The Book Shopper

Change for Blog Subscribers

Dear Blog Readers:

The Book Shopper blog - now in its 10th year -- is in the process of changing how we maintain contact with our small but fiercely loyal group of readers.  There are two reasons for the change:  a.) Facebook has become tiresome for several reasons -- even though we will maintain a limited presence on that platform and b.) we are migrating from Feedburner to Feedblitz to manage subscriptions. Just a better experience for all concerned.

What this means

Not much except you may receive an email asking you to re-subscribe or if you don't receive a notification and want to make sure you continue to get a couple of book-related postings a month, just go to the link on  thebookshopper  home page (marked in the screenshot). Of course, the subscriber list is not for sale in the likely-as-an-asteroid-hitting-the-earth chance that someone would be interested in such a transaction. But don't think for a moment that we don't appreciate and value your readership.  

 

Best Books Read in 2018

"The best way to absorb the contents of the book is to copy it manually." - Jorge Carrión

Instead of focusing on the best books published in 2018, my tradition is to revisit the best books I read in 2018. To do this I pull out  a year's worth of scribbling on notecards that have been repurposed from a variety of sources. These might include promotional postcards from restaurants, travel postcards, etc.
Moreover, if I add a page number to my notes, it works as an index, does it not? Upon completion,  I either stick the card in the book for future reference or place it in a card file. 

This method looks better than using a highlighter or a pen to mark up the book and when I revisit the cards, it’s like getting a brief refresher on what I read. (The complete list of what I read, examined, skimmed and studied can be found in the right margin of The Book Shopper home page. ) I like to think of it as an eclectic list, but I did discover some shared themes. Here are some topics that emerged.  I have embedded some links to relevant earlier postings as well.  

Slow-reads. Last year, Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech (2016) by Eva Brann made the list. This year I am moseying through her earlier and similar book Open Secrets/Inward Prospects: Reflections on World and Soul (2003). This book of aphorisms ranging from travel to ethics to conduct to passion to kookiness breaks the postcard model, so I enter my favorites into a Mead bound notebook. In an ever maddening world (note my worrisome facial expression)  Brann offers a seamless mix of wisdom, humor, and philosophy.

A little less demanding but equally entertaining and thought provoking was Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016) by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, which I wrote about here. What makes this book doubly appealing is that it uses computer science as a launching point to discuss how the logic of computing can assist our human thought processes as we try to manage daily problems. 

Vietnam Books (plus). In 2017, the toughest book to read in length and just general sadness on the destruction and waste in Vietnam was Neil Sheehan’s: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), which I wrote an essay about for the Tropics of Meta blog.   This year, I followed up the experience via two books:  Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel  The Sympathizer (2016), and David Halberstam's The Longest Winter: America and the Korean War (2008).  Admittedly, I am not much of a fiction reader, but as I wrote earlier the Nguyen book is "cutting, emotional, funny and relevant." In the case of the latter, the Korean War was a precursor to the Vietnam war in some respect. The need to stop Communism (North Korea backed by China) from overrunning South Korea and threatening Japan, troops had to be sent in immediately. In Vietnam - though this was the same rationale -- the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in the beginning were more interested in ridding their homeland of colonialists (the French and the United States ) than adhering to Communist doctrine. Like all wars, there was such a waste of lives of combatants and noncombatants alike, but somehow Vietnam when compared to Korea was much worse. A complete essay about the Halberstam book appears in the Tropics of Meta blog as well.

Books about Books. Several books that I read in 2018 fall into this broad category. One of the more obvious is Jorge Carrión's Bookshops A Reader's History (2017), which received a blog shout out last month and another is Paul Fussell's  The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), which I read in part after revisiting some books about World War I in remembrance of Armistice Day. Fusssell deep dives into the literature and poetry of The Great War, which is the first major war where the combatants were somewhat educated.  And finally, an honorable mention goes Nicholson Baker's The Way the World Works: Essays (2012) which includes his musings on how he keeps track of his favorite passages using his dot method, which I am including below. (Click on the photo to improve readability)

 

 

Return from the City of Books

Despite not being in Jorge Carrión’s list of notable bookshops (see previous posting), Portland, Oregon or should I say Powell’s Books is known unto itself as the City of Books. While making our second visit to Portland, we decided ahead of time that we would at least try to go beyond the Powell’s influence and look for other book places of interest.

