Tree Book Shelf

These bookshelf trees (yes, there is more than one design – apparently this is a trend that’s been around a little while) caught my eye. Wouldn’t it be a magical addition to a child’s room? They look like something out of a Shel Silverstein poem or story.

(Photos from Design Dazzle, Olivier Dollé, and Double Takes)

City of Thieves by David Benioff

David Benioff’s novel City of Thieves first grabbed my attention on the shelf of my local bookstore, perched alongside eleven other titles that the Little Shop of Stories book group Guys Who Read had discussed in 2011. Yes, you could say this is a guy’s book. Maybe that’s what made me want to read it. I’m not a guy, but the story about two boys embarking on a week-long odyssey to find a dozen eggs in the middle of winter during the Nazi siege of Leningrad in 1942 was a synopsis with potential. Plus, the setting (enhanced by the gorgeous cover art) sounded like my kind of story.

The synopsis has cinematic sweep, too, don’t you think? No surprises there. Benioff is most known for his film career, which began remarkably quickly when he was called in to adapt his first book, The 25th Hour, into a screenplay for the Spike Lee – Edward Norton film. He then went on to write the screenplays for Troy (2004), Stay (2005), The Kite Runner (2007) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). He makes a lot of money writing unputdownable books and annoyingly good screenplays, and if that’s not enough, he’s married to Amanda Peet and could himself be Hollywood’s next lead man (have you seen his picture?). All this while he’s still in his thirties. The snob in me wants to remark that none of this would have been possible if his father, Stephen Friedman, wasn’t the former head of Goldman Sachs….just how do you go from teaching high school English to writing a book that gets the attention of Spike Lee?

But mostly I’m just extremely jealous.

I didn’t know all this when Luke and I chose City of Thieves as our together book. I’m glad I didn’t. It would have been agonizing reading such a phenomenal book while wrestling with my deep resentment for the man.

The first chapter is told from a fictional David who has traveled to Florida to record his Russian-American grandparents’ war stories. Until now all we (or David) know is the family legend that their grandfather, Lev, “the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen.” This is the last time we hear from David as he humbly bows out of the story. The last word we’re left with is Lev’s carte-blanche permissive to David to be the writer and, where there’s a discrepancy, “make it up.” And so we begin Lev’s story wondering, in spite of the words “A Novel” stamped on the book’s cover, which part is true and which is made up.

The rest of the story is told through Lev Beniov, a self-described “runt from birth,” Russian Jew (non-practicing) and son of the famous poet who years earlier “disappeared,” meaning, the NKVD took him away. When Lev is caught breaking curfew one night (a crime punishable by execution in siege-afflicted Leningrad), he is thrown into a cell with Kolya, a fast talking, handsome, man of the world and womanly-wise Red Army private who, inconveniently, has been accused of deserting. Instead of the execution sentence they both anticipate, they are brought before a terrifying NKVD colonel who is preparing to celebrate his daughter’s wedding. Of the rare delicacies the colonel insists on acquiring despite the loss of life this breaching of ration ordinances will inflict, the one ingredient he still lacks are eggs for the wedding cake. He wants a dozen and the task of finding them has fallen to Lev and Kolya. The duo are given a deadline of one week, a “Get Out of Jail Free” letter from the colonel, and the ultimatum that if they do not return with the eggs they will be killed. And if they choose simply not to return, they will probably die because the colonel has kept their ration cards as insurance.

I hate even to hint at the kind of adventure the boys, who are, I should add, predictably archetypal opposites, will encounter. The one, Kolya, is goodnatured, athletic, confident of his ease with both men and women, and down to Earth in the extreme, to the point that his main concerns during a week where the boys’ lives are continuously threatened are satisfying his sexual needs and relieving his bowels. Lev, on the other hand, is a virgin, a self-proclaimed coward, a former champion chess player (of a minor city league), and in as much as he empathizes with the pitiable characters the pair encounters, he is the empathetic heart of the narrative.

The climax of the novel occurs when they finally encounter the villain of the tale, who Benioff has spent much of the narrative building up to with terrifying suspense-filled effect. Though the character reads like a film stereotype – the schnapps-drinking, prideful Nazi officer whose love for causing human suffering is second only to his commitment to doing so “properly,” with Germanic precision – we fear him just the same, because we suspect his actions, if not his character quirks, are based on historic fact. I don’t think I had read such a suspenseful chapter as the one Benioff crafted for his novel’s climax, since I first discovered the power of the short story in eighth grade when I read “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. Interestingly, the scene in City of Thieves also involves a game.

But perhaps the clincher for me with this book, and the reason I can’t hate Benioff even though I try, is because he comes wonderfully close to evoking the name of Anna Karenina in the tragic inevitability of the novel’s heartbreaking conclusion. I’ll say no more. Only that you’ll not soon be able to shake the names Kolya and Lev from your mind for many months, if not years, to come.

