The Book Shopper

MARTA Book Club #7 Your Ticket to Summer Reading

 

For those unfamiliar with the group, 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 organizational rules, no t-shirts, and no special fares.  Very convenient. The only requirement to be a member of MARTA Book Club is to read a book while riding public transportation, which will become more difficult to do when the budget cuts take affect. Still, we read on!

What We Are Reading: No books from the Georgia Center for the Book List of What Georgians Should Read were sighted. Instead, here’s a list of what Atlantans are reading since my last MARTA posting on May 23rd:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Spotted two of these, which made me wonder if some college class had assigned the book.

Almost Forever: Almost Forever\For the Baby's Sake by Linda Howard and Christine Rimmer.

The Mephisto Club  by Tess Gerritsen

Clinically Oriented Anatomy by Keith L. Moore, Arthur F Dalley, and Anne MR Agur

Secrets of Power Negotiating by Roger Dawson

Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime: Stories by J. California Cooper

Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts by Hunter Lewis

Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness by Daniel G. Amen

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

To Try Men's Souls: A Novel of George Washington and the Fight for American Freedom by Newt Gingrich, William R. Forstchen, and Albert S. Hanser

Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The Bible

A Sticky Situation by Kiki Swinson

Storm Prey by John Sanford

Reckless: A Novel by Andrew Gross  

Master Your Metabolism: The 3 Diet Secrets to Naturally Balancing Your Hormones for a Hot and Healthy Body! by Jillian Michaels and Mariska van Aalst. Steamiest cover, but not worth looking up.

Gone Too Far by Angela Winters

The Soccer Book by David Goldblatt

Dead Sleep by Greg Iles

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. This is my contribution to the book club this month. Solnit gives a cultural history of walking mixed in withher personal experiences. Great book for those who don’t believe so much in the Allure of the Automobile.  I picked it up when I was in Boston last month. I’m also finishing up Peace Like a River by Leif Enger.

Blue Elephant Book Shop

 

As someone who enjoys shopping for books, I certainly like the new location and layout of Blue Elephant Book Shop, which as moved from the busy intersection at Claremont and North Decatur to downtown Decatur near Dancing Goats Coffee Bar.  Even though previously  it was just across an intersection from Eagle’s Eye, you would risk your life walking from one bookstore to the other.

  Bookstores seem like a natural fit for re-purposed houses (like Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas or Atlanta Book Exchange on Highland) as each room can host a different genre of books (contemporary fiction, history, local interest books and children’s books). Even though I would order an occasional book, or stop by to grab something as a quick gift at the old Blue Elephant location, it always seemed too wide open for the intimate activity of browsing.

Baptist Church Book Sale

This week Denise and I experienced for the first time the book sale on the front lawn at the First Baptist Church in Decatur, which is just a fraction of their huge legendary yard sale that ended Saturday.  

Earlier in the week—in the quiet cemetery-like surroundings—we scouted out the thousands of book offerings. You can easily imagine what was there—the usual books that are laid to rest: War and Peace, The Thorn Birds, The DaVinci Code, Rhett Butler’s People, Pat Conroy books, The Magic of Sex (?), and a complete hardback set of Louis L’Amour westerns.

Denise went back for the opening ceremonies on Thursday and not only picked up some Sunshine Biscuit tins (reliving the fresh baked goodness of her youth), but she brought home some great hardbacks for our library: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx, and a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s essays, How to Be Alone. Franzen is headlining the Decatur Book Festival on Labor Day weekend, so I am stockpiling inventory.

Thomas Chatterton Williams Meets Killer Mike

 

It’s not often do go to a reading and a Grammy-award winner makes a guest appearance, but on June 1 at the Decatur Public Library, Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture ended up sharing some of the spotlight with Killer Mike  (aka Mike Bigga), an award-winning rapper who is based in Atlanta.

The well attended reading of approximately sixty people got a little more than just Williams reading his book, which is a personal account of the author reconciling a double life of “keeping it real,” which meant playing hoops and not appearing to be successful in school and his parallel journey to be a learned man – the  result of a determined father who oversaw his son’s education. Losing My Cool began as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that Williams wrote in 2007 as a graduate student at New York University.

After the mild-mannered Williams finished the reading, (the less mild-mannered) Killer Mike–who sat in the front row–introduced himself during the question and answer session and almost commandeered the reading.  (Williams who was familiar with the rap star’s music skillfully prevented the takeover.)  For several minutes, the two men debated articulately about the use of the phrase “hip-hop culture” in the subtitle of the book. Killer Mike felt that it was “disingenuous” for Williams to use “hip-hop culture” in a negative connotation that ignored the poetic, intellectual and social roots of the music form, which originated in the South Bronx  around 1977.  Williams admitted he didn’t necessarily embrace the subtitle of his book, but defended using “hip-hop culture” because black culture and hip-hop are usually (though erroneously) perceived as being the same. Williams believes that while “Black street culture is authentic, it should not be the end all and be all,” noting that blacks should be familiar with the works of Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, to name but a few.