The Book Shopper

MARTA Book Club #27: Acceptance Speech

  

Since the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority  (MARTA) Book Club is a finalist for the Georgia Commute Options' Road Warrior of the Year award it seems only appropriate as its founder that I post something to acknowledge its nomination.  Little did I know when I began the club in 2009 as a spoof on book clubs in general that it would rise to any level of recognition.

I plan on being at the award ceremony on the behalf of the club on April 29th, but I think the chances of winning are highly unlikely. Even though Vegas has the odds at 500 to 1, why not prepare an acceptance speech just in case?

The Short Speech

The MARTA Book Club, which is open to anyone who reads a book while riding public transportation, has served two main purposes.  The 27 postings which lists all the books I have seen people read over the years (I call it "bookspotting") reflects the makeup of those who ride whether they read Bibles, romance novels,  textbooks or the occasional outlier such as Plato's The Republic. 

The second purpose is more personal.  I have used the book club to comment and sometimes rant on the MARTA experience and policies -- whether it was complaining about rate hikes, changes in service, or satirizing the Code of Conduct.  Coincidentally (or maybe it did a little good),  MARTA has improved over the six years and ~10,000 miles I have been riding, although it still does have its bad days. What is a bigger problem is the safety of those on foot and bikes. Being a pedestrian crossing the 10th Street  bridge from the Midtown Station has the danger equivalence of rock climbing.

But the MARTA Book Club turned out to only be the beginning. As a writer and a rider, I began to use my experiences and observations of commuter life as an inspiration to write stories, which I am putting together in a book entitled Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire, which will be published sometime this year. 

So as you can see, my relationship with MARTA is more than as a daily commuter or even a -- shall I dare hope -- a Road Warrior. It has influenced me also, not only by the books I read riding to work but by the ways in which it connects me to this city. 

Why MARTA, you sound like you're my muse.

 

 

What We Are Reading

Here's a list of books being read since the last posting. If you are interested in visiting all the MARTA Book Club postings, go here. 

The Fall: Book Two of the Strain Trilogy by Guillermo Del Toro

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole

Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II by Belton Cooper and Stephen Ambrose

Double Cross by James Patterson

Sonography: Introduction to Normal Structure and Function (textbook)

The Master and Margarita by MiKail Bulgakov and Diane Burgin

Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk: The Turning Point of World War II by Dennis Showalter

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon

 Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

 Tears of a Tiger by Sharon Draper

 Undercover User Experience Design (Voices that Matter) by Cennydd Bowles and James Box

Borderlands LA Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua

The Republic by Plato

NYPD Red 2 by James Patterson and Marshall Karp

The Alchemist by Paula Coelho

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Meant to Be by Lauren Morrill

Nine Days by Fred Hiatt

 

 Next Assignment

Keep reading, get to work on time, and watch for puddles on the platform.

 

 

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Historical Atlas on Display

For those of you who either a.) appreciate old books, b.) like maps,  c.) relish fine printing, or d) all of the above, make an effort to see the Joan Blaeu's Grooten Atlas, first published in the Netherlands in 1662-1665.

The Grooten Atlas along with framed prints are currently on display at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking on the campus of Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. Here's the press release from the Museum:

"Georgia Tech’s Price Gilbert Memorial Library and the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking proudly exhibit Joan Blaeu’s Grooten Atlas from February 27 to June 26, 2015.  Also called the Atlas major, the atlas was published in Amsterdam between 1662-1665.  Blaeu’s nine volume atlas remains the foremost European Atlas published in the seventeenth century.  These works are familiar to some faculty and students, but the larger community has been unaware that Georgia Tech has these treasures in the rare book collection.  This particular edition is one of the few remaining hand-colored, gold-embossed deluxe editions of the Atlas, bound in Moroccan leather.  Original volumes of the Atlas will be on exhibit along with reproductions of select maps from the collection. 

Exhibited maps include European views of Africa, the Americas and Asia, depicting important trade routes and ports.  Detailed views of European cities and countries provide insight into a continent developing the geopolitical regions known today.  The Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking map of Virginia and Florida will also be featured in the exhibit.                 

