretty good for that kind of research—as are public libraries. (Indianapolis has one of the finest public library systems in the country.)

And so the books that I choose to keep on my shelves need to be ones that I love, ones that I go back to over and over again, ones that inspire me to write often and to write well. Those are the keepers. The rest are just taking up space—hopefully not for too much longer.

Perfect Free Shipping for Large Price

After Shane M. White

So the thing I’m going to write about tonight is whether or not I should be a hypocrite when it comes to buying books on the magic Internets. Except, yeah, I’m not really buying books. I’d be buying two magazines, though both are girthy enough that they could pass for books. But you know what I did when I got online tonight? I looked them both up on Amazon, found them both for less money than I had expected to pay, and was nearly ready to check out when I thought that maybe I should at least call the Barnes & Noble at Clearwater Crossing to see if they were going to carry the one that is a current issue. Then I decided to call the other “nearby” Barnes & Noble stores to see if they were going to carry it. (I would not have had to call around if Borders still existed. River Crossing always carried Granta, and I would have just gone over between sets on Friday night and picked it up, no worries. But no—now I have to make calls, and check the Internet and whatnot.)

And just real quick, so you know what I’m talking about, the two magazines are Granta, issue 117, and The Comics Journal, issue 290. Granta is a quarterly literary journal—117 is the next one—with a different theme for each issue. The theme for issue 117 is Horror, and the issue features a new short story by Stephen King. I came by this information in a Stephen King Newsletter e-mail, but that e-mail also said that Granta 117 is available for sale on October 27^th—that’s tomorrow to you and me, kids (or today, depending on when I get this finished and post it)—but the folks I talked to at Barnes & Noble tonight said that the current issue stays on sale until November 13^th. Maybe it takes awhile for these things to get across the pond. (Granta is published out of the U.K.)

The Comics Journal stopped putting out a print magazine when they got to issue 300 in November 2009, but apparently came back with an even bigger issue 301 this past August. That’s what I’ve been able to gather from the Internet, anyway. Comics Journal 290 had a lengthy roundtable discussion with a handful of comics professionals and Monte Schulz, son of Charles, wherein they discussed the merits (or lack thereof) of the recently published biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, by David Michaelis. I read this biography and liked it very much, but the Schulz family, Monte in particular, has been very outspoken in their disappointment with it. Monte says that Michaelis cherry-picked his sources in order to support a pre-ordained agenda. Reviews of the biography, including one in the Wall Street Journal by Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, were positive, and I’ve been curious to read this roundtable, but I just never got around to getting online to get a copy of the issue in question. I happened to be thinking about it earlier tonight and realized that the cover prices of the issues would be more than $25, which would qualify for free shipping on Amazon—that’s mostly why I checked Amazon first. As will be made clear if you elect to keep reading, I looked into it further after I had that first inspiration.

I got a definitive “no” from the guy at the Clearwater Crossing Barnes & Noble. He told me about the re-evaluation they did with their magazines earlier this year—it’s all based on sales, he said…go figure, right?—but he also said that it looked like Granta had been dropped earlier than that. The folks at the Carmel and Greenwood Park Mall stores were less certain of themselves, but each eventually managed to conclude that the current issue doesn’t go off sale until November 13^th. The Carmel store has that issue—I know because I have been to the store recently and seen the issue on the rack—but the guy at Greenwood said that they had not received any copies of the current issue, despite the fact that they usually carry the magazine.

I’ve been dropping money on literary magazines a little more than usual this year, partly because you need to know what kind of work journals are publishing if you want to submit to them, but also because I just like to read them, and I think that you ought to support the things you enjoy, to the extent that you are able. I don’t buy Granta very often, though, because it’s pretty expensive—cover price is $16.99—but the one or two issues I have bought I have thoroughly enjoyed. I know that the Stephen King story will just wind up being collected into his next book of stories that comes out, but I’ve always enjoyed horror writing in general, and I’m interested in the work of some of the other authors listed in the issue’s contents, including Don DeLillo and Roberto Bolaño. I’ve never read DeLillo, but have heard good things about him, especially a big novel he wrote called Underworld, which is set in New York, among other places. The late Bolaño has a pretty solid cult thing going on right now, mostly, I think, on the strength of his novel 2666, which I read last year and enjoyed very much. There’s also a story by Paul Auster, whose interview with The Believer I read not too long ago (and whose wife, Siri Hustvedt, was featured in a recent issue of Poets & Writers) and really enjoyed—one of the more enjoyable interviews in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers; and one by Daniel Alarcón, who read a Bolaño story called “Gómez Palacio” for a New Yorker podcast.