Much has already been said about the Benioff’s humor-infused narrative, so I won’t dwell too long on this attribute. I’ll add only that, for us, the humor, mostly delivered through Kolya, is what makes the grisly scenes of war and destitution bearable. With it, the novel strikes the same poignant note as Art Spiegleman’s Maus, which I find interesting because of Benioff’s known fandom of comic books and graphic novels. I would love to pursue a line of thought on this blog about how being a visual generation has influenced our critique/requirements of literature. In other words, did I enjoy City of Thieves that much more because Benioff knows how to write a story to my cinematic requirements (a familiar story arch, banter-y dialogue, few monologues, powerful yet sparse descriptions of setting, archetypal characters, lots of sex and violence….)? What do you think?

Also, if you’ve read the novel, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Did you love it? Find it troubling? Are you, like me, a reluctant Benioff fan?

Not another Book Nook

I can’t think of a more generic name for a bookstore than Book Nook. Used bookstores love it, though. I can think of five off the top of my head and I’m 99.9 percent positive they’re not all part of a chain. Am I right? Perhaps you can shed some light on the origins of this rather dull name for a bookstore. Is there some authoritative publishing body giving used booksellers a short list of possible store names, away from which they are not permitted to stray? Are they just not very creative in the name department? Does the genericness of its name somehow add to a used bookstore’s mystique? Or am I missing something?

In any case, these have been my background musings when I’ve driven past the Book Nook in Druid Hills every day on my way to work for the past four months. I say background, because they never really twigged my curiosity beyond the banal musing, certainly not enough to make me want to stop by for a visit. It’s snobbish, I know. I simply had my mind made up about the kind of books that would be in a bookstore called Book Nook, the name glaring out in bold canary yellow lettering over a nondescript brick building that calls a dingy Shell station and a suspect nail salon its neighbors. In fact, I only brought myself ’round to visiting it because I was having my car’s oil changed at a garage two blocks down the road. In other words, I was bored.

You know where this is going, right? I go in. The bell over the door tinkles benignly. Somewhere a bowl of Chef Boyardee is being reheated and the smell is diffused through the surprisingly spacious room. Thankfully, the corduroy-wearing booksellers ignore me (I don’t really plan on buying anything, so better they not pay me any attention). I’ve stepped through a time warp; to my left, a fairly large room of used vhs tapes in their original scuffed-up paper sleeves make me feel as though I’m on the set of Be Kind Rewind, to my right, an extensive collection of comic books are filled in deep wooden bins. The entire shop is about the size of small public library. There is a newly released section, mostly consisting of titles which, I suspect, big box stores were unable to sell, though some good ones catch my eye: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, What the What by Dave Eggars and Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks.

Curiously, I mostly get lost in the cooking and diet section. Nothing has been published before 2000 and most not before 1990. The nutritional advice reflects the wisdom of the time and I’m filled with the same morbid fascination as when I visited the medical museum at Old Salem as a child. Okay, maybe not that extreme. Though it did make me remember with some fondness dancing along to my mom’s Jane Fonda exercise videos. Which of our generation’s diet and exercise regiments will our children laugh about?

There is a rare books section, where I spend a good deal of time admiring the gold leaf titles and illustrations on the bold royal blue and maroon linen covers. I could definitely talk myself into buying a stack of books, most of them oddities, but then I see a sign indicating cash only. Yet another ingredient in a used bookstore’s rather antiquarian business model that makes them both delightfully and annoyingly an escape into the past. The sign also advertises a 40% discount off the quoted price when you trade in your own books. On my next visit, I will come armed.

The fun is not lost, however, as about ten minutes into my visit I decide that a game could be had finding the most ridiculous, most random book in the store. In fact, I think it would make quite a fun date night. On this particular visit, the book that took the cake was by one David Haviland.

And on that note, I’ll leave you. But do share: what was the oddest book you ever found in a used bookstore?

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Last night Luke and I went out to Midtown to watch the Oscar Nominations for Animated Shorts. While each of the eight shorts was at times poignant, clever, odd, hilarious, and gorgeous in, this one, for obvious reasons, stood out. Book lovers will appreciate the childlike wonder of being swept away by books into a world of imagination, self-realisation and adventure. Louisiana-based directors William Joyce and Bradon Oldenberg take inspiration from hurricane Katrina, The Wizard of Oz, Buster Keaton and the silent film era (are we seeing a theme in this years films?), and I find the old fashioned artistic style delightful. Well worth a watch.

