hogglestock

Simon’s first trip to Politics and Prose was not all that he hoped it would be. This time, he appears to have enjoyed it far more. I am more than delighted that this is my neighborhood bookstore. It’s the place I go when I need an infusion of something written this century. Plus I always make out like a bandit on the sale/remainder shelves in the basement.

I am pretty sure that all but the bottom book came off the sale shelves. I got the Waters because I kind of enjoyed The Paying Guests, at least enough to try another one. I got the Simon Mawer because I LOVED The Glass Room and merely liked the far inferior Trapeze. The NYRB got purchased just because it is NYRB and it was on the sale rack. Those are always worth a go, even when they aren’t.

 

 

As the car was hurtling back toward Washington and Lucy and John, I made the mistake of mentioning Wonder Books in Hagerstown, Maryland. So it was one final bookstore stop. I’m not sure how I managed to do any browsing whatsoever given how badly I needed to wee. Alas the store has no restroom. When we finished we did manage to find one at the Aldi in the same strip mall.

With the exception of the Taylor, these books aren’t in the greatest shape and kind of sums up the state and condition of Wonder Books. I bought the Bryson because I have listened to much of them book on audio and there is so much I want to be able to read for myself. The Secret People is a John Wyndham I haven’t read. Yay for that. And The Blue Sapphire actually replaces a slightly better copy of that edition that I also bought at Wonder Books but left on a cruise ship library after reading it back in 2012.

Right after Simon said he wanted to at least drive through Detroit on our roadtrip, I stumbled across a click-bait list of the 25 best bookstores in the U.S. Much to my surprise one of those stores was a giant used bookstore I had never heard of. John K. King Books. Four floors of used book mayhem. Online reviewers sometimes complain about how cold or hot the store is. Apparently the old industrial building doesn’t have much in way of climate control. Thankfully the weather was perfect for our visit. Not too warm and not too cold. Also thankfully they have a customer bathroom, although the key chain is about the size of a phone book.

If I lived in Detroit, John K. King would be a regular stop for me. It’s the kind of place that just begs to be browsed. It’s organized pretty well, but given the limited time we had I only got to see a fraction of what I wanted to see. Still, as you will see, I found a few things to buy.

 

 

 

 

 

While we were at Booktopia in Petoskey every time we mentioned that we were stopping in Ann Arbor, without exception, someone would tell us we had to go to Literati. Happily it was already on my list of places to visit and happily we didn’t skip Ann Arbor because we both loved it. The store is bright, airy, tasteful, and hip (without tipping over into hipster). It isn’t huge but their selection of books is pretty darn perfect, at least in fiction. You can tell they think a lot about what they carry with a perfect balance of classics and new fiction and with plenty of happy surprises along the way. It is the kind of place that you trust implicitly to deliver good reading into your hands. They also had a very conveniently not-in-use bathroom in the second floor espresso bar, the absence of which would have made browsing impossible for this road tripper.

I read Fun Home when it first came out and hadn’t realized that Alison Bechdel had another graphic novel called Are You My Mother?. The Viola di Grado books for some reason just lept out and me and both had jacket descriptions that made me feel like I had to have them. Plus it is rare that I dislike a Europa book.

Hollow Heart is a book about a woman who commits suicide. The book is told from her point of view–after she is dead. (As I type this, I can’t figure out why I haven’t read it yet. I think it just moved to the top spot on the TBR pile.) 70% Acrylic 30% Wool pulled me in because it describes a dystopian Leeds where it is always winter. In fact it has been winter so long that no one can remember anything different.

 

 

 

We also stopped by Aunt Agatha’s which is, not surprisingly, a mystery/crime bookstore. They have new and used stock and, although pretty well organized, it looks a bit of a jumble. For those who like the genre and know what they are looking for, this is a great resource. For those like me who just dip their toes into mystery it was a little overwhelming. There wasn’t anything I could see that would help me explore and figure out what I actually wanted from the heaving shelves. Aunt Agatha also probably suffered in comparison to Literati. I don’t need Agatha to be that hip and tidy, but I would have liked it if they had had a curated table or two to help recommend things to the clueless (no pun intended). The gentleman who was working that day was very helpful and friendly. I enjoyed talking with him.

Our final stop in Ann Arbor was Dawn Treader Books. This is a jam-packed used bookstore that could have taken up some of my time and money on a different day. The fact that it was a beautiful, warm day and we were still going to be going to John K King Books in Detroit that afternoon, meant I didn’t look too hard here. Part of the deal was that prices seemed a little high for my taste. A $7.50 mass market copy of The Chrysalids seemed a little steep. Then again, it was a cool, older edition that is probably hard to find. At any rate, I bought nothing.