And now to procuring copies of both of these magazines. The library actually has a copy of Comics Journal 290, but it’s bound up in their archival magazines, and not available for checkout. I don’t recall exactly how long the Peanuts roundtable is, but it’s very long, and would take far too long to read for me to just sit there at a table in the library and knock it out. I called a few comics shops when I first heard about it, but none of them had back issues of the magazine, so that pretty much leaves just the Internet. I could probably come up with an excuse to go up to Carmel sometime and get a copy of Granta at Barnes & Noble, but it’s an awfully long way to go just for a magazine—and unless it’s a weekend trip, the traffic is bound to be bad

So the first place I looked was Amazon, where I found a used copy of Comics Journal 290 for $0.37, listed in “very good” condition from a third-party seller listed as “bargainbookstores”; but for $0.37, it could just about be falling apart at the seams, and I’d take it. They also had Granta 117 for $10.95, six dollars less than cover. The two together did not qualify for free shipping, but even with shipping at about four bucks for each item, the grand total would be less than if I had bought both at cover price and got the free shipping. The problem, of course, is that buying from an outfit like Amazon is part of the reason that bricks-and-mortar stores like Borders are going away. So I fired up Barnes & Noble to see what I could find there, and I found pretty much the same thing—used copy of Comics Journal 290 (it was even from the same third-party vendor, though here it’s $1.99) and new copy of Granta 117 at $10.95. The shipping was even the same, about four bucks each.

Not a whole lot of difference between the two, except that going with the Barnes & Noble website would at least be supporting a company that operates bricks-and-mortar bookstores. The online model might be cutting into actual sales at those bookstores that they operate, but getting my dollars that way instead of losing them to Amazon would at least help them to be able to continue to operate those bookstores. In the long run, of course, the few dollars that I am going to spend on this transaction are a drop in the bucket for either company, and will make no real difference in the grand scheme of things. Buying online will also push a tiny bit of business to the U.S. Postal Service, because I’m not about to spend any extra money to have it shipped in a day or two by one of those overnight couriers. The post office needs more help than Barnes & Noble, though, so in the end it’s probably a push. I help the post office by buying online, and I maybe help Barnes & Noble a little bit more by going out of my way to pick up the issue of Granta at their actual store in Carmel. (Of course, the sales tax would go to Hamilton County, which I’m not in favor of supporting, but what the hell? It's a buck and change. That won’t buy much in Brainardville.)

And then in the end I wound up not pulling the trigger on either transaction, the Barnes & Noble one or the Amazon one. No help from me for the postal service or the bookstore today. I’ll wind up doing it tomorrow, or making some excuse to go up to Carmel here in a week or two. There’s a new Stephen King book coming out on November 8^th, and I’ll have to go by a Barnes & Noble to get that, and that might well be the excuse I need to go up to Carmel to see if they have Granta. I’ll have to go the Internet route at some point to get the issue of Comics Journal 290, and if that’s the only thing I’m going online for, it really won’t matter if I use Amazon or Barnes & Noble—except that in some small way it will matter, even though the fact that it matters won’t matter to anyone but me.

The Elusive Borders Essay

I tried to do a second National Novel Writing Month tune-up exercise by going for 1700 words on the closing of Borders, but I only got to about 1200 words before I ran out of things to say—and yet here I am trying it again! It’s just another big corporation gone by the wayside, though in this case due at least as much to bad decisions the company made as to that whole recession thing people have been talking about; but it is just another big corporate chain, even if it was one that gave something to Indianapolis that no indie store has been able to do. There are still Barnes & Noble stores around town, but shopping there is not the same experience that it was at Borders.

I never bought much from the music or movies sections of Borders stores, even if they had something I wanted that I could not find at Best Buy*. The score to the film Revolutionary Road comes to mind. (Leaving aside the fact that the film was just a mediocre adaptation of a really fine Richard Yates novel, the Thomas Newman score was haunting and lovely.) I was not surprised that Best Buy did not have it in-store, and I was also not surprised that Borders did have it and that they were charging an arm and a leg for it (relatively speaking). It was something like $17.99 or $18.99 at Borders, and I actually had the CD in my hand at, I think, the downtown store, and was just about to grin and bear it and take it down to the checkout counter—when I decided that I would finally try the ol’ iTunes Music Store, where it was only $9.99. That’s still the only thing I’ve ever bought with iTunes (other than one song from the Vs. re-issue that just would not rip correctly off of the CD I bought at Luna), but it was totally worth it.