If you don’t already have date plans for Valentine’s Day this week (and by date I mean en couple, solo or with friends/family – why not, right?), and these Oscar nominees are playing at a theatre in your town, I can highly recommend checking them out. They’re the perfect mixture of sweet, gentle, and thought-provoking entertainment to suit any outing.

(Also, for all you Downton Abbey lovers, did you see this hilarious video, Watchin’ Downton? These girls are too funny.)

Books and Fashion

Here’s what I see walking in the mall yesterday. Club Monaco decorating their shop display area with books (all piled up and discarded, it would seem). And people say books are on the way out. Clearly they’re the trendy new decor item in fashion. Over Christmas JCrew was decorating with wreaths made out of book pages.

Book fetishizing soars to new heights.

Book Review: The Buddha In The Attic

Having tackled the subject of the Japanese internment camps in her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka turns now to the American dream. The Buddha in the Attic tells the collective story of a community of women who journey from Japan by boat to marry the handsome and successful young Japanese-American men who have been courting them in letters. These men, they believe, will save them from a host of problems facing them in their native land: poverty, social ostracization, spinsterhood, a lifetime of hard labor. When they arrive, they are greeted by older men, many of them farm laborers, and it becomes clear that they have been lured to California to pick strawberries, clean houses, wash other people’s fine clothes, and stay perpetually pregnant.

Their stories will end in the internment camps, to which they are whisked away one by one and then everyone all at once. “Some of us went out and began buying sleeping bags and suitcases for our children, just in case we were next. Others of us went about our work as usual and tried to remain calm. A little more starch on this collar and it’s be fine, now, don’t you think?” 

There is no one set of named main characters. Rather, using repetition and first person plural, Otsuka creates a community of voices that articulates the contrast of cultural experiences between the categorized Japanese new immigrants and their individualized American counterparts. Though each woman has her own story, it is told through the sieve of the group. The community is in and of itself a unique character. The style also has a similar effect to walking through a holocaust museum; the many thousands of discarded shoes, glasses and clothes; the profound and oppressive realization that each item has its own unique story and, yet, the individual has been erased, replaced with the collective identity of “victim.”

The immediate impression is that Otsuka’s writing is more like poetry than prose. From the beginning: “On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice as young girls and had bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but may more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years…” The repetition continues and we flit from one woman’s thoughts to another, sometimes in the same sentence, to great emotional effect. Even as the characters’ experiences vary to the extreme, there is no divorcing them from the collective.

The style poses many questions regarding identity, the immigrant experience and our cultural perception of the individual/the community. But most appealing is Otsuka’s fresh approach to narrative style. It is the perfect example of form-bending to suit an author’s thematic needs (rather than mere self-indulgence), and it is done as only an artist-turned-writer could. By eliminating the role of traditional named characters, Otsuka charges the narrative with a foreignness (what, no individual? This is not something we, as American readers, are used to) that is exotic and uncomfortable and completely other, which exactly reflects the experiences of the Japanese immigrant women.

Thank you, Leslie, from Inkwood Books for the recommendation.

Indie Feature: Decatur CD

All evidence points to the imminent closure of independent record stores. Most of them have already closed. The few hangers-on have had to launch ambitious fundraisers in their communities, set up shop on eBay and redesign their store calendars with Record Store Day at the center, a hopeful red bullseye encircling it (it’s April 21st this year, by the way). Regardless of what the writing on the wall seems to be telling us, I’m continually surprised by what I find when I walk into my neighborhood independent record store: people.

On this particular visit – I am going to Decatur CD with the express intention of talking with proprietor Warren Hudson about these weighty matters – I walk into a store speckled with browsers and one customer in particular posing the question to Warren that we all have voiced at one time or another: “But why would anyone want the downloaded an mp3 when you can have the experience of going to a record store? Besides, the sound is so much better on vinyl. When I hear a song I like, the thought never crosses my mind to go download it from my computer; I’d rather just go to the store and buy it.”

The man looks to be in his late forties, early fifties. I get the impression that Hudson doesn’t hold much store in these nostalgic opinion, though he may personally agree with them. They just aren’t the realities of his business. He patiently describes a scenario I’ve often heard booksellers lament: customers come in to browse in the physical shop and then download whatever album they fancy on their iPhones, often right there under the proprietor’s nose.

Like others in the music industry (particularly those who’ve found themselves on the chopping block) he holds the belief that independent bookstores are going the same way as record stores. Later, talking with me, Hudson compares the future of books to the present reality of movies.

“It used to be it’d take hours, maybe all night, to download a movie. Now it happens in minutes. Whose going to go out and buy a dvd when you can do it so easily at home and so fast for free? That’s where books are headed.”

I have to admit, film is the one media that I rarely feel guilty about not paying for. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel too sad about withholding my hard-earned Franklins from the already dollar-saturated industry. Of course, we know it’s not the wealthy who have had to take austerity measures in Hollywood in recent years, but the folks behind the scenes, like the writers.