If our Booktopia welcome packets had not included a coupon for a free used book from the Friends of the Library book sale, I wouldn’t have known it existed. In the basement of the lovely public library in town (across the street from an even lovelier old Carnegie Library) they have an ongoing book sale. I did not come away empty handed.

I bought the Virginia Woolf because it is a Persephone that I don’t have. Frankly, it is one that I wouldn’t have bought if it wasn’t a dollar. I’m not much of a Woolf fan. But hey, it is pretty short, I will give it a go. The Norris I was drawn to because of the cover and then was intrigued by its subject matter. An 1880s battle between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in California.  The Appelfeld–despite the cover looking like something from Little House on the Prairie–is about a Jewish woman and her son travelling through Hitler’s Europe.

The local independent bookstore host for Booktopia, and our center of gravity for two days, was Mclean and Eakin. Given the amount of time we spent there I’m surprised by how much I didn’t buy. This was also the place Simon and I were the subjects of one of the Booktopia breakout sessions. Imagine an hour sitting in front of eager readers and listeners of The Readers. That’s my idea of a good time. Not sure if the audience felt that way, but I had fun.

So what did I buy?

I’ve been avoiding Ruth Reichl’s novel because I love her non-fiction so much I’ve been wary of thinking less of her in case her gift for writing doesn’t transfer to fiction. I guess the time was right to take the plunge. I read some Dario Fo in college Italian classes. Don’t remember anything about him but a combo of the cover and the fact it is a Europa book kind of sealed the deal. The book about the Place Vendome was for John as was the The Dirty Life–a memoir of a woman who decides to become a farmer. I’m not sure why I bought the Anita Diamont same for Euphoria. Probably a cover thing.

 

Just about an hour before we got to Petoskey we stopped in Gaylord because Simon giggled every time he saw the name. As we strolled the rather quiet, late Sunday afternoon in September main street we noticed a book store. In fact, our first book store of the road trip.

I made my first purchases of the trip at Saturn Booksellers. They had pretty good stock for being a small store in a small town. I also liked that they had a section for self-published books. I didn’t buy any (although was tempted by Does God Have a Penis?) but I liked the fact they were providing an outlet for self-publishers

I could have purchased more, but I was saving that for Petoskey. I have no idea about the Strauss but it was on a sale cart and Simon said something about it being good or something like that. The Vienna Melody is about a family who have to live together because their piano-maker father’s will requires it.

Being the fiction fanatic that I am, I never thought for a moment that my reading choice for Aarti’s A More Diverse Universe would be a work of non-fiction. I had intended to read Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche or one of the more recent novels of Shyam Selvadurai. But the calendar got away from me, Booktopia happened, various busy things at work and at home, and boom, I didn’t get to either of those, or any other novel by an author of color. Perhaps even worse, I looked back at my reading for 2015 and the only author of color I have read this year is James Baldwin.

As pitiful as that is, in at least one way, it is fitting that Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin are mentioned in the same breath. In addition to his breathtakingly good novels, Baldwin wrote non-fiction about race in America with unflinching and unapologetic honesty and Between the World and Me is nothing if not honest. In fact, as I have read recently, Coates modeled Between the World and Me on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in both format and outlook.

For those who haven’t heard anything about it, Between the World and Me is a 152-page letter from Coates to his teenage son Somari. Although Coates’ love for his son, his family, and his friends comes through very tenderly throughout, the overall message of the book is a rather depressing, pessimistic view of what has happened to African Americans, what is happening to African Americans, and what is likely to continue to happen to African Americans. Specifically, he warns his son of the violence perpetrated upon Black bodies on a daily basis in the United States. As someone who thinks of myself as being well informed about what African Americans face, a book like this points out that I don’t know squat.

Some have complained that Coates is too pessimistic. I suppose one could nibble at the edges of his thesis and his approach and find ways in which he may overstate something or paint with too broad a brush. But really, when it comes down to it, it really is just nibbles. The overall thrust of his argument and the outlook he has is not just deeply rooted in the past, it is deeply rooted in the present. It is disgusting how little has changed for African Americans. Whatever advances they may make socio-economically speaking, they still face a daunting, daily assault on their very being. It’s a scenario that requires a very open mind for someone who thinks of himself as white, to be able to take it on board and allow the overall truth of what Coates writes about to sink in–without getting defensive about it.