I don’t buy DVDs at all anymore, and that’s mostly because the movies I like enough to own are things that Amy would never want to watch with me. Other than the occasional collector’s edition, like those versions of the Lord of the Rings movies that came in a box with a collectible sculpture, or the collector’s edition of The Lion King (pre-3D re-release), I rely on Netflix and the library for any DVDs I want to watch. Borders charged an arm and a leg for DVDs, too, and are there even any indie video stores out there? I don’t know, and it doesn’t mean so much to me that I’m going to spend the time to find out.

Books, on the other hand, are tremendously important to me, and always have been. I was into books before I was into music and movies, and though I still love music and movies, my interest in them has cooled somewhat over the years. Mainstream music is hit and miss, and almost all mainstream movies are terrible. Literature is pretty healthy, even if printed material, as an aggregate medium, is in trouble. E-books were a spectacular failure the first time they turned up, because no one wanted to sit at their computer and read for very long; but this second iteration is hitting, due largely to the viability of portable devices like the Kindle and the iPad. That doesn’t mean that physical books (and the bricks and mortar establishments that trade in them) are dead, but it does mean that they have to change the way they do business.

They have to provide a means for reading e-books, which Barnes & Noble managed to do with their Nook e-reader. They developed the device themselves, married it to the Android platform, and launched it two years ago. Borders got into bed with Kobo, but didn’t launch the device until almost a year after the Nook came out. Borders was never any great shakes at the technology stuff anyway. While Barnes & Noble jumped solidly into online bookselling, Borders limped along at first on their own, then in partnership with Amazon, and then on their own again. And there was also the problem of the revolving door at the CEO position and changes in ownership.

But they got their stores right, at least. They installed bookshelves in the walls, which made the stores feel more like libraries than places of business. They still had racks and fixtures out on the open floor, but they made much better use of their wall space than Barnes & Noble, where things are packed in tight and the lighting is dim. It always seemed to me like their selection was better, too. That might just be my impression of the Indianapolis Borders stores versus the Indianapolis Barnes & Noble stores, but it always seemed like there were more copies of the books on the shelves at Borders—so that you had more to pick from, to make sure that you got a book that was in good shape.

Borders generally had a better selection of literary magazines, too, though I have only become very interested in journals in the last couple of years (and so can’t be sure that I am remembering this entirely correctly). I remember that the original Castleton store had a whole end rack in their magazine section that contained nothing but literary magazines, and that the River Crossing store had a respectable selection. They always had Film Comment and Poetry, both of which I have to actively seek out now when I want them. The Clearwater Crossing Barnes & Noble doesn’t carry Film Comment, and they only occasionally stock Poetry. I have to go to Greenwood or Carmel to get Film Comment now—which is pretty far out of the way to go just for a magazine.

I made my last visit to a Borders store on the Tuesday before they shuttered the Indianapolis stores for good, and that visit was to the south side store. Jackson was at school that day instead of at home with me (I think maybe because of Labor Day—was it that long ago?), so I had time to make my way down there before going into work; and it was nice to be able to make that store the last Borders store I visited. If I had not made time for that trip, the store at the Castleton Square Mall would have been the last one I ever visited, and that would have been sad, because that store sucked from the day it opened. The location was terrible (whoever designed the parking lot when they added those shops on the outside of the mall is an awful, awful human being), the lights were always turned up to 11, and it was the only Borders I can recall ever visiting that felt more like a place of business than it did a place to be at peace among books. By contrast, I used to stop at the south side store on my home from Amy’s, before we were married, when that store had just opened and stayed open relatively late. It was comforting and inviting, like the others of its kind in town.

And on that last visit, there were still lots of gems to be had, when the discounts were up to 70-90% off the original price. I first picked up an anthology of stories that had appeared in McSweeney’s, but wound up putting it down when I came to a novel called Elizabeth Street, which I had looked at before but never purchased. It’s a fictional account of true events in the history of the author’s family, and it is concerned with life in the Little Italy section of New York City; and at 80% off, I was all in. I also got a copy of the 2009 World Almanac, from the bargain section, at 70% off its $1.00 sticker price, which put it at a whopping thirty cents. A Modern Library trade paperback edition of Henry V was all of fifty-nine cents.

I got to all of the other stores in the area before they closed, too—even the one up in Carmel, where the happy coincidence of dinner with Amy and her parents let me stop on my way at the Carmel Borders to pick up Roberto Bolaño’s excellent 2666 at 40% off and whichever issue of A Public Space was current at the time at 50% off. Two last stops at Castleton netted me Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry and another Modern Library Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I. My last stop at River Crossing saw me walk away with two volumes of interviews from The Paris Review. I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude downtown, and also a beloved book from childhood, The Cay, for Jackson. The only store I didn’t get to before it closed that I would like to have done was the one in Bloomington; but it closed before Borders went into Chapter 11, and I didn’t even know that it was going out.

