Bookavore

Lots of goings-on here in the store.  We’re gearing up to finally have a sizable manga section and expand our graphic novel section (YAY!), so I’ve been working on those opening orders piecemeal all day.  Suggestions welcome; so far my order is based around the most popular series.  This expansion is being accompanied by a big floor and shelving move in the kids’ department that will probably take the better part of the month to get completely done.  And we have a ton of great events coming up, including a midnight release for Breaking Dawn, the latest Twilight book, and a big big big children’s author in October.

On top of all this, I thought it would be a great time to start up a weekly e-newsletter from the store, to go out every Tuesday morning.  Head Buyer named it The Bookmark, which seemed overly simple to me at first, but it has since grown on me.  We’ve been shocked by the great response!  I thought people were so sick of email that we’d have half the list unsubscribe, but we’ve only had a few people drop it.  And surprisingly, we even had people ask to be added to the list.  In a personal triumph, I even got an email from a customer saying how impressed she was!  So, definitely worth losing a piece of my Monday.  I’ll gladly add you to it as well–just email my work email (stephanie at moravianbookshop dot com).

O yeah, and I think I almost understand co-op, thanks to Melissa Lion and a boatload of prompt and brilliant sales reps.  Melissa kindly provided her notes from her days in co-op, which helped settle a lot of random questions I had.  Thanks Melissa!  Then I wrote an email to all my big reps Wednesday, and by Friday I had heard from almost everybody at least once–giving me more information and ideas, answering my questions, and being excited for me that we’re finally doing it.  <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 my sales reps!

Link of the day, sent from NAIBA: an intriguing article by Nicki Leone, a former/current bookseller, on her idea of the perfect online bookstore.  Very intriguing for those of us looking to the future decades of bookselling.

In an attempt to catch up the books I’ve been reading, here are some recent lunchtime reads, one sentence each:

57. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron (FSG, 2007).  YA fiction.  A sweet and captivating story that is as quiet as its protagonist but also just as powerful.

58. One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead (The Penguin Press, 2007).  Hahaha, this was my staff pick for my newsletter last week, so I can just cut and paste its description here: “Now that we’re in the thick of wedding season, Mead’s book makes great reading for anybody planning or attending a wedding.  She looks at how the wedding industry grew to its current size (over $160 billion a year!) and what weddings mean in modern-day America. Her writing is funny and well-researched, with fascinating information like the fact that there are occasionally rivalries between Las Vegas wedding chapels, and that the diamond engagement ring didn’t become traditional until after World War II. This might not make a good wedding present, but you could slip it to the mother of the bride or the maid of honor!”  Let me just add that if you are trying to convince somebody to elope, rather than have a wedding, this would be a good choice.

59. The Facebook Book: A Satirical Companion by Greg Atwan & Evan Lushing, illustrated by Aurora Andrews (Abrams Image, just out).  I mean, this is pretty funny if you use Facebook, which I do; not sure if it would make sense to the other 85% of the country.  But then, it’s not supposed to.  (Why, I remember when my college had to sign a petition to get ourselves on Facebook!  And then we had to walk to dinner barefoot in the snow uphill both ways!  And then we all felt silly when the whole world could get on Facebook without any trouble 18 months later!  I’m just never sure who will buy a book like this, because though it’s funny, I don’t think I’d read it again.  On the other hand, I wasn’t sure who would buy The Truth About Chuck Norris, and we’ve sold 75 copies of that since November.  So clearly I know nothing about the appeal of novelty books about the internet.)

I swear I’ll blog the rest of the great unread masses soon.  It’s just that when I get home from work, I prefer to read books, rather than write about them.  Which probably explains why I have chosen bookselling, rather than book reviewing, as a career.

I only brought 2 books with me for the flight because it seemed foolish to overpack when en route to what is basically the biggest free-book-extravaganza of the year.  2 books was definitely not enough–should have been at least 3.  I have really been enjoying the view out my window, though.  As I type I am flying over mountains in Colorado.  They have snow on top.  This is a weird-looking country from the air.

