Next Expert, Please!

Marilyn Dahl, editor of the indispensable Shelf Awareness, is our next expert advisor at the Booth. She's only here until noon, so get in here and get advise on books from a woman who knows more books, and more about books, than just about anyone you're likely ever to meet.

The Holiday Gift Advice Booth is Open!

A team of experts is waiting, all day today, to help you pick the perfect book for any and everyone on your gift list. First up today, David Glenn, Random House Rep Extraordinaire.

The line is already forming, the advice costs one thin quarter and all moneys raised go to the University Book Store Scholarship Endowment Fund. So get in here today!

Tonight's Capote reading

We'd like to give one last plug for tonight's reading in our U District store by our own Used Book Buyer Brad Craft. For the last couple of years, Brad has very generously accepted our invitation to him to sit down in a nice comfortable chair and read us a story.

That story, "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote, is a remarkable piece of work, a largely autobiographical story about Capote, who as a young boy was sent to Monroeville, Alabama to be raised by his mother's relatives. Among the relatives, he met his beloved "Sook," Nancy Faulk—a childless, older woman distantly related to him—and they connected.

The boy—called Buddy—and Sook spend much of the story gathering supplies to make fruitcake for the relatives, but really the story is about poverty and loneliness—about the way we, in absence of our biological families, create our own with those who happen to be around. We're clever that way.

Sentimental? Oh, possibly. Quite beautiful, though. I've never been much for sentimentality in my reading tastes, but this one works for me. And Brad reads it with a tenderness and charm that really has brought a tear to my eye every time.

I understand Bukowski once wrote of Capote that he "never had his nose rubbed into life." The underlying sadness of "A Christmas Memory" certainly argues that, in my opinion. (And the seeming blindness of Bukowski to any form of pain that is not his own certainly reminds me why I've never cared for his writing.)

Please do join us.

A Sincere Thank You to All Our Thankful Contributors

It's Thanksgiving Day.  This is just a quick note from home, where the turkey's in the oven and all is (largely) right with the world, to say "thank you" to all the good people who contributed a book and a story to our blog of "What (book) Are You Thankful For?"  Coworkers, customers, and friends all made for an incredibly diverse and interesting list.  If any readers haven't check it out yet, please do so, as it makes for an excellent shopping list for the Holidays.

And the display table is still up in the Seattle store, if anyone would like to stop in and look at a selection of the books.

Again, thanks to everybody.

Reading for Reading(s) Sake -- Orwell & Dickens

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              As part of my big "Employee Shopping Days" splurge, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I bought two handsome volumes of reissued George Orwell essays.  Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays and All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays.  In the latter, the very first essay is "Charles Dickens," originally published, in book form anyway, in a collection called Inside the Whale & Other Essays, in 1940.  

The last time I bought a collection of Orwell's essays, just a few years back, it was in an Everyman's Library edition, in one volume, nearly three inches thick!  I still own it, for reference I suppose, but it is a 

ridiculous object; cumbersome, impossible to carry on the bus, heavy on the chest when reading in bed.  (Now there's a good subject for an essay: American-made books and their resemblance to American-made cars, i.e. the SUVs of classic literature.  Another day perhaps.)

Despite already having done one Dickens reading at the store, on his birthday in February, this year, and having done a good deal of research for that, for whatever reason, I never read the Orwell essay on Dickens.  I know I started it, but I never read it.  With the more attractive and  practical volume from Harcourt, Inc., now on my nightstand, and a reading of Dickens' "The Chimes" coming up on December 9th, I have done at last.  I'm ashamed I never did before now.  I can recommend it as one of the best things I've ever read about Dickens.

By 1940, Orwell had already seen the grim effect of orthodoxy on the socialism he uses to critique Dickens' liberalism, and Orwell's critique is no less justified or interesting because of the failure of certain premises still assumed in the essay.  And just when I'd grown impatient with Orwell and his jabs at Dickens for failing, among other things, to write realistically about agricultural workers (!), Orwell starts the fifth section of his essay with the following line:

"By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this, will probably be angry with me."

Now what is not to like about a critic capable of that line?  Moreover, Orwell goes on to write one of the best appreciations of Dickens' genius I've ever read; cogent, concise, and very cleverly written.

If for no other reason, I will be always grateful to Orwell for providing me with the perfect phrase summarizing the true nature of Dickens personality.   Particularly, though without specific mention of it in the essay, the Dickens of 1844, when he wrote the story that I will be reading at the store: the Great Man was, as Orwell says, "generously angry."  Perfectly said.  Perfectly true.

A Thankful Reminder

Check out our earlier post of "What (book) are you thankful for?" because the list has grown and grown. We've had submissions from every corner of the bookstore, and from customers and friends.

When you're in the store next, make sure you explore the display in the center of New & Used Books. Every title has an individual bookmark, reproducing the recommendation from the blog. Very popular, those bookmarks. And yes, you can take one with you when you buy the book.

Thank you to all the contributors to date and keep the titles coming!

My Annual (Library of America, etc.) Orgy

Every year, not unlike Christmas, our Employee Shopping Days roll around again (thank you management,) and, while I always intend to use this opportunity to buy edifying books for widows and orphans, I instead indulge myself in an orgy of entirely selfish consumerism.  True, I bought a single title, as a token to assuage my guilt, for my partner: Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, by E. Patrick Johnson, but everything else was for me.

And, as I do every year, my first priority is always to add to my collection of the complete Library of America.  I've been collecting this series since they started publication, many years ago.  Every year they publish four or five new titles, so I have to get those too.  Doesn't matter if I like the authors.  Doesn't matter if I will ever read the individual volumes.  Gotta have 'em.  I look at it as an investment.  (These books are the only material goods specifically mentioned in my will -- no lie.)

If you don't know the series, Library of America publishes the classics of American literature and history in an ongoing project to preserve, promote and, I suppose, defend our cultural heritage.  It is an admirable undertaking and done superbly well.  The books are beautifully made, of durable materials, and meant to "last a lifetime."  They will certainly outlast me (thus the provision in my will.)  As a collector, they are my pride & joy.

As a reader, some years are better for me than others, the worst being the year I had to buy Kerouac, Alcott, and Lovecraft.  Very little joy there, I can tell you.  But I did my duty.

This year has been (for the most part) happier:

Collected Stories and Other Writings, by Katherine Anne Porter.

This goes to the top of my night-stand reading pile as soon as I

finish with my reading for my Christmas Readings this year.

Collected Poems: 1956 - 1987, by John Ashbery.  A favorite of my dear friend Richard, himself a poet, and someone to

whom I will now be forced to pay more serious attention.

 

Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, by Philip K. Dick.  This purchased reluctantly and soon to be added to my shelf

of LIAM acquired "more in sorrow..." titles.

I'm disappointed not to be able to add the second volume

of A. J. Liebling to my collection, as, for some unknown

reason, it seems never to have arrived, either at the bookstore or with the

distributors, despite a September publication date.

Finally, (although tomorrow is another Shopping day, as Scarlett might say nowadays,) I rounded out my selection with a beautiful remainder about the great director Jean Renoir, and two handsome volumes of essays by George Orwell: Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, and All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, both compiled by George Packer and attractively produced.

Santa has already been better to me than I deserve.

Free Stuff Flash Mob: aka Campus Thank You

Q: How delighted were we with the turnout for yesterday's Campus Thank You Celebration?

A: Very!!!

Great crowds, great vendors, great singers, great games, great raffles, great prizes, great students, faculty and staff. Thank you to everyone who participated.
Don't be strangers. Stop by. Shop a little.