The Book Shopper

Atlanta Book Event Calendar - December

Here's a sampler of book related events for the month of December. As you can because of the holidays, it's a light month. I purposely don't put the times so you will have double check each website before heading out. All events are in Atlanta unless noted.

Tuesday, December 6. Lt. Col. Steve Russell (Retired), author of We Got Him! A Memoir of the Hunt and Capture of Saddam Hussein. Peerless Books, Alpharetta.

Tuesday, December 6. Jennie Knight, author of Feminist Mysticism and Images of God. Charis Books & More.

Wednesday, December 7. Charles Mann, author of 1493: Uncovering the New World That Columbus Created. William Carlos Museum, (shown above) Emory University. For details on this event and others visit here.

Wednesday, December 7. Scott Wallace, author of The Unconquered. Eagle Eye Books, Decatur.

Saturday, December 9. Annual Friends of the Auburn Avenue Research Library Book Sale. Details here.

Tuesday, December 13. James Robertson, author of The Untold Civil War: Exploring the Human Side of War. Carter Presidential Library & Museum. For details on this event and others at the library, visit here.

Holiday Advertorial (and Gift Guide)

One of the favorite jobs I ever had was working as an “editor” at a weekly shopper newspaper in Michigan. A shopper isn't exactly like a newspaper, but I had free editorial reign to collect any news and information I thought fit to break up the glut of ads. I also wrote feature stories for monthly senior paper with the publisher's only directive being: “Make sure there is a pretty picture on the front page.” I could write a feature story about anything I wanted: baseball, antique cars, and Lake Michigan's winter mariners. (I was inspired by the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”). Who cared if journalists scoffed at my professional credentials? I loved the creative freedom (one of the advantages of blogging).

Part of the job including writing what they called “advertorial” which is advertising that looked liked a short feature article. I'd drive around town and interview our major advertisers and write up something interesting about their establishments. The work included taking pictures.

So with this in mind, this week I want to remind readers that we do have a few sponsors (link in the upper left corner) for the blog and to revisit the writing form known as the advertorial. So I asked owners of two reputable book sellers, Books Again and A Cappella Books to give me a list of books that would make an excellent gifts for the holiday season.

My criteria was that it had to be an autographed book, moderately priced, and a book/or author that many people have heard of. I think picking a book for a person is a risky endeavor, but the autographed book is a safe and personal gift if you know a person likes a particular writer. In keeping with spirit of advertorial, the words are lifted from mouths and websites of the two owners (with permission of course). Here are their lists:

First from Books Again's Jim Adams:

Pat Conroy, My Reading Life. His latest book about the books and literary experiences that affected his life and writing. $32

Herschel Walker, Breaking Free. His personal story of living with Dissociative Identity Disorder. $20

Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence. His ninth novel, set during the Renaissance in Florence and the subcontinent of India. $20.

Jeffrey Lent, In the Fall. His outstanding debut novel set at the end of the Civil war. $15

Jeff Shaara, The Last Full Measure. Second book and sequel to his father’s classic The Killer Angels. $30.

Larry McMurtry, Some Can Whistle. Novel set in Texas, a setting that McMurtry knows all too well. $30.

Robert Stone, Outerbridge Reach. Underrated American novelist, this excellent novel pits man against the sea. $25

William Kennedy, Very Old Bones. Another greatly underrated novelist, this book once again uses Albany as the setting for the story. $25

 Carl Hiaasen, Basket Case. Another excellent example of Hiassen’s dark humor. $20

James Lee Burke, Dixie City Jam. Robicheaux is once again solving crimes in southern Louisiana. $20

From Frank Reiss at A Cappella's

Roseanne Cash, Composed. The daughter of music legend Johnny Cash, writes candidly about her upbringing, her development as an artist, and her current life. $27

David Sedaris, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary. A unique blend of hilarity and heart, this new collection of keen-eyed animal-themed tales is an utter delight. $20.

Rita Dove, Sonata Mulattica. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning poets's suite of linked poems, Dove dramatizes the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860), son of a European woman and a self-proclaimed "African prince." $25

David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries. Byrne's thoughts on world music, urban planning, fashion, architecture, cultural dislocation, and much more, all conveyed with a highly personal mixture of humor, curiosity, and humility. $26

Back To The Lighthouse

by Chantal James

For whatever reasons, we abandon novels. We leave them half-finished; we discard them after only twenty pages, we drift apart from them after the first hundred.