55. Larry and the Meaning of Life by Janet Tashjian (Christy Ottaviano Books/Henry Holt, September 2008).  YA fiction.  This is the third book in a series (the first two are The Gospel According to Larry and Vote for Larry) about Josh Swensen, a 18-year-old boy who, by this third book, has already led an online revolution, faked his own death, and run for president.  When we meet him in this book, he’s become a couch potato, exhausted and jaded from all of his work.  He finds himself being pulled into orbit around a supposed guru who his ex-girlfriend is devoted to, and his summer goes from dull to over-exciting.  I liked this book a lot, even though the ending was pretty hard to swallow.  I like the use of footnotes 95% of the time, and Tashjian does a great job of fitting in references to Gandhi, Thoreau, and anti-materialism without coming off as preachy (it helps that she’s established Josh as narcissistic (though endearing). And I haven’t read the first two books, so this is a book that could appeal to readers who haven’t read a Larry book before—and will probably make them want to read the first two.

56. Goldengrove by Francine Prose (Harper, September 2008).  Fiction.  Picked this up because I really liked A Changed Man (which, curiously, I picked up the last time I went to BEA a few years ago).  I didn’t find many similarities between the two books, but I still liked this one.  [had to close my laptop before it died, here]

I wish I could think of more to say about Goldengrove, especially because there’s a bookstore in it (named Goldengrove) but I am now finishing this entry after an insanely-long ride to the hotel, which was just the capstone to a very long day.  I am out of words.  So I am going to go to bed, because I have a secret meeting to go to tomorrow, which is exciting, except for how it starts at 730am.  Yeah, it is definitely bedtime.

Lunchtime reads have been:

51. When Men Become Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear, and the Women Who Fought Back by Stephen Singular (St. Martin’s, 2008). This came in the store a little bit ago and I intended just to flip through it, because of the whole Yearning for Zion thing being in the news, but I ended up reading the whole thing. This is a great book for secret fans of true crime, because Jeffs is just as crazy as any serial killer. It’s also interesting to see why the FLDS was allowed to get away with their crimes, as well as the small army of people that were needed to start bringing them down. Made me think very seriously about the consequences of freedom of religion, even if the writing was choppy. If someone comes in wanting to know more about the FLDS stuff, this is a great book to hand them.

52. Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury, 2008). As a vegetarian who sometimes doesn’t eat fish, I found this book invaluable and fascinating. I personally don’t have a problem with the ethics of eating a fish, but I do find the way many fish are caught to be problematic (most of all because of reports that at the rate humans are consuming fish, they will all be gone by 2048). Grescoe agrees, in many ways, and his book is a trip all over the world, looking at how fish is caught and consumed. Very well-written and engaging, and equally interested in people as fish, because after all, when we stop eating a certain kind of fish, it does have an impact on fishermen. Best of all, there’s a comprehensive section in the back with suggestions from Grescoe about how to consume fish responsibly. Unfortunately, it’s not simple, but if the book drives home one point about ethical fish eating, it’s that there is nothing simple about it. Well, that’s a small lie. The book’s thesis is actually summed up in the title–to eat ethically, we need to eat lower on the food chain. Rather than tuna and shark, eat sardines and clams. It’s just that “eating lower on the food chain” is a shifting thing that is a matter of “depends” and “sometimes.” Anyway, I really enjoyed it, as would anybody who likes Michael Pollan, Animal Vegetable Miracle, etc. I think this book has the potential to become very big, and I hope it does.

This is another installment of lunchtime blogging, bringing you the books I’ve been reading for the past week or so at work.  As though I don’t have enough books squirreled away at home that need reading, I also hold books aside here at work to look at and read them when I can.  It’s an illness for which there is no cure.

40. Names My Sisters Call Me, by Megan Crane (5 Spot, 2008).  Nice light chick lit, which is usually not my thing, but I liked the letter in a Shelf Awareness ad and it has a cute cover so I ordered it in.  The almost boilerplate archetypes got on my nerves, but other than that I liked the story.  Would be a great recommendation to somebody who needs something for the beach or an airplane ride.

41. Love and Consequences, by Margaret B. Jones (Riverhead/Penguin, 2008).  It is, of course, easy to say this in hindsight, but seriously, this book is fake as all get out.  It is, in fact, offensively fake.  There’s nothing to say about this that hasn’t already been said a couple dozen times, but really, it is embarrassing to the publishing industry on multiple levels that nobody caught this one.  It took me forever to finish because I was so not into it, and I finally just finished it out of spite.  The saddest thing about the whole mess is that Jones is actually a really good writer.

42. The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage, by Alexandra Harney (Penguin Press, 2008).  This is the best book I’ve read about the way business is done in China, and why it is hard to change.  Harney writes very compellingly about the ways in which the current business structure is bad for almost everybody, not just Americans and not just Chinese.  Great first-person research combined with an impressive grasp on the minutiae and the big picture of China studies.  Also, because China is so crucial to the current global supply chain, this book would probably be interesting to people who want to learn more about the effects of globalization on business, but who also do not want to be bored out of their socks.  Definitely highly recommended.  If there are any booksellers out there who are doing the Lonely Planet promotion (we are!), this would be a great addition to that display.

