So, readers may be asking, where's the "bookstore" aspect of the Manic Bookstore Cafe?
I just found a link to my Bunin and Butter post on Christian Book Barn.com (go figure!). But it is one thing to comment on literature as a "professional," and something else entirely to disappear into books the way I did as a kid, as an "amateur," the way I try to do every summer (and holiday break, if I can manage it). A really good bookstore manager would have opinions about all kinds of books. My interest these days runs almost exclusively to contemporary fiction.
When my kids were smaller, I manically read YA fiction in the summer -- Jeanne Birdsall's trilogy starting with The Penderwicks, or Hilary McKay's Casson Family series, or even Harry Potter (to keep up with my son). But now my daughter has moved on to Jane Austen, my son is reading history and re-reading The Iliad most weeks, and I am on my own.
So, what to read? A great way to dive into summer fiction is to go to local used bookstores. At Blue Jacket Books in Xenia, OH I was looking for high school graduation presents, and picked up Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Not the kind of book I usually read, but strangely compelling. The language is fantastic and pulls you in even as the horror of drug-runners and cold-blooded killers and teenage brides and trailer parks pushes you away. Like Carl Hiassen, but without the humor. McCarthy gets desperation and inevitability, and the plot plods forward with doom for every character just up ahead. His "good guy," the sheriff, is tortured by his own demons (left over from his service in WWII) and though he works to achieve a kind of justice, he seems aware that justice is beyond his grasp. A hard book, but a good one.
If I were to start a real (not virtual) bookstore cafe, I might restrict my holdings to hardcover books. Our personal library includes Vintage Classics and old Penguin paperbacks which are now dusty and mildewed and falling apart. So we are de-accessioning and rebuilding. I went to Dark Star with my daughter to replace my old copies of Emma and Sense and Sensibility with nicer hardcover versions -- more durable, more pleasant to read.
And I was lured by two fat novels: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. I saw Chabon speak on a panel during the Folio Fiction Festival at the British Library in March and remembered that though I have failed to enjoy Mysteries of Pittsburgh and have never geared up for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel about a Jewish enclave in Alaska seems right up my alley.
But I'll have to wait -- my husband assumed I bought it for him. So instead I immersed myself in the late Victorian era of A.S. Byatt. Byatt herself said in an interview with The Guardian: "I started with the idea that writing children's books isn't good for the writers' own children." Fascinating. I remember finding Possession (1990) to be great, but too mannered. This book does have some problems, especially toward the end as she approaches WWI and its aftermath, and as the children mature and thus the story moves away from the mother-writer. But the sprawling English society of bankers and collectors and artists and artisans was entrancing and led to a number of late-night "are you ever coming to bed?" conversations. In short, it was terrific.
Byatt weaves English history and social conditions (the writer figure is the daughter of a mining family whose father and brothers die in accidents) with fairytale motifs from English and world folklore. Her characters ring very true (a keeper of artifacts at the Kensington Museum that eventually becomes the V&A, bankers who tolerate their bohemian relatives, children who create a tree house in the woods and are somehow divided into the "olders" and the "youngers," with younger olders feeling resentful when cast into the ranks of the older youngers...). Several of the plot lines are utterly heartbreaking, and having German and Germanophilic characters illuminates the Great War from a new angle -- an appropriate read this summer on the 100th anniversary of that damaging debacle. I'm afraid I saw the denouement coming from a long way off, although that didn't make it any less wrenching. Definitely recommended.
I just found a link to my Bunin and Butter post on Christian Book Barn.com (go figure!). But it is one thing to comment on literature as a "professional," and something else entirely to disappear into books the way I did as a kid, as an "amateur," the way I try to do every summer (and holiday break, if I can manage it). A really good bookstore manager would have opinions about all kinds of books. My interest these days runs almost exclusively to contemporary fiction.
When my kids were smaller, I manically read YA fiction in the summer -- Jeanne Birdsall's trilogy starting with The Penderwicks, or Hilary McKay's Casson Family series, or even Harry Potter (to keep up with my son). But now my daughter has moved on to Jane Austen, my son is reading history and re-reading The Iliad most weeks, and I am on my own.
So, what to read? A great way to dive into summer fiction is to go to local used bookstores. At Blue Jacket Books in Xenia, OH I was looking for high school graduation presents, and picked up Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Not the kind of book I usually read, but strangely compelling. The language is fantastic and pulls you in even as the horror of drug-runners and cold-blooded killers and teenage brides and trailer parks pushes you away. Like Carl Hiassen, but without the humor. McCarthy gets desperation and inevitability, and the plot plods forward with doom for every character just up ahead. His "good guy," the sheriff, is tortured by his own demons (left over from his service in WWII) and though he works to achieve a kind of justice, he seems aware that justice is beyond his grasp. A hard book, but a good one.
If I were to start a real (not virtual) bookstore cafe, I might restrict my holdings to hardcover books. Our personal library includes Vintage Classics and old Penguin paperbacks which are now dusty and mildewed and falling apart. So we are de-accessioning and rebuilding. I went to Dark Star with my daughter to replace my old copies of Emma and Sense and Sensibility with nicer hardcover versions -- more durable, more pleasant to read.
And I was lured by two fat novels: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. I saw Chabon speak on a panel during the Folio Fiction Festival at the British Library in March and remembered that though I have failed to enjoy Mysteries of Pittsburgh and have never geared up for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel about a Jewish enclave in Alaska seems right up my alley.
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| This is the cover for the UK first edition. |
Byatt weaves English history and social conditions (the writer figure is the daughter of a mining family whose father and brothers die in accidents) with fairytale motifs from English and world folklore. Her characters ring very true (a keeper of artifacts at the Kensington Museum that eventually becomes the V&A, bankers who tolerate their bohemian relatives, children who create a tree house in the woods and are somehow divided into the "olders" and the "youngers," with younger olders feeling resentful when cast into the ranks of the older youngers...). Several of the plot lines are utterly heartbreaking, and having German and Germanophilic characters illuminates the Great War from a new angle -- an appropriate read this summer on the 100th anniversary of that damaging debacle. I'm afraid I saw the denouement coming from a long way off, although that didn't make it any less wrenching. Definitely recommended.
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