The Book Shopper

Prepping for Ireland

In anticipation of a trip to Ireland next month, I have been trying to familiarize myself with the Emerald Isle, which admittedly is a near foolhardy task given the magnitude of the rich Irish literary traditions.

With the help of our private book group (the GRSG) I was able to read at least one of the books of the Irish canon – James Joyce’s Dubliners, his collection of short stories that was published in 1914. This was my first experience with Joyce and with this help of the James Joyce's Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations (1993) edited by John Wyse Jackson & Bernard McGinley (shown above), I was able to get a sense of the complexity of Joyce’s work and definitely an indoctrination into life in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century.

Joyce wrote the book after he had left Dublin in 1905 and our notes about the book include a review of the 1987 John Huston movie based on the final story of the collection The Dead. It was Huston’s last film and it stars his daughter Anjelica Huston.

Some in our group prefer Joyce’s Portrait of Artist a Young Man or Ulysses (no one favors Finnegan’s Wake), but I will have to take their word for it.

Literary Tours

Other preparation included Zoom tours of the W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) exhibits that are done through the National Library of Ireland.  Admittedly, I knew very little about these two Nobel Prize winning Irish poets, but one important takeaway is how the poetry of each man captured the political upheaval in Ireland at the time. Yeats' poem Easter, 1916, commemorating the uprising led by Irish nationalists for independence of Ireland and Heaney during the more recent violence in Northern Ireland.

I know this preparation sounds paltry, (watching The Banshees of Inisherin and three seasons of Derry Girls doesn’t count) but usually after these kind of trips with my longtime partner Denise, the education continues long past after we return stateside. I am taking Colum McCann’s Transatlantic with me.  A tour of the Book of Kells is planned but there are many bookshops in Dublin as well and I intend to perform my book shopping duties.

A Liam Neeson Coincidence

While researching for this piece I stumbled on to a clip of Neeson reading Yeats' Easter, 1916.

The versatile Neeson also appears in Season 3 trailer for Derry Girls

 

Berlin Book Shopping Revisited

This month I returned to Berlin to see my older daughter Cynthia, which always includes some book shopping. Last time we visited the Another Country Book in the Kreuzberg district (during my 2019 European book shopping tour) and this time it was the Hopscotch in the Tiergarten district of Berlin. Both have plenty of English language offerings.

It took a little hunting to find Hopscotch which lies inside a large courtyard with no street signage.  Inside is a small shop, but it is crammed full of all kinds of books and smaller publications.  It would have been an ideal outlet for my earlier works, The Book Shopper and the quirkier Down and Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, but alas, I had no copies with me. 

We spent nearly an hour there. Cynthia replaced her copy of Walter Benjamin's voluminous The Arcades Project and she recommended Saidya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), which I purchased and started reading while I was in Germany.

(For the record, my "in country" books for the trip were:  Philip Kerr's' The Pale Criminal (1990) the second novel of his Berlin noir trilogy set on the eve of Kristallnacht 1938 and W.G. Sebald's Vertigo also published in 1990.) 

 

 

The Force Is Always With You

What do binder clips, ballpoint pens, tape measures, can openers and large bridges (like the Navajo Bridge in northern Arizona) have in common? They are all part of the invisible world of forces that impact our daily lives, and they are discussed in Henry Petroski's Force: What It Means to Push and Pull, Slip and Grip, Start and Stop (2022).

Force examines a host of scientific, physical, and mathematical topics without burying us in technical jargon. Petrosky mixes anecdotes about his life extending back to his childhood playing with the Tricky Dog dog magnet (Chapter 2 - Magnetism) or in Chapter 13 when he reminisces about watching a clerk in a bakery slice a loaf of bread and then flawlessly place it inside a plastic bag (pg. 164). He writes:

"The clearance between the contents and container appeared to be as tight as a piston in a cylinder. She left the bag open, lest the fresh bread be crushed in the course of closing it. She did not have to be so careful with a loaf of rye bread because its crust gave it both stiffness and strength to resist. Watching the whole seamless process and imagining the forces involved was to me the greatest thing since sliced bread itself."

Reading Force will change how one looks at some of the simplest objects like the binder clip and ballpoint pen (Chapter 12 - Stretching and Squeezing), the can opener (Chapter 6, - Lever, Lever, Cantilever), and the tape measure (Chapter 14 - Deployable Structures). You will even feel a little better about yourself when you learn that your fingerprints wear thinner and lose some of their tactile qualities, which explains why I drop more objects (like pens, clips, and tape measures) than I used to. 

This doesn't mean that Petrosky doesn't tackle bigger engineering feats like bridges, arches and domes, and obelisks. As he describes the reasons behind famous bridge collapses you may be thankful that bridge repair is part of the Federal infrastructure plan. 