And I’m currently in the middle of When Men Become Gods, which in a quirk of good timing, arrived from MPS yesterday.  It’s about the fundamentalist Mormon church.  Originally, I was just going to skim it, but it’s too interesting, so I am reading it for real.

I have just been completely knocked over by a book.

39. Unwind by Neal Shusterman (Simon and Schuster, 2007).

I’m not even sure I can write coherently about this book; I literally just finished it and I’m still reeling. The premise is, after the Heartland War was fought–a bloody battle between pro-lifers and pro-choicers–the treaty that is agreed on bans abortion, but introduces a new idea: unwinding. Any teenager can be unwound anytime before their 18th birthday, simply by their parents signing an order. A procedure known as neurografting allows medical science to *recycle* almost 100% of the body. Most unwinds don’t want to be unwound, but have no choice–they’re wards of the state that the government doesn’t want to support any longer, discipline cases, or kids whose parents can’t afford to send them to college. Some religious families sacrifice every tenth child as a form of tithing. Unwanted babies are “storked,” or left on stoops–if a baby is left on your front porch, you are legally obligated to take it in and raise it. The unwound parts still have vague memories of where they came from.

I know, that’s crazy enough, right? What’s even crazier is that Schusterman has made this world eeriely real, and so close in time that you can almost reach out and touch it. The book follows three unwinds who escape their fate; one is a confused tithe, the other two are just trying to make it to their 18th birthdays. They are quickly drawn into an underground that opposes unwinding, but has problems of its own. And I won’t spoil any more for you.

Shusterman keeps up a breakneck pace almost the whole time but it never feels rushed. The characters are likable but also real. And the end; well, like I say, the end just knocked me head-over-teakettle twenty times.

But do you know what the most astonishing part is? This book is YA. Not just categorized in YA even though it really ought to be shelved elsewhere (*cough*Tweak*cough*). This is honest-to-cheese YA, even though it is about abortion and parents signing off on murdering their teenagers and moral dilemmas and explosives and so on. But even so, it has powerful crossover potential (read: this would work equally well for a grownup book discussion group as a YA one; in fact, I’d love to see the outcome of reading this with a mixed batch of teens and adults).

Whew, no kidding, I’m a little exhausted from reading this book. I can’t really recommend it more highly than that.

38. The Market by J. M. Steele (Hyperion, 2008). I just ripped through this because my YA book discussion group is reading it in August, and I needed to know what it was about in order to write about it! I really, really liked it. Here’s a piece of my little write-up for the pamphlet I hand out about the group: “The premise of this book is new and different: imagine that a group of people at your high school were playing a stock market that was completely based on the rise and fall in popularity of your female classmates. Sounds horrific, right? Now imagine that your two best friends work together to use you to manipulate the market and win $25,000, by making you popular. As Kate becomes Kat, and her social status starts to rise, the whole school is buzzing, but she begins to wonder what the point is, and who she is. Hard to put down! Spot-on in most of its observations about the crazy rules of high school social life.”

I am really excited about this season’s YAG (Young Adult Group) line-up! Here it is:

May 1: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Because several people asked me to! I’m actually the only YA fan left on the planet who hasn’t read this yet, so I should probably get on that.

June 5: Generation Dead by Daniel Waters. I loved this book, as I have noted before. (Booksense link to come once the book is out!)

July 16: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Not only did I love this book, but I totally had a little fangirl moment when Cory Doctorow (yes, this one) replied to my pie-in-the-sky email to say he’d love to participate in our group discussion via phone! Yes, I am a big Internet dork. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s an awesome book! (Ditto wrt the link.)

August 7: The Market by J. M. Steele. As noted above. And we’ll have one half of the duo behind the pseudonym with us at the discussion!

If you want to join us–and why wouldn’t you?–we meet from 6-7pm. Except for in July, when we will be meeting 11am-12noon to accommodate the fact that Cory is calling from London. All YAG books are 10% off! (NB: YA-loving adults are as welcome as teens, but have to be aware that they will not be allowed to take over the discussion simply because they are grownups.)