I spent a lot of time and money at Borders stores over the years. I don’t remember the first time I went to one, though it might have been the original Indianapolis location at 86th and Allisonville, when I was in search of Dan Quayle’s memoir in paperback for a class I was taking in college. I remember discovering “bargain books” for the first time at a Borders in Chicago when Amy and I went up there with a friend of hers to visit someone in a hospital. My mom was the one who got me started on Borders, because she used to get the books she gave us for birthdays and Christmas there when Matt and I were younger. She always stuck the bookmarks you got at checkout into the books, so I had Borders bookmarks going back to when I was in junior high or so. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Barnes & Noble bookmark; but maybe that’s what separates the good from the great.

* When I buy CDs now, I go to Luna. It took me awhile to get around to this decision, which is sort of surprising given how much I blather on about supporting the indie outift and eschewing the corporate chains. I used to chafe at the idea of spending several extra dollars per CD at Luna, but I finally made peace with the fact that since I only buy CDs rarely anymore, it doesn’t really hurt me to drop those few extra dollars. It’s voting with your dollars, and I fully acknowledge that it’s pathetic that it took me so long to get comfortable with spending that little bit of extra money.

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.

Book Wars

I read on the worldwide Internets the other day that there’s a book war going on. Even in a recession, online retailers (sometimes known as e-tailers) like Target and Amazon - among others - are at each other’s throats trying to see who can take the biggest loss on each copy sold of new novels by a handful of the big names in popular fiction. One of these authors is Stephen King, whose 1000+ page doorstop, Under the Dome, bows on November 10th; and I’d be interested in this subject even if there weren’t a new Stephen King book coming out, but since there is, I’m even more interested - because I’m going to buy the book the day it comes out.

The only question is how much money I’m going to spend on it; a secondary consideration is which seller of books is going to benefit from my purchase; and I’m going to leave off with whether or not certain places that peddle books actually deserve the quasi-romantic appellation bookseller, and focus instead on why I should or should not support any of these places where I might obtain the new Stephen King book. (There are other authors with new books out this fall that will be sold online at deep discounts - namely, for $9 or less - by Target and Amazon and others; but Stephen King is the only one of those authors who interests me. Others with new novels that you can get online for cheap include John Grisham, Michael Crichton, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Barbara Kingsolver.)

And if you know me at all, then you’re probably thinking that I’m going to say that you should go out and support the local guy - right? Head down to that neighborhood bookstore and put some bread in the pocket of the small businessman who lives in your community and shares your love of a good book. Well...kinda. If you live in Seattle, or are within thirty or so minutes of the Elliott Bay Book Company, then yes - you absolutely should get out and support the local guy; and the same goes for anyone who lives in New York City and can get to the Strand. You people have viable local options that give you the full bookstore experience, complete with newsstand and new releases.

We don’t have that at non-chain places here in Indianapolis. I’d probably have to order the new Stephen King from a place like Bookmamas. On the other hand, I could walk right into Borders and get a copy for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty percent off the list price. And yes...Borders is a chain; but it’s one that is struggling to stay on its feet - due in part to the recession, but also in part to flagging CD and DVD sales, and to other factors including disastrous mismanagement when it was (briefly) owned by KMart and to an online partnership with Amazon that just never really worked for Borders.

And quite frankly, it’s the best we’ve got in Indianapolis, as far as bookstores go. Some people prefer Barnes & Noble, but I just don’t understand this. Those stores are horribly laid out and way too crowded - even when there are no people in them - and their selection, particularly of literature, leaves much to be desired. (A couple of notable exceptions include their selections of books by Virginia Woolf and Charles Bukowski. I admire both writers, but will always check Borders first; and really, when I say that Barnes has a better selection, what I really mean is that Barnes carries both the first and second Common Reader by Woolf and a larger selection of Bukowski’s poetry. All of his prose, and all of the other books by Woolf, can be found at Borders.) This criticism applies both to their shelves of books and to their newsstand section.

After all, part of the charm of a bookstore is in browsing new items to see what's new and what might be interesting. Little mom and pop places don't give you that, and neither does a place like Barnes & Noble that does not feel cozy and at least a little bookish. (To be fair, the new Borders at Castleton Square doesn’t feel this way, either - it feels like browsing for books under the Friday night lights at a football stadium.) On the other hand, I almost never go into Borders and come out with a book; usually it's a magazine or nothing. When I do buy books, it's usually at Half Price Books, where the books are used - as they are at Bookmamas. But Half Price is entrenched, and has corporate backing; and because of those two factors, they have both a greater supply of incoming books to consider for purchase and more latitude to purchase books in quantities sufficient to keep their selection both fresh and robust.

