Valentine's Day

Thinking about the bookstore's staff, it occurred to one of our booksellers that we've managed—as a company—to bring together a number of couples. If you survey the staff, you'll find quite a few relationships that started when eyes met in the book stacks. (The Valentine of The Shelver, your humble narrator, was met right here in the store,
for example.) Heck, a few of us have even tied knots and had kids with fellow booksellers.

We would like to suggest that you consider—if you find yourself single on this couple-y sort of holiday—University Book Store a place to look for love as well as literature.

Think about it: the place is awash in romance. Every shelf teems with it. Here's a list of some of the staff's favorite literary romances:

Pride and Prejudice (Of course.)

Northanger Abbey

Persuasion

Oscar and Lucinda

The Time Traveler's Wife

Venus in Furs (Ummm...okeedokee. Why not!)

George and Martha

The History of Love

Who Do You Love

Lucky You

Gaudy Night

Bel Canto

Four Letters of Love

Norwegian Wood

Kafka on the Shore

Jane Eyre

Tadpole's Promise

Swann's Way

Love in the Time of Cholera

Middlemarch

And that just barely scratches the surface. Here's a suggestion: if you're on your own tonight, and feeling a little blue, stop by University Book Store, grab a book from the list above, or ask a staff member for their most romantic recommendation, do a little browsing with said book in hand, and look around for someone else doing the same thing. Maybe you'll meet a fellow single who is also a fellow reader.

Barthelme

The new issue of Bookforum includes an article by James Walcott on the influence of and upcoming publications by the late, great Donald Barthelme.

I'm particularly fond of Not-Knowing and really happy to see it back in print.

This is Timothy Hutton reading a little Barthelme. (Remember these MTV bumpers? Lou Reed read a bit of MacBeth in one, I seem to recall. And someone else reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis.)

Here are two of my favorite Barthelme stories:

"Rebecca"

"Me and Miss Madible"

And here's a really good essay on Barthelme's Syllabus by Kevin Moffett.

UPDATE:

One more. Here's the amazing Donald Antrim reading "I Bought a Little City."

Annoucing the 2008 UBIE Award!

Here's an announcement from our Kids Department:

Not to be left behind in this busy awards season, University Book Store is proud to announce the 2008 recipients of our very own Ubie Awards, which we give to our favorite picture book and children's/young adult novel of the year!

This year’s picture book winner is How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird by Jacques Prévert and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein. Prévert’s well-known poem is brought to life in Gerstein’s glorious illustrations, which positively burst with creative energy. Both poem and pictures work together perfectly to capture and celebrate the joy of artistic expression. This is a book that sings!

This year’s winner in the novel category, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, is another book in which the text and illustrations work together harmoniously. (It justly garnered this year’s Caldecott Medal.) Hugo Cabret is a unique, masterful, and utterly absorbing blend of words and pictures that tells the suspenseful story of a young orphan living behind the walls of a Paris train station who gets caught up in a mystery involving the early days of filmmaking.


Because it is so difficult to choose just ONE picture book and ONE novel from the many wonderful books produced each year, we’ve decided to share the other choices on our Ubie shortlist with you, too. Here are the other books we fell in love with last year!

Picture Books:

Cowboy and Octopus by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith
The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers
The Surprise by Sylvia van Ommen

Novels:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (National Book Award Winner for Young People’s Literature—yay, Sherman!)
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

Happy Birthday, You Little Dickens!

Last night, our used book buyer, Brad, did dramatic readings of Charles Dickens for an appreciative audience. Did you miss it?

If the answer is yes, then you are in luck. Here's a bit of it for you. It's the scene in which Nancy is murdered from Oliver Twist:



Enjoy it? Wish you would have been there? Bookmark our Events Calendar and check it regularly. We do stuff like this all the time.

The Sum(mary) of All Things

If you had to write your autobiography in 6 words what would it say? The estimable Carl Lennertz posted a few, funny and famous, at his blog Publishing Insider.

Because of my insatiable appetite, mine is "Books and food--my two loves." What about you?

Dog of the Week

Hey there book/dog fans. The Shelver is finally back from an extended vacation, and with him comes a brand new dog of the week.*

This is Cody:



He's young, and refuses to stop moving long enough for his picture to be taken, so instead, I made a little movie of him chewing on my shoe. And shoelace.

Good boy, Cody.

* And, apparently, a need to speak in the third person.**

** Speaking of odd choices for a narrator's voice, have any of you readers had a chance to check out Joshua Ferris's novel, Then We Came To the End. I'm a little late getting to it, I know, what with it being on quite a few top ten lists and getting the National Book Award nomination and all. Sorry. My reading list finally opened up a space.

I mention it, though, because it is in first person plural. We did this. We did that. An interesting strategy, usually. A difficult one to pull off, too, because it tends to imply that the story being told carries a lot of weight, as if the first person singular narrator wants to spread around the blame.

In this case, it seems to work pretty well.

Reading the Superbowl!

Big game's coming up. Sure, you could spend the next few days watching all the coverage on ESPN or the major networks. Me, I'll be sitting down with a good book.

Here are some choices for Patriots fans:

Fans of NPR's Wait, Wait—Don't Tell Me might want to pick up a copy of Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything by Charlie Pearce.