More lunchtime blogging to bring you:

37. As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial: A Graphic Novel by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan (Seven Stories Press, 2007).  I really enjoyed this, even though it is incredibly unsettling.  The book punches you in the face from the first page and doesn’t really let up.  Although there the plot is ostensibly about aliens who come to literally consume the Earth, the point of it is really to drive home that changing our lightbulbs and recycling our soda cans simply will not be enough to save the environment.  What we really need to change is the system at large, because industry is responsible for most of the environmental damage in the world.  And changing the system means changing our lifestyles, in a big way.  The satire is blunt, but effective, and there are some panels that are hilarious.  McMillan’s art, like the writing, is simple but effective.

The book would make a nice counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth, because it is attacked for not going far enough (as are most mainstream environmentalist actions, for that matter).  You might, like me, be left wondering what to do; the book essentially calls for outright revolution.  Which, okay, fair enough.  But from where?  This is, I think, more for thought-provoking than anything else, but it does an exceptional job of challenging conventional wisdom that has led us all to think that if we all just individually consume smarter, we can avoid catastrophe.  This means it will disagree with the new breed of “shop green” books that’s exploded this season, and makes it all the more valuable.  Definitely belongs on any Earth Day/green living table display.

A related book that just came in and looks AWESOME is Planetwalker, by John Francis (National Geographic, 2008).  Just flipping through and reading random sections, I was astonished by how amazing this guy is.  Check out his website, too.

I read a lot of fiction this week, oddly enough. I kept picking up and putting down non-fiction. I tried to read Terri Cheney’s Manic and just couldn’t do it. I suspect I have hit a wall with white-lady-situational-memoir (so for now, it’s those and overly-precocious-younguns-novels that I’m not able to read).

33. The Punch: A Novel by Noah Hawley (Chronicle, June 2008). This is not normally my sort of book (I am absolutely sick of anything that seems to be a young-white-literary-man novel), but I picked it up because I liked the cover, and then took it home because Mary Roach blurbed it. But it ended up being so delightful that I think I will probably read it again some time. First of all, it’s very funny, and has some clever satire, but in that lovely warmhearted Walter Kirn sort of a way. But also, it’s a lot deeper than you’d assume from the back cover, in terms of some great metanarrative writing. You know what’s coming the whole time, but Hawley plays with narrative so deftly that you keep watching the trains just to see them crash. Plus, you’ve got to love a book in which one of the main characters is an accidental bigamist who you still, somehow, like more than his brother. I suspect this will be a Booksense pick. I suppose I should nominate it (which I still have never done. Bad bookseller!)

34. The Mercy Rule: A Novel by Perri Klass (Houghton Mifflin, July 2008). Another novel that skewers deftly but with great heart. Narrator Lucy is a pediatrician who works primarily with at-risk foster children/children who are on the verge of being foster children. The book goes between her experiences as a child, her experiences at work, and her experiences out of work, which include dealing with her children’s private school, her academic husband, and figuring out her son, who is probably autistic to some extent. Some beautiful writing about parenthood and marriage. One of the things I liked best was that any number of improbable things happen in the book, but they don’t seem improbable until you start to tell people about the book. I wish this was out already, because I tried to sell it to somebody yesterday. I will definitely be giving this to a family member who is a pediatrician, but its appeal is much wider than that. It’s in the same vein as Jodi Picoult and I think will appeal to the same fans, but without all the unsolvable moral dilemmas and crying for the last third of the book.

35. The Fold: A Novel by An Na (G. P. Putnam’s Sons/Penguin Young Readers, April 2008). This is about a girl whose aunt is pretty much forcing her into getting eyelid surgery in order to have more Caucasian-looking eyes. Na does a good job of talking about all the issues that surround such a decision, especially in Joyce’s more traditional Korean family and church community. The writing felt a bit forced to me; the book is definitely more plot- than character-driven, and some of the characters feel more like stand-ins for particular points of view than people. But I liked it overall, and think it will be well-liked by teen girls as well.

36. The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It by M. Gigi Durham (Overlook, May 2008). Just read this today. I was very, very impressed by this book. Durham does an incredible job of writing intelligently and fairly about a subject that, as she notes, tends to send most people running to one of two camps: anti-sex (who think girls shouldn’t be taught about or thinking about sex at all) or pro-sex (who equate sexualization with empowerment). In addition, Durham doesn’t just neatly discuss the myths that propel the sexualization of young girls, she also provides a virtual toolbox for people who work with/parent young girls to fight back. She’s not kidding with the “what we can do about it.” I’d say a good third of the book is dedicated to specific examples at the end of each chapter of how to combat sexualization, plus a boatload of resources. As such, I’d love to get this book in the hands of every teacher, doctor, and parent in the country. Durham doesn’t want young girls to be nuns–she recognizes that all humans are sexual, and that sexual development is normal–but she does want media and corporations to stop exploiting that development for monetary gain. She also writes very compellingly about the affect that First World advertising and culture has on the sexualization of young girls across the globe, especially with regards to sexual trafficking. I really can’t recommend this one highly enough; this is the sort of book that could be a great catalyst for positive change in this country if enough people started putting into practice even a quarter of her suggestions.