 

Book Art on Broadway

Earlier this month I visited the newly opened Museum of Broadway in the theatre district of New York City. Included in the many exhibits of history and artifacts on Broadway, was this book art from the musical Show Boat. Premiering in 1927, with music composed by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II (based on the novel by Edna Ferber), the musical is considered to "have both embodied and propelled the broad advancement being made in musical storytelling in the late 1920s." 

To commemorate its importance of Show Boat an entire room is dedicated to the production. American artist Rachel Marks' installation includes a flowing scattering of pages from the novel, music and lyrics wallpaper, and a slice of tree trunk with each paper ring representing a year since its debut.

Friendly Book Shopping

Volunteering at the Friends of the Decatur Library Book Sale earlier this month provided me the rare opportunity to wear my vintage 2008 Decatur Book Festival shirt. I also did some book browsing while tasked of keeping the tables of books in order (e.g., moving Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from the toxic masculinity section back to Classics).  

Amongst the book tables—bibliophiles scouted for that rare find, voracious readers interested in quantity as much as quality filled shopping bags, and parents stocked up for their pre-school children. I especially enjoyed seeing youngsters sprawled on the sales floor absorbed in a colorful book, oblivious to the whirlwind around them.

After the initial onslaught things slowed down and I was able to browse for myself. Even though I haven't done much large venue book shopping in a few years (I still wore my mask), I only brought a couple books home. Most notable was a 50-cent copy of Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, which we are reading in our book group duo. The extra copy allows me to mark passages for discussion.

The next Friends of the Decatur Library Sale will be the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, May 27th. In the meantime, you can donate your gently used books at the front desk of the Decatur Library. Take it from me, these books will get a thorough and appreciative examination and the money raised during the sale goes to support the library.

 

Filling the Sports Void

Let's face it we're sick of football. College basketball really doesn't start until March; pro basketball until mid-April. As for my favorite sport baseball, I refuse to fill up on empty Spring Training calories before Opening Day. This leaves a big sports void in the month of February and I usually fill it with a good baseball book, but this year things worked out a little differently. By consensus our two-person book group, selected a sports/history book to kickoff 2023—David Maraniss’s  Path Lit by Lightning: The Story of Jim Thorpe (2022).

If you are like me, you were probably familiar with the Thorpe name as some great athlete who played sports early in the 20th Century, residing in the black-and-white team photograph corner of your mind.  Reading Maraniss’s detailed biography of Thorpe’s life changed all that. I can now pick Thorpe out of this picture of the Carlisle Indians football team (middle row, third from the right).

Football Days

Thorpe was born in 1887 on a Sac and Fox reservation near Prague Oklahoma, twenty years before Oklahoma became a state. When he was 17, Thorpe was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and ended up playing football for the legendary (albeit somewhat undeserving) Pop Warner in 1907 (top row, wearing a suit). In the early days of football, Carlisle, though it was not a college, played many of the college power houses of the time: Army, Penn, Harvard and Pitt. In 1912 they finished with a 9-1-1 record including an historically significant victory against Army (the pre-game pep talk where Warner reminded his team what the U.S. Army had done to their ancestors). In the game Thorpe was knocked cold by future president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Since there was no such thing as concussion protocol then, Thorpe later returned to the game.  

At Carlisle, Thorpe was also introduced to track and field, which matched well with his overall athleticism. By today’s standards he was not that big —about 175-185 pounds, but he was all muscle, speed, toughness, and agility. Thorpe represented America in the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm where he won two gold medals. (Maraniss points out that ironically, even though Thorpe was a Native American he had to sign a form that he was an American before competing.)   Sadly, within a year he was stripped of those medals because he had been paid as a professional minor league baseball player. Later Thorpe played 269 games in six seasons at the major league level, mostly for the New York Giants, but this clip from Total Baseball confirms that he had trouble hitting the curveball.

Thorpe was prominent in the early history of professional football along with the likes of Red Grange and George Halas. He was the league's first president, though mostly because of his athletic fame.

More than Sports

Although the first half of the Path Lit is about the early days of the Olympics, football and some baseball, the book is also about the politics and policies of assimilation, racism towards Native Americans, and several chapters on life in Hollywood in late 40s and early 50s. In 1951, Burt Lancaster starred in a movie made about Thorpe's life.  Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame directed it. 

But Thorpe had many troubles. Maraniss summarizes them all: "his struggles with alcohol, his nomadic lifestyle, his Sisyphean cycle of finding and losing jobs, his bad luck and mistreatment, his [three] dysfunctional marriages, his time away from his sons and daughters when they were young.” However, despite their difficult upbringings Thorpe's children grew up to become military officers, government workers, college graduates, and Native American activists. 