Denise and I did spend some time in the architecturally impressive Portland City Library. They were having their Friends of the Library holiday sale, and I had to resist picking up a replacement copy of The Sympathizer (2016).  And they had literary socks, if I wanted them. We enjoyed the Beverly Cleary Library Room – a book room that has low shelves of children’s books wonderfully displayed along with a large tree sculpture. I had forgotten that Cleary had grown up in Portland and her Ramona books, which both my daughters read vociferously, were set in Portland. Dana Lynn Louis and Barbara Eiswerth designed the sculpture for “teaching children another way of living.”

 

We also went to Oblation Papers & Press to look at stationary, vintage typewriters and their letter press printing machines.

Denise and I also stayed at the historic Heathman Hotel, which prides itself on its reading room where signed first editions from writers who have stayed there filled the shelves. Since I always travel with a copy of Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, I debated to sneak it onto the shelves, but refrained.

Inside the High-Rise at the City of Books

On the trip I brought a list of books I wanted to review firsthand. Online shopping is no substitute for browsing and I ended up purchasing several books: W.B. Sebald’s Austerlitz, (2001) which Carrión wrote about extensively in his book, a David Shields book of essays, Other People: Takes & Mistakes (2017) and Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle (1996). Shields is one of my favorite writers and reading more Beatty has been on my radar ever since I read The Sellout. I am currently reading White Boy Shuffle and it does not disappoint. You can really tell the difference in the prose when the writer began as a poet. (See the posting about Beatty and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer.)

Wisely, I did not leave my copy of Down & Outbound at the Heathman. Powell’s has a section for small presses, and I was able to chat with the curator of that section, who warily accepted a copy of D & O for evaluation. I made it as easy as possible for him, leaving him with a self-addressed, Christmas stamped postcard with a quick survey. On the back of the postcard, the curator could check all the boxes that applied:

____ I like D & O as it is and would be interested in stocking it..

____ If D & O had conventional binding I would have been interested in stocking it. 

____ I like/ appreciate D & O, the book and idea but not for Powell's

____ I don't think this book does not work for me.  

Since returning, I’ve been running out to the mailbox every day, but I wonder if it is a futile exercise considering that the Atlanta United defeated the Portland Timbers 2-0 in the Major League Soccer championship. (People in Portland were politely quizzing me about it throughout our visit.) No hard feelings, Portland. Remember you’re still a much, much better book town than Atlanta.

Postscript

UPDATE: January 19, 2019 - Much to my delight I received the aforementioned postcard from Powell's and though the curator checked the following, I do appreciate getting a response, which I interpret as either a semi-rejection or partial victory depending on my frame of mind

____ I like D & O as it is and would be interested in stocking it..

___X_ If D & O had conventional binding I would have been interested in stocking it. 

_X__ I like/ appreciate D & O, the book and idea but not for Powell's

____ I don't think this book works for me.  

 

 

Bookshops from Around the World

I recently finished reading Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History (2016), a browser's voyage of bookshops from around the world. The voyage includes a passage through time since some of the bookshops cease to exist except in the author's  memory. I am not much of a world traveler, but I have shopped in four of Carrión's favorites.  Shown above from the top: Athenaeum Amsterdam, two scenes from the book bazaar in Istanbul, two photos from Last Book Store in Los Angeles and The Strand in New York. 

To best enjoy this book (a gift from my older daughter Cynthia who lives in Germany and provided this photo adjacent Another Country in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, a used bookstore mentioned Carrión's book ) you might want to utilize a browsing (not skimming) frame of mind since it is unlikely you are familiar with many of the international writers and historical references that Carrión writes about. When this happens, just take your time and shuffle along to the next paragraph, remembering one of the author's truisms: "While orderliness tends to predominate in bookshops that sell new books, chaos reigns in second-hand shops: the disorderly accumulation of knowledge."

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Five Notable Books About The Great War

For me, World War I isn’t an event remembered once a century, it was something I grew up with since both of my grandfathers fought in The Great War. Captain Glenn R. Browne was in the 35th Division over in France and my mother’s father Sergeant Harry D. (Pete) Burtis, I believe, fought in Mexico with the 129th Infantry Co. B. (Yes, we’ve been sending troops to the border for a long time.)  Twenty years ago, I had a uniform, hat and binoculars of theirs permanently sealed in a museum-quality frame which hangs in my study. I even have a long wool coat that belong to some member of my father’s family, which is in excellent shape as well. My grandmother gave me a bound copy of The Stars and Stripes dating from February 8, 1918 to June 13, 1919. 

With my  lifelong interest in mind,  I would like to share with you five books about World War I that are amazing works of scholarship and readability:

British novelist Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, a set of three historically-based novels Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995) which covers the war’s effects in Great Britain as well as life on the battlefront. I did a short shout out to her in my book of essays, The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009), but you can get a quick sense of the books in this article from The Guardian.