Or there's the great, much-missed David Halberstam's The Education of a Coach.

And if you're a Giants fan, you might check out I Dream in Blue: Life, Death, and the New York Giants.

All three are sure to whet your appetite for the upcoming grid-iron grapple.

Are you well-read enough for some football?

Dickens

On February 7 at 7pm in our U District store (fireside), we will be hosting a birthday party for the one and only Charles Dickens. Our host, used book buyer Brad, wrote the following essay to generate some excitement. Enjoy:

Why Read Dickens ALOUD?

In 1853 Charles Dickens, the most popular novelist on Earth, gave a public reading of “A Christmas Carol,” his most popular story, to benefit charity. The reading was a sensation, raised an enormous sum, and resulted in a clamorous demand for more readings. For the next five years, and, in fact, for the rest of his life, Dickens read regularly for the benefit of charity. But in 1858, Dickens began to read his work “professionally,” i.e. for profit, and he quickly became the first, and perhaps the only, novelist in history, to earn more from reading his work aloud than he did from publishing it. He read in London, and in provincial towns, in theaters and public halls, before royalty, and, at his insistence, to audiences of working people at discounted ticket prices they could afford. He also read in America. The crowds hoping to buy tickets in New York, formed a full day before the box-office opened, stood in subzero weather, stretched three quarters of a mile and kept warm by dancing, singing, and fist-fighting.

In 1868 Dickens, whose health was failing, in part as a result of the physical and emotional strain of touring and performing, went on his emotional Farewell Tour. Dickens had come to depend on the readings and the direct connection they provided him with his readers. Giving the readings up was insisted on by his doctors, but to some considerable extent, it may be said that ending the readings was also his undoing. By 1870, at only 58, Dickens was dead.

So what was the magic of these public readings? The most obvious factor was the unprecedented popularity of Dickens’ books. There was hardly an English-speaking household during his lifetime that did not know Dickens’ novels and stories, either in their serialized form in magazines, as books, or in their innumerable adaptations to the stage. Those that couldn’t read, gathered to hear the books read aloud. Nothing in English since Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, was as widely known as Pickwick, et al.

Authors had been giving popular paid lectures for more than a generation, perhaps most famously Coleridge and Hazlitt. Dickens himself had been giving private readings of his work to a select circle of friends and critics for years before he began to read in public. But what Dickens did, by accepting a fee to read his books aloud, was new, and, in the beginning, he worried such performances might hurt his reputation. Instead, Dickens found his unique connection with his audience was infinitely deepened. As a novelist, Dickens was loved. As a reader, he was worshipped. And if the majority of the recorded witnesses to his performances are to be believed, it was only right that he was.

Already a much admired amateur actor, Dickens the reader was a phenomenon. Thomas Carlyle, not a man known for his enthusiasm, described Dickens as “an entire theatre company… under one hat.” Dickens did not simply read his stories, he acted them. Having carefully selected and edited his text, working and reworking each reading for maximum effect in both humor and pathos, the author then “became” each of his character; in his most famous dramatic reading, the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist, he was first Fagin, then Sykes, then Nancy, in turn. The transformation was electrifying.

And always he was Dickens as well. When his audience laughed, Dickens laughed. When the death of little Paul Dombey made tough old Scots cry during a reading in Edinburgh, Dickens wept along with them.

Everywhere he read, audiences came to see not simply a famous author, but the friend who had introduced them to Mr. Pickwick, who had mourned with them the death of Little Nell, who had spoken for them against the inequities of their society in Hard Times and in the editorials in his magazines, and who had rejoiced with them in their happiness, at the wedding of Nicholas Nickelby (and many thereafter.) Dickens, it was felt, and is still felt by his readers, is ours.

And that is the key to the remarkable success of Dickens’ readings: his audiences felt they knew him as well as they knew his books. And Dickens felt much the same about his audience. While he disliked autograph-hunters, and committee-men, and provincial receptions, he genuinely loved his readers and was moved by, and deeply grateful for, their affection.

Dickens considered the greatest compliment of his life to be from a working man who, approaching him in the street after a performance, thanked Dickens for his reading of the previous evening, “… and for all the light” Dickens had brought into his home, over the years.

So why should anyone attempt to reproduce, even in tribute, something of the magic of a reading by Charles Dickens? Obviously, it would be impossible to capture the unique thrill of hearing the author read his own words. A number of great British actors have presented Dickens readings onstage. Most famously, Emlyn Williams regularly performed “An Evening with Charles Dickens,” and more recently, Simon Callow and Miriam Margoyles have both done one-person-performances as well. The public readings of A Christmas Carol are a tradition the world over. But there is something to be said for anyone, amateur, enthusiast, or common reader, reading the words of Charles Dickens aloud. Luckily, the texts of Dickens’ own readings have been preserved. But even if only reading the opening chapter of A Tale of Two Cities in a classroom, or one of the Christmas stories in the family circle, the pleasure of Dickens, for reader and listeners, is enhanced by the sound of his words in the air, by the shared laughter and tears, by familiarity of the stories, by the echo of his own voice, coming back to us, however faintly, from those famous readings of more than a century ago. It is the voice of a friend.