So I’m torn as to where to spend my money on this new book. Part of me really does want to support the little guy in just about every way that I can and that is financially reasonable; but as long as we don’t have a major indie bookstore here in town, I don’t want to see Borders go away, either. What I am sure about is that I’m not going to go with the ultra-cheap online option - that undercuts the entire concept of bookstores in every way, and I don’t support that at all. (Maybe, as penance for having bought books for 45% off at Best Buy in the past, I’ll just suck it up and order a copy at full price from Bookmamas.)

And no...I don’t own a Kindle.

Praise Song For The Day

A sampling of links concerning the poem written by Elizabeth Alexander for President Obama's inauguration, including the text of the poem posted on poets.org with permission of Graywolf Press, which is publishing a chapbook edition of the poem; a review of the poem from the Christian Science Monitor; and the author's website.

News That Practically No One Will Care About

I watched Revolutionary Road a couple of nights ago and have since been pondering what I thought of the movie, both on its own terms and in compare/contrast terms with the novel upon which it is based (which I have just about finished reading for the second time); and I've been trying to decide whether or not I want to shell out the dough for the original score (by Thomas Newman, who also scored the previous Suburbia Is Hell film by Sam Mendes, American Beauty). I checked some of the Interwebs and found out that the only Borders in the city that didn't have the CD in stock was the one right next to the mall I work in, and the Castleton store was already closed when I got off work, so I had a go at Barnes & Noble. They didn't have the CD, but I did discover something cool while I was browsing the fiction racks.

Two of the three novels by Richard Yates - who wrote Revolutionary Road - that had previously been out of print are now back in print. The store had one copy of each novel - Disturbing The Peace and Cold Spring Harbor - and I snapped up both of them, almost thinking I was seeing things. I checked the Borders website when I got home, and it says that the third out-of-print novel, Young Hearts Crying, is due to be re-released in March. This means that, come March, all of the fictional works of Richard Yates will be in print.

Crannies And Nooks - Books Read In 2008

Here's the list of books I read in 2008, a total of 65, up from 51 last year. The increase has come at the expense of writing, I'm sorry to say; but getting a novel right is hard, or at least getting this novel right has been hard for me. This year's list is in alphabetical order, separated into fiction and non-fiction. Only one of the books has a link with it - there was a really good review of American Wife, posted on the New York Times website, by Joyce Carol Oates.

FICTION
2007 Best American Short Stories - Stephen King, ed.
The Abstinence Teacher - Tom Perrotta
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
American Wife - Curtis Sittenfeld
Appaloosa - Robert B. Parker
The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman
Brokeback Mountain: Story To Screenplay - Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana
The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
Christ The Lord: The Road To Cana - Anne Rice
Choke - Chuck Palahniuk
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
The Dark Tower: Song Of Susannah - Stephen King
The Dark Tower: The Dark Tower - Stephen King
Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman
Duma Key - Stephen King
The Dying Animal - Philip Roth
The Easter Parade - Richard Yates
The Garden Of Last Days - André Dubus III
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets - Jo Rowling
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince - Jo Rowling
Hearts In Atlantis - Stephen King
Insomnia - Stephen King
Just After Sunset - Stephen King
Little Children - Tom Perrotta
Lost Girls - Alan Moore
No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy (2)
Oil! - Upton Sinclair
The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
The Rules Of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis
Story Of My Life - Jay McInerney
The Subtle Knife - Phillip Pullman
The Tales Of Beedle The Bard - Jo Rowling
Twilight - William Gay - (No, not that Twilight.)

NON-FICTION
The Age Of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 - Sean Wilentz
The Bishop’s Daughter - Honor Moore
Bound By Honor: A Mafioso’s Story - Bill Bonanno
Catch Me If You Can - Frank Abagnale
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide To Global Warming - Bjorn Lomborg
Covert: My Years Infiltrating The Mob - Bob Delaney
Fair Game: My Life As A Spy, My Betrayal By The White House - Valerie Plame
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History - Helene Stapinski
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And The Journey Of A Generation - Sheila Weller
God Without God: Western Spirituality Without The Wrathful King - Michael Hampson
Hep Remembered: Memories Of Terry Hoeppner From Those Who Knew Him Best - Terry Hutchens
Hey Rube - Hunter S. Thompson
Hit & Run: How Jon Peters And Peter Guber Took Sony For A Ride In Hollywood - Nancy Griffin & Kim Masters
The Ice Man: Confessions Of A Mafia Contract Killer - Philip Carlo
Keys To Parenting Your One-Year-Old - Meg Zweiback
The Iron Road: A Stand For Truth And Democracy In Burma - James Mawdsley
The Last Amateurs - John Feinstein
Made Men: The True Rise-And-Fall Story Of A New Jersey Mob Family - Greg B. Smith
The Majors - John Feinstein
A Man Without A Country - Kurt Vonnegut
My Father’s Houses: Memoir Of A Family - Steven V. Roberts
The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built A Company One Cup At A Time - Howard Schultz
Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, And Priorities Of A Winning Life - Tony Dungy
The Rape Of Europa: The Fate Of Europe’s Treasures In The Third Reich And The Second World War - Lynn H. Nicholas
Savage Grace: The True Story Of Fatal Relations In A Rich And Famous American Family - Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson
A Season On The Brink - John Feinstein
So Wrong For So Long: How The Press, The Pundits-And The President-Failed On Iraq - Greg Mitchell
The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through The Hidden Villages Of Sicily - Theresa Maggio
What Happened: Inside The Bush White House And Washington’s Culture Of Deception - Scott McClellan