Explore how the Grooten Atlas came to be produced in 1660s Amsterdam, the culmination of years of research, the development of papermaking and printmaking, and the establishment of the art of map making.  Joan Blaeu, a second-generation mapmaker, celebrates the work of Tycho Brahe, mentor to Blaeu’s father. Brahe’s study of astronomy and contributions to celestial navigation provide a solid foundation to the development of the Atlases.                  

Considered together, the Blaeu’s Grooten Atlas provides important examples of evolving cartographic technologies and rich material exploring the idea of Europe after the Thirty Years War."

Be mindful of the hours since the museum keeps more "business hours" 9-5, Monday to Friday.  But there is free, easy access parking in front of the museum on 10th Street, which is important if you ever tried to park near there.  Admission is free but the museum appreciates  donations. Here's a few more marginal photos of the exhibit that should not preempt you from attending.

One of the Many Walls of Maps

 

Tools of Cartography

 

Prepping for the Cubs Opening Day with Books

As a longtime Cub fan dating back to the Ernie Banks days*, I am often asked about my tormented relationship with the Cubs. On the precipice of the 2015 season it is a little different. Some baseball prognosticators actually think that the Cubs will make the playoffs this year with their abundance of young (unproven) talent. I think .500 ball is a more realistic outcome and this is fortified by some of my recent off-season readings, which included three books about the Cubs.

This winter I received Jimmy Greenfield's 100 Things a Cub Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die (2012), which I appropriated as a nightly bedtime story before turning off the light. In one and two page snippets, Greenfield mixes Cub history, lore, and brief bios of famous players. Some players were known for their athletic ability (Ryne Sandberg, Billy Williams and Hack Wilson) and others for their nicknames (Dave “King Kong” Kingman, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams). I know quite a bit about the Cubs, but not everything. For example, I didn't know before Wrigley Field, that the Cubs played at the West Side Grounds between 1893 and 1915. Legend has it that the expression “way out in left field” originated at this site, because of the ballpark's left field proximity to a psychiatric ward. “As the story goes,” writes Greenfield, “ players patrolling left field could overhear patients in the ward. And so the term 'way out in left field' came to mean someone questioning your sanity.”

Greenfield references many books about the Cubs including others in my library: Wrigleyville: A Magical Historical Tour of the Chicago Cubs (1996) by Peter Golenbock and Rick Talley's The Cubs of `69: Recollections of the Team That Should Have Been (1989).

I revisited both books this winter upon the passing of Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks. I liked Ernie who was on the downside of his career when I was youth, so I don't remember his National League MVP years of 1958 and 1959 and didn't realize that he was the first African-American to play for the Cubs. However, if you re-read Talley's book you realize that there was much more to Ernie than unbridled “let's play two” optimism. Even Ernie had a hard time saying good things about Cubs manager Leo Durocher who managed the Cubs during their greatest collapse (attributed mostly to Durocher playing his starters into the ground) in the summer of 1969.

I certainly remember the Cubs debacle of 1969 and it was my moment when a Cubs fan earns his or Cubby Bear stripes (my younger daughter earned hers in the 2003 Bartman game where the Cubs were five outs away from the World Series). That's what it means to be a Cubs fan – to have tremendous optimism and hope and then have it crushed like so many paper beer cups in the bleachers, paraphrasing folk singer-song writer Steve Goodman, who wrote the Cub National Anthem, A Dying Cub's Fan Last Request in 1981. (See Goodman perform it here on top a  left field rooftop before all the modernization.)

Envisioning playoff victories for the 2015 team before the first pitch of the season is a sure recipe for disappointment, and thus my prediction is simply that more Cubs fans will be likely being coming into the fold with heartaches, not celebration hangovers.

* This photo comes from a family trip in 2001. It includes my sister, daughter, niece and nephew. The Cubs lost to the Pirates that day. My first Cub game was sometime in the mid-60s when my Uncle Bill took me to a Cubs double-header. Banks hit two home runs that day.