A little visiting with your friends, some relaxing beverage, an intimate reading accompanied with song, a room packed to the gills all for a visit with one of the most famous songwriters out there, a personally signed book in your hand: This was Lemuria last night as singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell kicked off his book tour for Chinaberry Sidewalks.

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Rodney said that you write a book because you have to write a book. This certainly was a book he had to write–it took ten years to write his memoir, but the work has garnered the attention of respected, colorful characters like Rick Bragg, Mary Karr and Kris Kristofferson. It is unquestionable after listening to Rodney sing last night that he has the heart of a poet, he is a wordsmith of the old school with songs like “Back down there . . . the sweet delta dawn” and the beautiful Roy Orbison melody “What kind of love?”

I asked Rodney about his connection to Mary Karr–who was just here this past July. I figured there was a meaningful one since they were both writers with a gritty Texas childhood. Not only are they buds, but collaborating song writers. Rodney said they will have an album coming out soon. Hopefully, they will do a tour and share a wonderful evening with us again.

Death of the Adversary: A Novel by Hans Keilson

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Francine Prose wrote a compelling review back in August in the New York Times Book Review about two novels by the author Hans Keilson. His two books and Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key were written about life prior to and during WWII and received accolades in 1959 when Death of the Adversary was published.

Translated into English in 1962 (Orion Press, NY) and first published in 2010 for the American public, Death of the Adversary is a psychological tour de force. Death is the story of a young boy growing up in the 1930s, a young boy uncannily sensitive to the psychological, political, cultural, personal atmosphere looming about him.

He is particularly aware of an unseen force, or rather menace, whose sting he intuits in conversations between his loving mother and father and later in schoolmates and friends. He tries to understand the fear growing around him, tries to integrate it into his worldview with rationalizations inept to the ever consuming power of the threat. The threat is real and it is unnamed in the book. Some of his friends speak of a presence they admire and ultimately proffer their allegiance and souls. We realize the threat is Hitler and Nazism.

So how does a young boy or anyone for that matter digest the ambivalence emanating from his German/Danish culture and come to terms with something that steals his early hope for stability and security to prosper and flourish, that steals hope itself? This is a “psychological fable (see blurb on back of paperback) of enormous proportions showing how the mind can’t see beyond it own limitations, its own experience but at a much deeper, non-thinking level feel the agonizing, irreconcilable horror of something so evil as unknown or unknowable, admired by despised.

Who can better write of such things than this author who became a psychoanalyst treating children traumatized by war? Not only an an articulate author and psycholanalyst, Keilson was hidden during WWII and eventually became a member of the Dutch resistance. The questions he eloquently asks in this book would make a lively discussion for a book group. Many WWII books have been published recently and this should be one of the first we read. Then I would suggest Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

Read more about Bonhoeffer here and The Invisible Bridge here.

-Pat

As I begin to grasp how much the book business is changing and contemplating how fast the change will come about, I’ve been pondering the future of Jackson’s local market, wondering what our book selling faceplate will become.

After 35 years and three locations all inside Jackson’s city limits, I’ve seen a lot of change. The Jackson malls of Northpark and Metrocenter had at one time five bookstores between them. Today neither of them has a bookstore. The big stores came to Jackson in the 90s–Books-a-Million across the street and Barnes and Noble on County Line–both of them very close to Lemuria. The 2000s were marked by a shift into the Jackson Metro area with Borders and Barnes & Nobles on the move. Metro area book selling has boomed while the local Jackson market has been drained.

Increased competition can be good for our desire to enhance business quality and performance. However, product shifting and an overall shrinking market make it difficult for customer growth in terms of increasing satisfaction.

We know we are in the midst of an intense change. We look into our crystal ball as we try to predict how all this change will play out for Jackson book buyers and Lemuria’s solid book readers.

Here are some questions we are asking ourselves:

1. Will Borders close or restructure itself into a new business model, de-emphasizing books as their main product and thus discouraging book browsing?

2. Will Barnes & Noble use all their square footage to build a great physical inventory and swamp their competition? Or will they diversify into marketing e-reading so strongly that they emphasize more department store type merchandise?

3. Will B & N and Borders come together to become a new dinosaur, merging into a new entity?

4. How many more nonbook items can Books-a-Million add to their square-footage? I’m sure some but how much more value will they add to their physical book inventory? Will Books-a-Million move outside Jackson and into the metro area?

As answers unfold to our questions, we will begin to decipher how our Lemuria will be altered. For 35 years we have been a Jackson institution, one for which I am proud and I hope my efforts represent my pride and desire for enhanced reading quality. For real book lovers, we are challenging ourselves to improve our service to you. Hard times are ahead and hard decisions will be made.

As we progress to Spring, we hope to share with you our interpretations of this ‘Big Swoop” of change. Our hope is for Lemuria to emerge from its challenges as a stronger institution for Jackson, a bookstore you can still be proud to bring “out-of-towners” to browse and enjoy, maybe in the future more than ever.

The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry

Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

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I’m beginning to feel the gardening bug come to life again. I know, I know that is barely the middle of January, but, still, I feel it coming on. I know that my early blooming daffodils will be peaking their hopeful heads up through the cold damp earth in the next few weeks, and that will certainly signal to me that spring is not far behind. I don’t know about you, but the last week’s extreme cold has made me realize that living any further north would really be hard!

So, as I begin to think of spring, I am planning on growing more herbs and vegetables this year. I had some good success last year, but I want to grow more that I can cook with this coming spring and summer. A new book which just came into Lemuria in early December ’10 is titled: The Kitchen Gardener’s Handbook by Jennifer R. Bartley. Within this beautiful book, the food gardener will find design plans, seasonal checklists, fresh recipes, plant profiles and growing tips, and flowers for the table, as the subtitle suggests.

Seasonally subdivided, gardeners can find herbs, vegetables, and fruits for every season of the year, and as an added treat, the gardener author has even included special recipes to be made from the vegetables which he grows in his own garden. For instance, for the Spring section, one will find how to grow strawberries and rhubarb and an accompanying recipe using both. For the summer, blueberries are certainly included complete with recommended varieties, as well as a recipe for “World’s Famous Blueberry Pie”. Included in each seasonal section with the plants which grow best, is also a highly helpful chart detailing the common name, scientific name, zone to grow, and certain notes about each plant. Beautiful color photographs accompany each section.

I highly recommend this new release published by Timber Press, the prestigious guru of gardening publishers, for gardeners wanting a helpful, practical and beautifully compiled guide to growing what one wants to eat.  -Nan

I can remember the first time that I saw a piece of William Christenberry’s work.  It actually was not a photograph but a model of a ramshackle building.  Really what caught my eye was the name of the piece, Coleman’s Cafe.  You see Coleman is my Dad’s name so I was naturally attracted to it.  In fact, Coleman was with me in the Smithsonian American Art Museum  in Washington, D.C.  As I looked around I noticed some of his photographs and really related to all of it.  Christenberry  is after all one of the South’s premiere photographers.

Christenberry’s new book, Kodachromes, is the first publication to show this particular body of work.  It encompasses work made with 35 mm Kodachrome slide film during the years of 1964- 2007.  Of these images of the Rural Deep South, especially Hale County, Alabama, very few have been on exhibit or published.

Though there are some new locations that one hasn’t seen before, be rest assured that Christenberry’s icons are here in this book, Coleman’s Cafe,  Sprott Church, and the Bar-B-Q Inn to name just a few.  Even if you have some previous books of William Christenberry I really think that Kodachromes would be a wonderful addition to your collection.

William Christenberry: Kodachromes (Aperture, 2010)