The best of the bunch in the fiction books that I read this year is The Garden Of Last Days, about a woman who brings her daughter with her to work one day and misplaces her while she is working. Set in late 2001, the novel is informed by events leading up to 9/11 - a cautionary study of human nature in the twenty-first century. Extremely well written and difficult to put down, even though it clocks in at well over five hundred pages.

Speaking of clocking in at over five hundred pages, the best of the bunch in non-fiction is Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And The Journey Of A Generation. I'm a sucker for music books, and this one was excellent, exploring the roles played by three prominent women through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, as folk music laid the groundwork for the emergence of American rock and roll. (Okay, technically Joni Mitchell is not American.) The Rape Of Europa deserves mention here, too, because it might be the best of all of the books I read this year - it just wasn't the one I liked the most. If I were an art historian, however, I might well be singing a different tune. Might be a top five desert island book for people who live and breathe art.

Others Receiving Votes:

FICTION
2. Christ The Lord: The Road To Cana - Yes, seriously. Finding Jesus (again) didn't diminish Anne Rice's ability to write. It might even have helped. I stopped reading her after Servant Of The Bones practically bored me to tears, but picked up the first Christ The Lord novel (Out Of Egypt) out of sheer morbid curiosity and was pleasantly surprised. The Road To Cana is even better. This is purportedly a planned trilogy, and I'm actually sort of looking forward to the third book.
3. The Reader - Had this not been made into a movie, I surely would never have discovered the novel; and that would be unfortunate. Another excellent study of human nature, the novel is full of rich, expository first person meditation - which is very difficult to translate into film. You'll appreciate the movie quite a lot more if you come to it having first read the novel.
4. The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass - Shame on the Catholic Church for the fearmongering that helped depress the grosses for the film version of The Golden Compass. There is now virtually no chance that parts two and three of this remarkable trilogy will ever be filmed. Maybe the ignorant Catholic fearmongering brought down bad karma on their heads - Disney has decided not to distribute the next movie in the Chronicles Of Narnia series, though Walden Media is reportedly going ahead with filming. Serves you right, you frogs.
5. Appaloosa - Hard-boiled, morally ambiguous cowboy western. The movie had closed by the time I finished the novel. Hello, Netflix.

NON-FICTION
2. The Age Of Reagan - This one was written by a liberal Democrat, oddly enough. It's brilliantly written, remarkably detailed, and (believe it or not) a page-turner. Begins with Nixon and goes right up to the present day, deftly illustrating the successes and failures of the socio-political ideology of Ronald Reagan and how that ideology became the black costume fused to the Peter Parker of the American electorate. A generation later, that ideology is still poisoning this country, having enabled the massive failures of King George II and Darth Cheney.
3. God Without God - An excellent study of perspective with respect to religion. Should be required reading but, alas, it's probably time for American Idol to start up again, right?
4. The Last Amateurs - Though golf is his true passion, John Feinstein is best known for writing about basketball, thanks to A Season On The Brink. This is the story of a season in the life of the Patriot League, a relatively new conference of smaller, more academically- and service-oriented schools in the northeast. These guys don't play for money or with any hope of winning the NCAAs. For them, winning the NCAAs is winning their conference championship and earning a 16-seed, so they can be destroyed on the first or second day of the tournament. But those two days are not only the best days of the tournament, they're also the best two days in all of sports. There is also mention in this book of Rick Greenspan and the good job he did as AD at West Point. Greenspan was most recently AD at Indiana, where he was thrown under the bus as a result of the Sampson purge.
5. The Post-American World - Tom Friedman's book The World Is Flat remains the seminal work on globalization, but this (briefer) book by Newsweek writer Fareed Zakaria is an important addition to the conversation. A lot of people in this country seem to think that the rest of the world doesn't have the right to grow up and get bigger and stronger, like the United States did after the Civil War. That opinion is wrong, of course, and it defines the modern day Ugly American. You'll find a lot of those people clutching their UAW cards and praying to their god for more bailout money for the Detroit automakers. Unfortunnately, the people who most need to read this book (and the longer work by Friedman) are the ones who are least likely to know it's there to be read in the first place.

