The Book Shopper

MARTA Book Club #8: Summer Wilting

 

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.

What We Are Reading: Sightings of books were down since my last MARTA posting. There are two reasons for this: a.) In the summer I ride the train less because the Atlanta heat and humidity will soak my shirt before I get to work and b.) I lost one of my note cards that I use to record books. If anyone has found it an index card with scribbles on it, just add it in Comments. Here’s an abridged version of what MARTA riders are reading:

A Hand to Guide Me by Daniel Paisner 

Controlling the Tongue: Mastering the What, When, & Why of the Words You Speak by R. T. Kendall

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Body Farm (Scarpetta) by Patricia Cornwell

Hot Blooded by Lisa Jackson

The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro, Chuck Hogan, and Ron Perlman 

Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment by Steve Harvey

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Ikea Catalog by Ikea. Why not? It’s thick and a great companion book to the Steig Larsson series

The Fountainhead  by Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Take It By Force by Judy Jacobs

 

Blogs and Independent Book Stores

The Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance (SIBA) has been running a marketing campaign called the 2010 Get in Bed Blog Project that suggests book bloggers and independent bookstores join forces to form an affiliation that would benefit both. On the surface that sounds like a good idea, but as a person who has been blogging about book related topics for a couple of years (albeit obscurely) and who has written a book about perusing used bookstores (an even more obscure offering), I have a few questions:

1. Why don’t book stores just do their own blogs? Anyone who works at a bookstore must read or think about books while at work and thus should have plenty of material each week. There are some smart book people who work at bookstores and hearing what they have to say—especially about older books—is always of interest to me. Also, how hard or time consuming is it to write a 300-500 words every week? Most bloggers have a day job and do it in their free time.

 2. Why haven’t bloggers approached booksellers already? Well, we’re kind of cowards to begin with, but unless you really, really like a particular bookstore (and don’t like to sleep around with other bookstores), a blogger would be limited to one bookstore’s perspective. There could be some editorial conflict if bookstore owners want only to promote what they perceive as selling well. One advantage of being a blogger is writing what you’re most interested in.

 3. How does the reader benefit? More book reviews may be one obvious benefit to readers, but there are already plenty of them around. The problem for bloggers is that writing a thoughtful review about a new book takes a lot of time. (Note to bloggers and store owners: Rerunning promotional material from a publisher is not a review.) And what if the book is a stinker and should be avoided?  I don’t think a bookstore owner wants to support that.  Other blog material could include author interviews or insightful essays. Good ideas, but again that is a lot of work for the blogger who is probably getting paid very little, if anything.  (Indies have tight budgets and payment would be difficult.)

 I am not sure this blog posting is a good way to share my views on this subject, (I would much prefer discussing this over coffee or a beer sometime), but since SIBA brought the subject up… My intention here is not to criticize SIBA’s efforts, but to provide a little feedback for potential dialogue.

 

 

Preparing for Franzen

We’re still a month away from Jonathan Franzen’s keynote at the Decatur Book Festival, which includes a launch of his new book, Freedom: A Novel, so it’s still not too late to bone up on some of Franzen’s previous works.

Of course, there is the well-known and weighty The Corrections, which was published almost ten years ago. As you may remember, The Corrections focuses on a normal, miserable middle-class Midwestern family, the Lamberts, but broadens to include commentary about the whirlwind economic boom of the 1990s. Against the backdrop of relative prosperity, people were still psychologically impoverished, depressed, and struggling to connect to each other. I guess the relative prosperity has passed, but we’re still psychologically impoverished, depressed, and struggling to connect to each other.

Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) is a pot-boiler crime novel set in St. Louis, with political intrigue fueled by the conflicts of the different social classes in the city. It doesn’t have the style, wit and strength of voice of The Corrections, but it does have a driving plot that carries the book. (Admittedly, I haven’t read his second novel Strong Motion published in 1992.)