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Independence sure is sweet. While you’re celebrating America’s this weekend, don’t forget about your favorite independent bookstore. We’re thrilled that BookPeople made the Huffington Post’s list of “Bookstores We Love For Their Spirit of Independence.” Make sure you go vote for us and Austin’s own Domy Books if you get the chance.
Ah, summertime. To me, that means pretty much one thing: summer reading. If only my boss would hand me a stapled list of titles in June with SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER across the top, right? Le sigh. Summer means freedom. Even if you don’t have time off, there’s something about these months—the sheer length of the days, the sweltering heat, and the way barefoot-summer-night-fun is offset by the dull endlessness of a July afternoon—there’s something about summer that just begs you to do nothing. Or better, as my friend Albert Camus puts it, “The hardest time was summer, when the heat killed even the sweet sensation of boredom.” Okay, Albert is talking about the heat in Algeria, but it sounds an awful lot like summer in Texas to me. Sometimes the A/C just doesn’t cut it.
I love lists. If someone writes a list of their favorite styles of pickle, I’ll check it out, test their conclusions, and develop my own theories of pickle. A colossal waste of time, but I don’t care, nor do I think I’m alone. So, when the New Yorker came out with their list of 20 American writers under 40 that will become, or already are the key writers of their generation, I was intrigued.
Gertrude & Alice, Diana Souhami’s biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas is wonderful. Whether you’re interested in modern art, modern literature, or modern love, the book will entertain and inform you with every bit of Souhami’s nostalgic, reverential writing. However, the book really takes off when the talented biographer gets out of the way. Here are some of my favorite examples:
EXTRA LIVES: Why Video Games Matter - Tom Bissell It's possible one of the reasons I enjoyed this book so much was to learn that I am not alone. I am not the only person in their mid (okay, late) thirties that still loves video games, often loses sleep because of them, and may have even called in sick to work once to finish a "mission".
We all love world literature, don’t we? We love to read translated literature that crosses oceans, cultures, norms, and expectations. But it hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when we stuck our heads in the sand and ignored all but a few foreign writers: Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens…etc. Even the so-called European High-Modernism of the 20th century was popularized by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, three Americans who wrote in English. Now we know how myopic we were. The world is full of incredible writers not writing in English. I’m glad we live in a shrinking world where we have that wonderful invention which Jorge Luis Borges predicted and Al Gore created: the internet. Now it’s easy to find a list of African writers. Two clicks and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi Wa’ Thiong O’, Ben Okri, and Naruddin Farah show up in front of me. And while it’s wonderful to celebrate the ease of our options, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always like this. Japan, until midway through the 20th century was an isolated literary treasure chest. Then in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature and America began noticing.
The Passage by Justin Cronin comes out tomorrow (Tuesday, June 8th), and our staff is beyond excited. This book has dominated our water cooler discussions for the past two months. We've been passing around advanced copies, wearing out the binding on more than one as Passage fever spreads throughout the store.
According to Jason Pinter, in his illuminating article on The Huffington Post, women have taken over the publishing industry and have stopped publishing books for men. Men don’t read, he observes, because nobody is making good man-based books. Tragedy. The number one culprit in the phasing out of male readers is Random House and their women. In 2010 we’ll see new fiction from Julie Orringer, Jennifer Egan, and Aimee Bender. What’s a man to do when he walks into BookPeople and finds new works by these three phenomenally talented and interesting writers, but knows that he can’t read them? They’re written by women for goodness sakes!
I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s worth mentioning again: I judge books by their spine. Meaning, the company that publishes a title can tell me a lot about what I might find inside the book. Finding a new publisher is like finding a new friend. It’s awkward at first, there’s almost too much to learn about each other, but, in the end, the vagaries and missteps can lead to a lifelong partnership that you can’t imagine living without. I was recently introduced to Other Press by a friend of mine, and I’m quickly forming a strong attachment.
I first spotted John Phillip Santos sitting in the lobby of a San Antonio hotel. I had no idea who he was, but his appearance made me take notice. Santos was dressed in a tuxedo shirt and jeans, wore freshly polished cowboy boots on his feet and had a tan blazer laid across his lap. He has a long mane of peppered gray hair, dark at the temples. I didn't know who he was yet, but he sure wasn't a tourist or business traveler. Santos definitely had an intriguing aura. As he sat in the wingback chair, looking lost in a deep stream of thought, I took another glance and headed to my meeting.
BookPeople 