Maraniss is evenhanded in his biography neither completely blaming Thorpe or the white-dominated society for Thorpes woes nor completely absolving either of them.  It's complicated and that is one of the strengths of the book is Maraniss has taken great effort to put the athlete's life in historical context. (It's one of the weaknesses too -- sometime too much detail.). Perhaps Thorpe summed up his own life best when he said after having his medals unjustly taken away, "Once I had made up my mind to face the world with the truth, I was no longer worried about the matter. I adopted a fatalistic viewpoint and considered the episode just another event on the red man's life of ups and downs.'

Jim Thorpe died in a trailer park in California from a heart attack in 1953, but the news traveled around the world as fast as communications would allow. After all, just a few years earlier in 1950, sportswriters from the Associated Press voted him by a wide margin the Greatest Athlete in the first half of the 20th century, 

Thorpe had quite a sports career and a life, which provided Maraniss with more than enough material to fill my reading off- season.

 

Mushroom Anthropology Notes

On The Book Shopper's companion blog there is my brief review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). It is entitled "Mushroom Induced Reading." 

Or you can take a peek at my reading notes (which are kind of like an index). Click on image of the notes if you wish to enlarge the "fine" print. 

Guest Posting: Anais Nin and Henry Miller

Preface: This posting comes from my longtime friend Dave Dintenfass who lives in Seattle. Our friendship dates back to 1979 while I was training to be a board operator at public radio station WILL in Champaign-Urbana Illinois. Dave was a student who was assigned to train me on the night and weekend shifts. (One advantage of those late hours is that I was paid to read while listening to classical music.) 

Dave has influenced my writing, my taste in books and my passion for book shopping throughout the decades. He offered to share his recent thoughts on revisiting Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. It reminds me of the kind of conversations we have had about books.  Dave writes:

I finished Anaïs Nin: A Biography by Diedre Bair (Penguin Books, 1995). This was a borrow from one of the ubiquitous Free Little Library kiosks here in Seattle.

A bit of a slog given its length but very well written and comprehensive in the way that most biographies are not. Of course, there was the benefit of access to the famous diaries so documenting the life of perhaps one of the most outrageously narcissistic literary figures wasn't quite the challenge that you might assume. Or perhaps the challenge here was not for lack of research material but rather for an overwhelmingly generous supply of it. Accordingly, a comprehensive biography like this is not small. Did I mention the book is nearly 700 pages?

I felt Ms. Bair really tried to remain neutral about her subject despite meticulous evidence of just how unpleasant Anaïs Nin was. We are examining the life here of a spoiled, manipulative, monumentally self-absorbed woman—a pathological liar and completely ungenerous person who was clearly morally untethered in just about every regard. Anaïs Nin was clearly her own worst enemy but to her credit, she was not afraid to detail it all in her infamous diaries.

Like most of us, I only knew of her work by association with Henry Miller (which actually was only a very brief time in the Paris of the early 1930s) and some of the works only available posthumously (including The Delta of Venus). I did check out some of her short fiction published during her lifetime (from archive.org) and I have to say, while these short pieces were beautifully written, they lack any sort of compelling story, and they seem actually rather shallow and utterly bereft of any humanity. But then I feel the same way about Lawrence Durrell's fiction—it remains a mystery to me why it is so highly praised; I find it incomprehensible. But Your Mileage May Vary. 

All this encouraged me to re-read Tropic of Cancer as it's been many years since I read any Henry Miller. I could say this 1934 novel hasn't held up but after reading it again 45 years later, it's clear to me it didn't hold up the first time I read it. Notwithstanding the long interval between readings, I vividly recall that my youthful impression was the same as now. Despite occasional flashes of dark humor and playful narrative, the book is much too long (over 300 pages in the Castle Books reprint of the famous 1961 Grove edition) and even more rambling and unfocused than The Great White Whale of my literary interest, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. (I'm not suggesting here any other equivalence between these two works, just that the Bellow book captivated my interest for years until I had the misfortune to finally read the thing from end-to-end with great disappointment.)

If Miller had boiled it down to 30 or 40 of the best pages, it might be viewed today as a compelling (though youthfully immature) riff on impoverished bohemian aimlessness in depression-era Paris. Curiously, it's when the narrator leaves Paris near the end of the novel (to teach English at a parochial school in Dijon) that some of the most focused and insightful writing emerges. In fact, I would suggest the last 50 pages of the book are probably its best.

I might revisit Miller’s other infamous early work, Tropic of Capricorn, written a few years after Cancer. When I last read it 45 years ago, I recalled it was a much better book. I’m not so sure now but it’s worth a go.

 Thanks, Dave, for thinking of the blog and recommending to me which books to read and avoid.

