The Book Shopper

10 Time Saving Tips for the Holidays

The pressure to get all the book shopping, wrapping, cooking and entertaining done over the holidays is tremendous. Try these time savers to relieve some of that yuletide anxiety:

1. Place gifts in boxes and then spray paint them instead of wrap them. Be sure and avoid an open flame, i.e., fireplace, candle.

2. Look for discarded end-of-the-year newsletter near the office copier or in the recycle bin at your neighborhood copy center. This can easily be repurposed as your own communiqué. Don’t worry if your annual yuletide biography doesn’t match up. No one reads them that close anyway.
   

3. Shorten holiday cooking time, by foregoing constant washing of your hands while preparing the feast. Take enough shortcuts and it’s doubtful you’ll be asked to host next year’s celebration.

4. In gift exchange settings, instead of choosing names for gifts, chose a single place where ALL the gifts must be purchased. Make it more creative (and easier) by limiting the designated retailer to the neighborhood convenience store or perhaps, a hospital gift shop.

5. Before watching a holiday movie, fast forward it to the dénouement. For example, in It’s a Wonderful(ly Dull) Life began watching at the point where George Baxter (Jimmy Stewart) receives  the best Christmas gift ever – lots of tax free cash.

Eighth Day: A Book Store Worth Visiting

 

 
Last month when I was in Wichita, Kansas to visit my book friend Bruce Woods and do a little self promotion, Bruce set up a lunch with Warren Farha, the owner of Eighth Day Books.  

 

For twenty years, Farha has been in the business of selling books. His store, a converted three story house, holds about 40,000 books specializing in the timeless classics in religion, philosophy, history and literature. It is one most impressive book stores I’ve browsed through in a long time.  Fortunately, you don’t have to visit the store to get a sense of Farha’s vision.  The store’s 170 page catalog describing over 1200 books provides a well-rounded education in itself, as each listed book has a long paragraph that captures the essence and importance of the book.

 

What strikes me as much as Farha’s thoughtful passion for books that refresh the soul (and his resemblance to the actor Richard Gere) is the underlying hardworking business ethic that he learned from working in the family grocery business. He understands the daily rituals required for successful retail sales, which includes in his case, gleaning book ideas from customers (on my suggestion, he ordered a copy of Andres Kertesz book, On Reading for his store). Several times a year he takes his offerings on the road to strategic conferences and book fairs. As we ate lunch, he would talk without fear about the new paradigms of book selling.  He understands that selling books online (whether it be through Amazon or his own website) is a trend that is not going away.

 

WVIK & The Book Shopper

This weekend NPR affiliate WVIK (from the campus of Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois) broadcast an interview with me for their About Books radio program. Listen here. During the course of the interview, I did some shout outs for several local Atlanta area new/used book stores, so if book shoppers from the Quad Cities wander into A Cappella or Eagle Eye in the next few weeks, those booksellers will know who to thank.

Join the MARTA Book Club

The MARTA Book Club is a loose, very loose, confederation of people who read while riding the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority’s public transportation.  There are no meeting times, no organization, no t-shirts, and no special fares.  Very convenient. The only requirement to be a member of the MARTA Book Club is to read a book while riding public transportation. Newspapers do not qualify.

What We Are Reading: Of course, we have no way of knowing what EVERYONE is reading, but here’s a sample observed over the last month:

The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown (3 spottings). Not unexpected since advertisements are all over Kroger shopping kiosks.

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. The book’s premise is 50 different writers writing about 50 different states. Impressive since it is such a thick book to carry around.

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. Published in 1978, it was on the bestseller list for about a gazillion years. (Perhaps mistaken for a travel guide.)

Two Local Readings: Rita Mae Brown and Padgett Powell

 

Last week I attended two readings:  Rita Mae Brown at the Margaret Mitchell House on October 27^th, and Padgett Powell two days later at the Decatur Public Library.

Part One: Rita Mae Brown

 I’m still mad at myself for not asking Rita Mae Brown my stock-in-trade question about Southern books, which goes something like this: “If William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor are the twin pillars of Southern literature, where does that leave Margaret Mitchell?”

It’s not an unfair question for Ms. Brown who offered some strong opinions about literature in her 1988 book, Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual. Ms. Brown, who was promoting her new book, Animal Magnetism My Life with Creatures Great and Small (Move over James Herriot) spoke to an older crowd of approximately 50 pet lovers, who were content to ask questions like “How do you name your pets and do you ever eat them?” (Actually the latter question was framed more like: “Are you a vegetarian?”)

The energetic, self-winding Ms. Brown (I should have used a high speed film to capture the movement of her hands) riffed on an array of subjects: Growing up in the South, the sophisticated forms of communication between animals (when dogs wag their tails that’s good; when cats curl their tails that’s bad), the broken contract between humans and domesticated animals (millions of pets are euthanized each year), 10,000 years of patriarchy that define human history (men’s efforts to control female sexuality),  and the how we’ve become more intolerant because we don’t ride the bus and mingle with other people. (I take the train, but I keep to myself.)  It’s pretty safe to say there was no discernable thread to all of Ms. Brown’s observations, (not to say she isn’t observant and witty).  I don’t think it mattered to the majority of attendees who paid for the opportunity to join the stampede at the book signing table afterwards for a brief chat with an author either about pets or perhaps to express their continued appreciation of Ms. Brown’s most influential book, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973).  

 Part Two: Padgett Powell 

Like Rita Mae Brown, Padgett Powell goes all over the place, except with Powell he was reading from his new “experimental” novel The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? – a 170+ page book written entirely as a series of seemingly unrelated questions. Of course to the uninitiated like myself, (admittedly unfamiliar with his work) what may seem random and disjointed at first, may upon further investigation reveal a theme or pattern to this work. (My unasked question to Mr. Powell was: How should a reader approach this book?)