Modris Ecksteins' The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989) put the war in a larger context of how it came about, explains the mindset that led to trench warfare and millions of casualties, and ultimately paved the way to the Second World War II and millions of more casualties. Here’s the original review from The New York Times and a short tribute from a 2014 blog posting. I re-read the book in preparation of a trip to Belgium.

Historian Alastair Horne’s The Price of Glory (1962) an in-depth horrific account of the Battle of Verdun. It was one of my father’s favorite books, and for years I hung on to it. I finally read it and wrote about it here in a 2016 blog posting. My biggest regret is that I never was able to discuss it with him.

Going through this list reminded me that I still haven’t read another classic on the topic, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. I’ll keep you posted.

 

Backlog #2: Words to Live By

The most noticeable outlier of my Books Read in 2018 list, which is viewable on the blog’s home page, is Brian Christian and Tom Griffith’s Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016). This book also caught my attention in the June/July Believer issue (see previous posting about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2106 novel The Sympathizer) in a dialogue between journalist Jessica Bruder and computer scientist David Blei. One of their main topics was how artificial intelligence and robots will affect the future of work. In the article Blei mentioned Algorithms to Live By as a book that is “very clear and it’s technically correct, but it’s not technical.” Relevant for me, especially since I am being asked more and more in my day job to assess auto tagging applications, which have a machine learning (artificial intelligence) component.

But what makes this book doubly appealing is that it uses computer science as a launching point to discuss how the logic of computing can assist our human thought processes as we try to manage daily problems.

Each chapter applies one of the fundamentals of computer science to day-to-day decision making. The chapters are: Optimal Stopping – When to Stop Looking; Explore/Exploit – The Latest vs the Greatest;  Sorting – Making Order; Caching – Forget about It; Scheduling – First Things First; Bayes’s Rule – Predicting the Future; Overfitting – When to Think Less; Relaxation – Let it Slide; Randomness – When to Leave it to Chance; Networking – How We Connect; and Game Theory – The Minds of Others.

Here are a few examples of relevant quotes gleaned from my notes that I keep on the backs of postcards stuffed in the book.

“Exploration in itself has value since trying new things increases our chances in finding the best…In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret…If you’re a baby, putting every object in the house in your mouth is like studiously pulling all the handles at the casino.” (Chapter 2: Explore/Exploit).  I know now that when my baby grandchildren put things in their mouth they are just doing some basic classification of the world placing all objects in two simple categories – Things I can fit in my mouth and the things I cannot fit in my mouth.

“Much as we bemoan the daily rat race, the fact that it’s a race than a fight is a key part of what sets us apart from the monkeys, the chickens--and for that matter the rats.” (Ch. 3: Sorting) Getting to and from work in Atlanta is pure rat race.

“It is really true that the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure.” (Ch. 7 Overfitting) I thought of this when I am asked to produce Key Performance Indicators (metrics) at work.

“We use the idiom of ‘dropped balls’ almost exclusively in a derogatory sense implying that the person in question was lazy, complacent, or forgetful.  But the tactical dropping of balls is a critical part of getting things done under overload. “(Ch. 10 Networking) Hmmm. An excuse worth considering next time I miss a deadline --- such as catching up on my posting backlog.

 

Backlog #1: Notes on Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Book Shopper Backlog

The last couple months I have seen the backlog of my unpublished postings really pile up. But my alibis are in order:  1.) The Cubs were in the race for the NL pennant again. This was the fourth year that the team has been relevant in October. I have been watching way too much MLB network and reading daily briefs from The Chicago Tribune, but that all came to an abrupt halt. Rockies 2 Cubs 1 in 13 innings. 2.) I’ve suffered a nasty brush with poison ivy. Not as disfiguring as others have suffered from what I hear, but its constant itchiness has messed badly with my sleep and skin. Despite a couple of steroid treatments, I do have a couple of raw patches that on sight can clear a room. 3.) General malaise from being too busy at my day job (there is no compensation in blogging). Writing is more of a habit or a practice than anything else and once you fall out of it, it takes maximum effort to get “back to the gym.”

Backlog #1

Notes on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s – The Sympathizer (2016)

The book came on my radar via Believer magazine. I have been a subscriber reading this McSweeney’s publication for over a decade and I have all the issues dating back to 2008 even though sometimes the magazine has gone on hiatus and magazine subscription management has been questionable.  McSweeney’s has  introduced me to new writers and thinkers such as Rebecca Solnit.. 