And for a closer, how about this interesting article on the fate of the semicolon in France? The whole thing is interesting, but the best bits are at the end, when they report the feelings of a dozen or so authors on the semicolon.

Or at least two of Kensington’s new releases would have me believe.  But if they are to be believed, things get better as well.

31. Band Fags! by Frank Anthony Polito (Kensington, June 2008).

32. Thinking Straight by Robin Reardon (Kensington, May 2008).

I’m not quite sure how either of these are classified–they probably belong on the adult side of the store, but they have definite cross-over potential for mature teens.  Band Fags! came to the store because when I saw it in the catalog, I had to ask for a review copy based on the title alone.  And despite the fact that I was not actually alive for the period during which half of it occurs (1982-198 I still found it hilarious.  The main character spends most of the book coming to terms with being gay, and his best friend figures it out a little sooner, but they both struggle to figure out what that means, and how their lives will be.  There are a lot of exclamation points in this book, but they are used just as effectively as Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (which is to say, they’re endearing!).

Thinking Straight is a little more depressing, because it’s about a teen who is sent to one of those Christian wash-away-the-gay camps.  It felt very realistic to me, although I have no experience in that area; probably because it gave me the creeps.  However, there’s an underground of sorts at the camp that helps narrator Taylor get through it.  One of the things that I liked about the book, despite not being a Christian myself, was that Taylor is not anti-Christian or hateful towards religion.  On the contrary, a lot of the book discusses reasons why Christianity might be wrong to persecute gay people (to the point where parts read as sermons of a sort).

But the curious thing about both books, and a positive thing, I think, is that while both teens are in uncomfortable situations, I didn’t find either depressing.  Brad, in Band Fags!, spends most of the book talking himself out of thinking he’s gay, which can be hard to read.  There’s also some intense scenes in both books, especially Thinking Straight, but I didn’t close either thinking, “Man, that poor kid is going to have an awful life.”  There’s this implicit acknowledgment that even though the world at large is still mean to gay people, things are getting better, and that more and more people are supportive.  Even at a conservative Christian summer program, there are people who aren’t anti-gay–the world must be changing, according to these authors.  Which it is, and I can only hope to the extent that is seen in these two books.  To that end, even though the writing is not always spectacular in either of them, I would recommend either on the basis of attitude and content.  Like I said earlier, they’d be great cross-over books for teens in general and especially gay teens who are working things out for themselves.  And I’d love to hear how those who went to high school in the 80s feel about Band Fags! (And, for that matter, how those who have been to gay-reformation camps feel about Thinking Straight.)

30. Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee by Pamela Druckerman (The Penguin Press, 2007).

Finished this at lunch the other day. This book is just completely fascinating. I read the hardcover because it passed my desk while looking a publisher returns, but it’s just come out in paperback. Basically, Druckerman looks at how infidelity is regarded in various countries and religions. She doesn’t draw any prescriptive conclusions, in the sense that she thinks that Americans should do things differently, as though it would be possible for us to do it differently anyway. But there are a lot of great lessons, such as:

“There’s something else that we could learn from pretty much any foreign country. The American idea that a husband and wife should reveal the entire contents of their brain to each other doesn’t exist anywhere else. Doing so probably removes a necessary mystery from marriage. It might be better to have some secrets, or at least pretend that you do” (277).

The fact is, we are pretty weird and prudish compared to a lot of the world. (Interestingly, it seems that the other country that comes close to our level of prudishness is–are you ready for this?–France.) Druckerman does a great job of skewering the American obsession with knowing every last detail about an affair, having to talk it out for years, the endless pain that results, etc. Which is not to say that affairs aren’t painful and disorienting, just that maybe our psychological-industrial complex way of dealing with them isn’t the most healthy.

The writing is great and engaging; Druckerman does a great job of being in the story without taking the focus off the material. She also looks at the differences between men and women cheating in each area, which is interesting, as well as how the consequences of infidelity are different in different contexts. Anyway, whether you’ve been the guilty party, the wronged party, or neither, this is a great light non-fiction read.