Best Books Read 2022

Unlike lists of the past years (Best Books Read 2017-2022), this year’s offerings concentrate on little books – the in-between-ers, the interstitials. These books are like Wordles between the Sunday crossword puzzles. In my book group-duo The Gravity’s Rainbow Support Group, we have read some colossuses this year and they have been quite good, but sometimes they make my head hurt (Laurence Stern’s Tristam Shandy comes to mind). So don't you agree it is equally important to read a “breather” once in a while?

The Best Books Read 2022 edition have provided quality respite and they deserve some kind of honorable mention. They – in the order they were read – are:

Josef Škvorecký, Two Novellas* (1977 - 208 pages). When I went to the former East Germany near the Czech border last, it reminded me of this writer Škvorecký  who left Czechoslovakia and resettled in Toronto. The three pieces in this book, the Preface on Red Music, and the two novellas Emöke and The Bass Saxophone were all good reads. The latter demonstrates how art (jazz music) became a "resistance" in the face of authoritarian regimes like the Nazis in World War II followed by the Soviet occupation afterwards.

Lee Smith, Blue Marlin: A Novella* (2020 - 136 pages). My longtime partner Denise has always admired Lee Smith (especially her novel Fair and Tender Ladies) and she convinced me to read the book. In a tight, elegiac story, the narrator, a thirteen-year-old girl reflects on a trip to Florida she makes with her parents – who are struggling with their marriage. They are on vacation in Key West, staying at the Blue Marlin Motel. Their trip coincides with the filming of the 1959 movie "Operation Petticoat" starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. The girl and the mother even became extras in the movie. (Smith calls the book autobiographical fiction, with an emphasis on fiction.)

Hilary Mantel, Learning to Talk* (2022 - 176 pages). I read this collection of stories about her growing up in Ireland in the 1950s just before Mantel died. Mantel’s very precise and understated emotional writing is powerful. You can see why she went on to win all those Booker Prizes. (I may have not read her most well-known work Wolf Hall, but I did watch the five-part series starring Mark Ryland, Claire Foy and Damian Lewis. The novel was set the time of Henry the VIII and Thomas Cromwell – when the British royalty played for keeps.)

Percival Everett, I Am Not Sidney Poiter (2009 - 272 pages). Speaking of Tony Curtis, he “appears” in Everett’s novel about a black man who resembles Sidney Poiter, but his mother gives the birth name of I Am Not Sidney Poiter. Everett mixes the plot of various Poiter movies into the short novel, including "Lillies of the Field", "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner" (with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy), "Buck and the Preacher" (with Harry Belafonte) and of course, "The Defiant Ones"starring Tony Curtis.

Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game (1963 -126 pages). A fellow bookseller gave me this tattered copy of the history of the inaugural 1962 season of the New York Mets “led” by Marvelous Marvin Throneberry and their future Hall of Famer manager Casey Stengel.  Breslin’s had a long, often controversial career as a New York journalist and columnist.  In this excerpt, the Giants superstar Willie Mays gets in a fight with Met second baseman after a hard slide at the bag, which escalates into a fracas. Breslin writes:

"[ San Francisco first baseman Orlando] Cepeda promptly charged [Met pitcher] Roger Craig throwing punches. For baseball players, who can’t fight even a little bit, it turned into a pretty good show. Much throwing of batting helmets and charging from the bench and the like. Stengel who knows that baseball players look like girls when they try to fight, remained on the bench. It was bad enough people called him an old man. He sure as hell wasn’t going out and let people say he looked like an old lady."

I realize this is not your normal Best of List, curated to impress, but you can read anyone of these books in just a few hours. Doesn't that count for something?

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* available on the Destination: Books Best of the Bookshopper online store.

Best Buys

As many as you may know, when I am not shopping for books, I am selling books. It is a blurry line because I often shop for books to sell. Sometimes what I read is determined by what I am interested in carrying for my popup book operation Destination: Books, but I can say that I never read a book that I don't want to read. Life is too short to do that and there is just so much other good material and writers out there that I'd rather seek out.

Even though Destination: Books is a popup and online bookshop and not a bricks-and-mortar store, it is still an independent bookseller and a member of the American Bookseller Association. D:B is an affiliate and a beneficiary of the Bookshop.org program. (Bookshop.org is a collaboration between the ABA and the book wholesaler Ingram.)

For every new book purchased through the bookshop.org portal, money eventually is shared to hundreds of independent bookstore affiliates. If you purchase any new book through my specific Destination: Books portal, the store receives an additional commission. 

Check out our Destination: Books bookshopper-themed portal. It lists some of the books I have written about in the bookshopper blog or ones we have recently enjoyed.   Furthermore Bookshop.org is offering free shipping on book orders until Monday midnight, November 28, 2022.

Thanks for your support of independent reading and thinking.