Crannies And Nooks - Books Read In 2007

Back in September, I wrote about a poll indicating that 27% of adults polled in the United States had not read one book the previous year - and I also posted a list of the books I had read in 2006, which was a total of 42. Now that 2007 is in the books, so to speak, here is my list of books read this year. The total is 51, up nine from the year before, although some of the books I read this year are ones I have read before. (I have no problem reading books more than once - in fact, I think you sort of have to sometimes, depending on how hard the book is. I also think that it's a great pleasure to re-read books that I especially loved, because subsequent readings almost always open up new layers of enjoyment that are not possible the first time around.) First are the non-fiction books, then the fiction ones.

The Audacity Of Hope - Barack Obama
A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
The Confession - James E. McGreevey
Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads - Greil Marcus
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid - Jimmy Carter
Irvington Haunts - Simnick and Hunter
Roadshow: A Concert Tour By Motorcycle - Neil Peart
Pearl Jam & Eddie Vedder: None Too Fragile - Martin Clarke
Edie: An American Biography - Jean Stein
The Mighty And The Almighty - Madeleine Albright
Fates Worse Than Death - Kurt Vonnegut
I’m Chevy Chase...And You’re Not - Rena Fruchter
Howl: The Poem That Changed America - Jason Schinder
Tough Choices - Carly Fiorina
The Assault On Reason - Al Gore
My Rear View - Dorothy Dugdale
Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade Of Curious People And Dangerous Ideas
American Mafia: A History Of Its Rise To Power - Thomas Reppetto
Bringing Down The Mob - Thomas Reppetto
Dead Certain: The Presidency Of George W. Bush - Roger Draper
The Terror Presidency: Law And Judgment Inside The Bush Administration - Jack Goldsmith
Into The Wild - Jon Krakauer
For Love Of Politics: Bill And Hillary Clinton - The White House Years - Sally Bedell Smith
Schulz And Peanuts: A Biography - David Michaelis


Factotum - Charles Bukowski
What Was She Thinking?: Notes On A Scandal - Zoë Heller
Boating For Beginners - Jeannette Winterson
The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham
Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut
Hearts In Atlantis - Stephen King
Traveler - Ron McLarty
Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut
Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
‘Salem’s Lot - Stephen King
Cold Spring Harbor - Richard Yates
Blaze - Richard Bachman
The Children Of Húrin - J.R.R. Tolkien
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince - Jo Rowling
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - Jo Rowling (twice)
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
The Last Don - Mario Puzo
The Sicilian - Mario Puzo
Middle Age: A Romance - Joyce Carol Oates
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
The Lost World - Michael Crichton
Lust, Caution - Eileen Chang
Women - Charles Bukowski
Post Office - Charles Bukowski
Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski
The Golden Compass - Phillip Pullman
No Country For Old Men (twice consecutively)

The best of the bunch this year:

Non-Fiction: Schulz And Peanuts - Probably the best biography I have ever read, a thorough and thoughtful telling of the life of Charles Schulz. Peanuts is absolutely the greatest comic strip ever created (with apologies to those who prefer Calvin & Hobbes, which is also great, but which would never have existed had Peanuts not existed first), but its creator remained a mystery, to those who did not know him, for most of his life. This book illuminates so much about the artist and his creation that it qualifies as an instant classic.

Fiction: No Country For Old Men - Though short (just over 300 pages), this novel is extremely poweful and somewhat uniquely written (some contractions have apostrophes, some don't - and quotation marks in dialogue sections are entirely absent) and presents a haunting story about how the world has moved on. In Anton Chigurh, author Cormac McCarthy has created a character rich in unrevealed back story and layered with such subtle quirks that to believe you know him completely is impossible. This is one of the very rare books I began a second time the moment I finished reading the last page.

Other Receiving Votes (Both Categories): The Golden Compass, Ham On Rye, Traveler, Dead Certain: The Presidency Of George W. Bush, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade Of Curious People And Dangerous Ideas, Roadshow: A Concert Tour By Motorcycle

Accio Controversy

Probably everyone has heard this already, right? I'm always behind those dang times. On the off chance that you haven’t, there’s a story on Newsweek’s website that talks about an appearance Jo Rowling made at Carnegie Hall in New York last night. After reading from the seventh Harry Potter book, she took some questions.