 In the June/July 2018 issue, the editors included a pullout pamphlet featuring a conversation between Paul Beatty and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Beatty is the author of The Sellout, an important satirical novel about race which I thoroughly appreciated on several levels and Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote The Sympathizer, a novel where the main character is a Viet Cong sympathizer who is embedded into South Vietnamese/American regime. Nguyen's  narrator not only gives a vivid account of leaving Vietnam during the last days before the fall of Saigon, but he also offers biting commentary on America’s attempt to sweep its defeat and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees under the rug. Both books are cutting, emotional, funny and relevant. It underscores that we have not come very far on attitudes towards immigration and assimilation in America.  Here are my indecipherable reading notes that I kept on the back of a retro Vietnamese political postcard.

 

Georgia Book & Paper Fair

The Georgia Book and Paper Fair is a few blocks away from the Decatur Book Festival, which is currently being held on Saturday, September 1st and Sunday, September 2nd. The event is located at Decatur's Ebster Recreation Center, which is air-conditioned and a welcome relief from the heat and humidity and humanity of the street fair. There were ~30 vendors from around the Southeast including some real book people that are even familiar with this blog.  (You don't meet many of those.)   I went over after doing my tour of duty as a volunteer on Saturday morning. It's one of the few places where I can wear my Thomas Pynchon-Roz Chast t-shirt.

(Click on to enlarge)

 

 At the Fair, I enjoyed catching up with Jim and Linda at Books Again, Jan and Bob at Atlanta Vintage Books, Megan and Josh from Underground Books, and Andrew at Big River Bindery. All vendors worthy of a shout out.

 

Western Immersion

Denise and I  recently returned from a 10 day swing through the National Parks of Bryce, Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon (North Rim) and Zion. In addition to the amazing scenery, hikes, raft trips, jeep rides and afternoon gin-'n-tonics, we did do some book reading and book shopping. Our audio book accompaniments included Nevada Barr's The Rope, a 2013 book set in the Glen Canyon Recreational Area and the orchestral soundtrack of the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven. provided by Denise's brother Michael. 

I brought along the classic 1993 narrative on the water problems in West, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Outside of Zion, our jeep tour guide reiterated some of the problems Reisner predicted when the population far exceeds the annual rainfall to support it.  (It's a desert, people!) I saw the book available in most national park bookstores. Since I left my copy in a motel room, I will have to pick up another copy in order to finish it.

One of the better bookstores was the  visitor center bookstore at Navaho Bridge in Marble Canyon, Arizona where a dual steel span bridge crosses the Colorado River.  Denise purchased Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone and Sky (2002) for our neighbor who watered our plants while we were gone and The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in the Age of Artificial Light (2013) by Paul Bogard.  In Page, Arizona, we picked up a copy of Gary Ladd's pictorial Lake Powell Unchained An Authorized Guide to Preposterous Lake  (2011) at the quaint John Wesley Powell Museum. In 1869, the one-armed Powell led the first "official"  expedition down the Colorado and was a visionary - albeit somewhat disregarded - who proposed regulating water rights by watersheds instead of regulating by state boundaries.  (Powell is still revered and his descendants do their family reunions on the river). 

Outside of Zion National Park in Springdale, Utah we stopped at the Worthington Gallery and picked up two books of black and white woodcuts by Royden Card. One book was The Alphabet in Woodcut  for our grandson Myrick's upcoming birthday and the other was a book of visual and verbal sketches entitled Desert Dawn (2003).

It wasn't until I arrived back home that I realized that I had left the Reisner book in the motel room.  (I can replace the book, but my reading notes on the back of a Glen Canyon Dam postcard are gone forever.) It turned out that it was a somewhat fortunate happenstance since my suitcase weighed in at the checkout counter at 48 pounds and six ounces. No doubt the lengthy Reisner book on this "heavy" subject would have pushed me over the my weight limit. 

 

Sharing the Dog Days of Summer with David Halberstam

One of my many excuses for not posting in a couple of months is that I had been writing a longer piece for Tropics of Meta, which describes itself as Historiography for the Masses. This political and thought provoking website examines popular culture and current events through an historical lens. Every August they ask readers/contributors  to revisit older books in their Dog Days Classics section. Last year, I wrote about Neil Sheehan's  A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.  

This year my offering is David Halberstam's The Longest Winter:  America and the Korean War (2008).  Writing longer pieces about certain books and how we react to them is one of the major themes of my The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009), which started this whole blog craziness almost ten years ago.  But sometimes short postings are not enough to fulfill one's need to write. It is both refreshing and taxing to do something with a little length and thought. Here's hoping that you take time to check out the piece and more importantly want to read the Halberstam book. 

Thanks to my partner Denise Casey and the editors of Tropics of Meta for making the essay presentable.