I think this is the kind of envelope pushing necessary to shake people out of complacency. One of the reasons the environmental movement has stalled in this country is because the average citizen doesn’t smell or taste or see the degradation. We’ve cleaned-up the obvious stuff, but there is still a lot that is hidden and even more pernicious, not the least of which is climate change–the causes and effects of which are so embedded in our society and so stupidly politicized that no one seems able or willing to do anything about it. I think a similar thing has happened with race.

Lest you think this is all too depressing to read, you need to get over yourself and read it. It’s something we all need to face square on. I don’t know what to do about it really, but I feel it cleared away some cobwebs that have been collecting since my much more radical thinking college days. Even with all the shock of the recent press given to violence towards African Americans and the racist hate that has bubbled to the surface since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, I think one still loses sight of, or doesn’t know about, what it means to be Black in America.

So go find out.

I had never even heard of Doris Grumbach until I stumbled across her on my recent 3-hour book binge at Powell’s in Portland. With so many authors and titles I knew about making their way into my basket, it is hard to explain why and how a total unknown would make the cut. If I remember correctly, it was her book Fifty Days of Solitude that caught my eye. The solitude part made me think of the wonderful journals of May Sarton and the 50 days part made me think of how I love a challenge. Apparently it is a journal/memoir of the author spending 50 days completely on her own. I assume it is a journal but since I found it in fiction, maybe it is made up. Nonetheless, it seemed like something I would enjoy so I put in on my pile. Then I noticed several other title by Grumbach. What if I ended up loving her and had only purchased the one title? Then again, what if I bought more than one title and discovered that I didn’t like her at all?

As is apparent from the photo above, I took a chance on Doris. What will soon be apparent is that I am so glad I took the gamble. I’m not sure why Grumbach’s novel Chamber Music was the first book I chose to read from the pile of 56 books I bought that day. I think my intention was to read the first few paragraphs of a bunch of them and see which one appealed to me most at the time But Chamber Music was the first one I picked up and I was so immediately taken by it that I never moved on to sample any other book.

The book is easy to summarize. Ninety-year old Caroline Maclaren (née Newby), the widow of esteemed, early 20th-century, American composer Robert Maclaren, has been asked by the other trustees of Maclaren Foundation to write a history of her life with the famous composer. What follows is the lovely, sad, beautiful story of Caroline’s rather complicated, unfulfilling life with Robert and the details of how her life unfolds after his death.

In short, Chamber Music was a joy to read. Superficially I loved the turn-of-century milieu, the bits in Germany and even more so the bits–most of the book actually–living just outside of Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. I was also greatly pleased that Grumbach joins the very small number of authors I have read who can write about classical music in a believable way that doesn’t feel forced or pedantic.

On a deeper level I found Caroline’s story tragic, sad, frustrating, at times hopeful, but above all beautiful. Grumbach manages to describe moments of deep pathos without ever making the reader feel manipulated. It seems odd to say a novel like this was a joy to read. Can something so sad be a joy to read? I think yes, but the word perhaps doesn’t really convey what I felt. More of a deep connection with the human frailty Grumbach is so good at portraying.

I can’t wait to see what the other Grumbach’s are like.

Just after downloading the next of the Palliser novels on audio recently, I got a marketing email from Audible telling me to try something different. I am pretty sure it was a random marketing ploy, and not a comment on all the Trollope I have been listening to. I didn’t open the email to see what they thought different should be, but I did go to Audible and for some reason John Wyndham and his menacing tale The Day of the Triffids popped into my head. I have no idea why. I only had the faintest notion of who he was and what he had written. After checking the audio samples to make sure the narrator wouldn’t bug me, downloaded Triffids and was immediately taken. I enjoyed it so much I quickly moved on to The Chrysalids and then to Chocky and loved all of them.

Now, before you get all dismissive and say you don’t do science fiction, I remind you that I am no fan of science fiction myself. But Wyndham’s work has several things going for it. Most importantly, Wyndham is a great story teller who keeps you on the edge of your seat. I also like that in the three I have read so far his settings are familiar enough, especially in Triffids and Chocky, that you don’t need to stretch at all to think it could be true. In fact, his post-war Britain perspective is right up my alley. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine Miss Buncle or one of Nevil Shute’s characters walking through a scene. And, although his prose is much better, Wyndham is like Shute in the fact that ordinary (kind of) people are called upon to do extraordinary things. Wyndham also gives much food for thought and for the most part his work stays just shy of any kind of preaching.

I am bonkers for Wyndham. Unlike other authors I love, I have no interest in rationing his work. As soon as I can get my hands on it, I am going to read everything he has ever written.

You might find this radio documentary on Wyndham as fascinating as I did. I love his edgy, subversive, point of view.

http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/john-wyndham-documentary/