One of the questions was whether Dumbledore had ever loved anyone. She smiled and said, “Dumbledore is gay, actually.” The article goes on to say that the crowd for several minutes shouted and clapped and that Rowling said, “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy.”

The ABC News website has its own story on the revelation, one that mentions a few of the other things that Rowling said in New York on Friday. Apparently she let David Yates, the director of the sixth film, know the little tidbit about Dumbledore when she “spotted a reference in the script to a girl who was once of interest to Dumbledore.”

She is also quoted as having encouraged her readers and fans to “question authority.” Sweet action! Not only is she the greatest writer of fantasy fiction not named Tolkien (and the greatest writer of children’s fiction period), she’s also a bit of a rabble rouser. I’m all for that. I’m all for people’s eyes being opened a little bit wider so that they can see some of the things in the world that they would never have seen for themselves if they had not been helped to those sights by someone else.

Like Tolkien, Jo Rowling has written more than just a book (actually in her case, seven books - yeah, whatever!) - she has created a world and brought forth from it stories to share with the real world. I don’t imagine that the world she created is quite as rich and detailed as Tolkien’s - in producing the most perfectly written novel in English, Tolkien told but a tiny bit of the history of the world that he had created - but there is a similarity between the two with respect to the fact that all which was created has not been told.

I suppose you could be narrow-minded enough to argue that this revelation is little more than sensational tabloid-style hype - you would be wrong, of course, but you could attempt to make the argument; but the truth is that by smashing taboos and prejudices and fears, revelations like this make the world a better place.

But that’s just me. What do I know?

It'll Change Your Life And Break Your Heart

Speaking of books, I started reading a novel called Middle Age: A Romance a couple of days ago. This novel falls squarely (or maybe rectangularly?) into that category of books on my shelves that are destined for one reading and then a trip to Half Price Books. It's by Joyce Carol Oates, who seems to be one of those rare authors who is both prolific and talented. I have never read anything she has written until now, which seems sort of odd, because I am such a book nerd and she is so well thought of.

Some writers are prolific and untalented (Dean Koontz, John Grisham); some writers are prolific and marginally talented (Anne Rice*); some writers are extremely talented but not especially prolific (Jonathan Franzen, Bret Easton Ellis, Tom Perrotta); some writers had talent once but then crossed the line into prostitution and lost their street cred, at least with me (Thomas Harris, Michael Crichton**); and some writers, though they are rare, are both prolific and extremely talented (Stephen King). There are also writers who have written an amazing first novel and clearly need to write more, soon (Elizabeth Kostova and Rex Pickett).

But back to Joyce Carol Oates. Her name first came up recently when I picked up an issue of Salmagundi in large part because its cover trumpeted a new novella by Joyce Carol Oates called "Papa At Ketchum, 1961." This caught my eye a little bit because of her name, but mostly because of the title. (The issue also contains an essay called "Marilynne Robinson & Religion," which sounded vaguely interesting. Marilynne Robinson wrote a book called Gilead, which everybody and their mother seems to think is the greatest thing since communion wafers, but which I thought was ponderous and boring. But then, not being especially open to whatever religious message it might have been trying to send, it's possible that I was not the target market.)

Oates came up again the other night when I found myself needing to start a new book, being more than halfway done with the two books I was already reading, and wanting to start something that I thought had a pretty good shot at being a book that I would read once and then want to get rid of. I'm about fifty pages into it, and I have to admit that it's pretty good, although she throws around sentence fragments like she's getting paid for them. I took a course called College Research And Review my senior year in high school (it was commonly called College Comp), and the teacher, Mr. Neal Shortz, assigned weekly compositions based on reading done in class on Monday. You got an automatic 65 (a bad grade) if your composition contained even one little run-on sentecne OR sentence fragment. I learned a lot about writing from that guy, but he never mentioned that you could pepper a novel with fragments and still be thought of as probably the most important woman of letters ever to emerge from America.

There's not really a point to this. Sometimes these things have no point. It's part of their charm. I'm outta here. (Actually, the point is sometimes to make someone chuckle. I hope that I have succeeded.)

* What I have read of The Vampire Chronicles is really good, and I have heard good things about the Mayfair witches books, though I have not read any of them. But Servant Of The Bones sucked, as did what I was able to get through of Pandora. Oddly, though, Christ The Lord: Out Of Egypt was pretty good. Actually, it was really good.

** This is somewhat disingenuous. I actually liked two Thomas Harris novels, although they were essentially the same story told with different characters (Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs). I have only liked one Michael Crichton novel (Jurassic Park), hated one (Sphere), and thought another was an okay read but an act of prostitution (The Lost World.)