This one-hour adventure sums up the whole enchilada of bookstore economics faltering. 

Mother's Day is tomorrow

I went to the most suburban of the Tattered Cover locations yesterday to buy Mother's Day presents. I picked up pretty notecards for my grandmother, and for my mom, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and  Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses.

Sometimes I'll buy books for people without having  read them, but I find this to be rather dangerous and perhaps even slovenly, a real character defect. So no more of that. Mom generally likes the books I like, so these  title have been road-tested and are suitable for release into the wild.

If you recall my post about 2008 books, I wrote about Diaz's "...ear for the musical qualities of oral tales, and [how he] isn't afraid to embrace the influences of American culture into the Dominican transplants." As for Petterson, his Norwegian narrative about late-life contemplation and recall is a wrenching antidote to Diaz's penchant for violence mixed up with his characters' ability (or not) to love.

Hope my mom will agree.

At the bookstore: The Good

I am in awe of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions and their gorgeous redesigned covers. It makes me want to buy them all and put them on display on the shelves of my new house. I probably won't, but I did buy the new edition of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The other "all about me" purchase yesterday was a physical copy of Lark and Termite, which is on my to-read list. It's a beautiful edition, with  images, and I've found that books on Kindle with illustrations lose something.  I think I missed out when reading The Lazarus Project on K, and if I'd tried Sebald's Austerlitz on the small screen, I would have been disappointed. All this confusion about format dredges up a host of mixed emotions about digital narrative. Hey, that was the topic for my thesis. Funny how it all comes back around.

It was satisfying to plunk down money in a real indepedent bookstore, where you see the real people  shelving real books. It can't last, not at the levels to which we are accustomed. In a sense, it's last call. Drink up while you can, because...

The Not-So-Good

 The shelves of today are shallow.  Let's say right from the start that I already know the whys of bare-bones inventory. But it's still lamentable. One  Nabokov: Lolita. No Speak, Memory, Pale Fire, or Pnin. No The Lazarus Project, even though it was a notable book from last year. Only the most recent short stories from Mary Gaitskill. No Veronica. And these are just the ones I paid attention to. The days of browsing for depth are done. Amazon has made itself both necessary and invincible. 

The Time to Move Ahead Grin and Bare

 Lest this become a dirge post, let me end by directing you to a book blog / social network I discovered recently. If online is where I'll meet or at least brush by other readers, so be it. Enjoy Readerville.