Back to music. Hudson is a seasoned realist. He’s made it in the record business longer than many and he knows wishful thinking isn’t going to pay the rent. Talking with the other customer, he imagines a near future when people walk by on their way to the Watershed (a popular restaurant down the road) and say, ‘Hey, didn’t there used to be a CD store here? I wonder what happened to it.’ Hudson imagines what he’d say in this hypothetical conversation: ”All those times you used to walk past and didn’t come in when we were open, we could have used your business then.”

During our conversation, he speaks so vividly of a future without Decatur CD that I’m prompted to ask: Does he see the writing on the wall for his shop?

“Not for this store, no,” he says. “I’m too stubborn. I’m going to keep finding ways to keep us in business.”

He may be a realist, but I’m not. I find myself wondering, or maybe, just hoping if it is solely stubbornness or if those people I see browsing the new releases, the extensive vinyl collection and the best jazz selection in Atlanta aren’t also buying. Whose to say? When I ask how they did over Christmas, Hudson admits they had their best Christmas ever. “But,” he’s quick to provide the caveat, “you need a good Christmas to get through January. Now we’re just going to focus on Record Store Day.”

So is there a glimmer of hope? Maybe one. I ask him if he feels the shop local movement has had any effect.

“Yes…” he concedes, “that Small Business Saturday that American Express sponsored was good to raise awareness. As soon as I heard about it, I went over to Blue Elephant Books and spent $25 on a book for my child.”

One thing, Hudson thinks, that would help small businesses in Decatur would be to get rid of the parking meters in the down town area. Hmm, now that’d make a great topic on For the Love of Bookshops. Does increased foot traffic equal increased business to small businesses? Would you spend more money at your local indies if your town were more pedestrian friendly? And for those of you who live in walkable cities, how does it affect your patronage of small businesses?

In any case, I’d love to hear what you guys think about the future of independent record stores. Particularly, do you feel indie bookstores are destined for the same fate?

Hot Yoga

This was me this morning, y’all, only not nearly as serene or (ahem) dry. I went to hot yoga. Have you ever done it before? I’m not gonna lie: it’s the hardest work-out I’ve ever done. Exhilarating, challenging, detoxifying (which is just a nice way of saying you sweat like a pig), and ridiculously hard. But instead of that energy boost that usually happens after yoga, I’m completely exhausted (“knackered,” as Luke would say). Passed-out-on-the-couch knackered. And while one of my New Year’s resolutions was to blog more, another one was to not stress so much. So the super awesome indie feature I had planned for you today is actually going to happen tomorrow. Get excited! Have a happy, healthy monday and I’ll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, 3 children’s booksellers talk about the lengths they go to make their bookshops magical (even going so far as getting licensed as a pet store). One of the booksellers is Diane from Little Shop of Stories, which is just down the road. Well done, Diane! Read the article here.

Sad news for Atlanta

Yesterday, Outwrite Bookstore and Coffeehouse announced that they were closing their doors finally and that all offers of relocating had fallen through. Outwrite was the heartbeat of the LGBT community in Atlanta for 18 years. Many supporters tell stories of coming out at Outwrite. Many can’t imagine the corner of Piedmont and 10th without it.

My one hope amidst this sad news is that Atlanta is not losing its one and only LGBT safe place; rather, that because of Outwrite’s trail-blazing leadership, the city has become more open and accepting, and that the community now has countless safe places.

Still, it’s a sad day any day a bookstore closes.

I wrote a story about Outwrite a couple months ago, if you’d like to see.

(Photo of owner Phillip Rafshoon by Dustin Chambers from Creative Loafing)

Wanderlust

Recently, I can’t seem to stop daydreaming about travel. Do you ever get itchy feet like this? It happens to me every couple of months. When I’m traveling I long to be settled – have a neighborhood, a steady job, a dinnerware set – and when I’m settled I long to be traveling again. I tried to overcome it this week with a visit to Little India here in Atlanta. I shopped at Patel Brother, where you feel like a tourist walking between the rows of unidentifiable spices and colorfully boxed incense. I bought sugar coated fennel seeds like they serve at Indian restaurants. I even got my eyebrows threaded. It helped for like a day, but today my wanderlust is back with a vengence.

Here are some places I’ve been daydreaming about:

The lakes and woodlands of Maine. Wouldn’t you love to be in that canoe right now?

One of my life-long dreams is to volunteer at an elephant orphanage in Thailand. (Photo by Steven McCurry).

Paris, naturally.

The Scottish highlands and islands.

Iceland.

Do you ever get itchy feet? How do you deal? Where do you fantasize about travelling?

(Top photo by david_murray)