Often we'll never pick up where we left off. Sometimes it'll be a season or two later, sometimes a year, a few years, when the book nudges it way back into our line of sight, begging to be reconsidered.

It does not attract this time for the same reason it did long ago. You're no longer the same person as you were then, when it was on the sidewalk cart of a used book store in some city you can't remember why you were visiting, to which you never returned. Or when someone left it at your house years ago, to be shuffled along forever with the rest of your things, eventually crated away to be unpacked in the next apartment, and then the next.

I don't know how a paperback copy of Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse first ended up in my house--whether I bought it, scavenged it, borrowed it. I can't give an exact estimate as to how long it has sat among my things, how often it has been shifted from stack to stack. I finally cracked it open for the first time a year ago, and put it down after about fifteen pages. At that glance, it seemed to be about a family of rich people in England, whose dramas unfold against this human backdrop of mostly silent, mostly invisible servants. I knew it was supposed to be a classic, but I couldn’t forgive the prejudices of its time, or the privilege of its author.

But as mysteriously as we abandon them, we return.

I spotted To the Lighthouse on a shelf last week, and picked it up. Why did it single itself out in my vision? ) I won't pretend that I know what had changed in me, what opening had grown for it. I am not convinced that we ever understand why a book reaches us—how it snags us at one time, but not another, or misses altogether. Words on a page are illuminated by something inside us, or else they remain just that. In this case it was the committed decision to continue even after my heart ached, that pushed me until I had reached the final page, awed.

When it’s all told, what's not to admire in this book?

The story’s telling is so exact, and so free. We seem to be able to read every expression on the faces of the family, houseguests, staff and neighbors of Mrs. Ramsay, characters that the book captures over the course of just two days, many years apart. It reads like a meticulous drawing in pencil, lines growing darker and lighter, lines erased, then re-traced. I admired its symmetry: how the first half of it perfectly resolved, how the trip to the lighthouse, decades-delayed, becomes a triumph for characters that the years have defeated. The book broke through to me.

But I continue to wonder about all those subtleties (and they are cultural, developmental, emotional, historical, random) that tint the lens through which we regard a book, no matter how well it was written. Do books choose us? Maybe a beautiful story, beautifully told, reaches for us, hoping we can brush back its cobwebs.

Chantal James is Writer-in-Residence at A Cappella Books in Atlanta. Her previous contribution to the blog was a posting about the novelists Amitvav Ghosh and Naguib Mahfouz. (Photo credit: Chantal James)

Literary Obsession

Currently, I am reading Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Book Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession. (A book seller gave me a reviewer's copy a couple years ago as complimentary swag for doing a reading. I greedily accepted.)

The subtitle of the book kind of says it all, but the main plot of the book centers around John Charles Gilkey, a notorious book thief and the antique book seller Ken Sanders who tracks him down. It's an easy reading book and not too demanding, but the most enjoyable part is the peek into the world of book collecting. Not only are Gilkey and Sanders passionate about books (though on opposite sides of the law) but they both began their love of rare books by collecting comic books.

In the book, there is a memorable anecdote about book selling when Sanders was hosting a book signing for cartoonist Robert Crumb and environmental writer and novelist Edward Abbey. Crumb had illustrated the 10th anniversary edition of Abbey's most famous book, The Monkey Wrench Gang and the two were signing books at a promotion. Here's Sanders story:

There were Crumb and Abbey dutifully scribbling their names. One guy walks up to Crumb and says, "Mr Abbey?" And Crumb before he answers, looks at Abbey and they exchange this glance. Crumb looks back at the guy and says "Yes?" And he signs that copy of the book, 'Edward Abbey!' Then he passes it to Abbey, who signed it, 'R.Crumb!' I would kill for that copy...I'm sure to this day, that guy doesn't know of the deception. I keep praying that someday that book will wonder in here. I've been searching for that book for twenty years.

Something to look for when you are attend you next antiquarian book fair (such as the Georgia Antiquarian Booksellers Association Book Fair sale, shown above).