In my last blog <A list of sorts, and George Saunders> I mentioned Manuel Gonzales’ book of short stories, The Miniature Wife, on my to be read shelf. Well, I’ve been reading it, and liking it, a lot.

When blogging about a short story collection, I like to focus in on one of the stories, peripherally, skirting around it, and maybe give you a sense of his skill and meaning, rather than sum up the stories as a whole. This could be the wrong strategy, but, and if it is, well, sorry folks.

The story I want to give a brief sketch of is the first in the book, Pilot, Copliot, Writer. Think about: you are in a plane; it is hijacked. You and your fellow passengers stay in flight, circling the city of Dallas, for the next twenty years. This is the situation. It is left unexplained how this state has been extended, the logistics of fuel and food economy left to our wonder with hints of ‘perpetual oil’ and vials of clear liquid to be ingested, “two drops, two drops will do,” says the hijacker pilot. The point of these stories is not the science behind such ideas, Gonzales doesn’t waste time with that nonsense, rather the point is to create worlds not so unlike our own, but with these fabulist situations to aerate the philosophic soil and better allow us to explore our motives, our needs, wants, and desires. In short, Gonzales has crafted stories here that test our souls.

Dark and innovative. A total blast to read. This is the first book by Manuel Gonzales and I’m  ready for his next.

My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read and Shop

Edited by Ronald Rice

Black Dog Books (2012)

Barry Moser’s reading of his essay about our bookstore was surely the highlight of Lemuria experience in 2012. Many old friends shared the evening toasting to bookselling. Barry’s reading of his heartfelt essay was sentimental and beautiful. I spent the last hundred days of 2012 reading this delightful book, drinking it in slowly, finishing the afterword on December 31st.

Emily St. John Mandel’s concluding essay reconfirms the importance of bookselling as a service and an art form. Mandel’s concluding thoughts on consumer responsibility and spending your money and time are ways that you influence your community. Your choices should reflect your concern for the future of your town. Mandel ends with “if it happens that you’re someone who enjoys having a bookstore in your town, I would argue that it’s never been more important”

My Bookstore includes essays about stores I’ve visited and ones I’ve just heard about. I’ve discovered new stores offering new horizons for me to hopefully experience. I’ve been reinforced by Ron Rice’s collection that bookselling as an occupation of choice is alive and kicking as 2012 comes to an end.

Here are some of my favorite comments from other bookstore essays:

Park Road Books (Charlotte, NC) by Carrie Ryan:

“Independent bookstores like Park Road Books are so much more than a place to buy books. They’re a place for gathering, for sharing, for learning, for meeting new people. They are a home. There have been times I’ve been far away traveling and I’ve become homesick and walked into an independent bookstore because that’s something they all have in common: a feeling of coming home.”

From Mike Cochrane’s essay, The self-stated goal of Talking Leaves Books (Buffalo, NY):

“. . . to make available life-changing books, books that ‘open us up to new worlds, or illuminate more clearly our own,’ books that ‘stretch and deepen our vision and our comprehension of the universe and its creatures, cultures and ways.'”

Stephen White’s essay about the great Tattered Covers Booksellers (Denver, CO):

“Intuition seemed to inform them when I was just looking, which was usually. But engage one of them on the floor with a question or a request for guidance and any staff member would talk books with you, patiently. Find books for you, eagerly. Ask what you liked, recently. Tell you about books they loved, passionately.”

I end this blog with comments from a great essay by Wendell Berry on books and bookselling from Carmichael’s Bookstore (Lousiville, KY):

“To me, it is not enough that a book is thought realized in language; it must also be the language further realized in print on paper pages bound between covers. It is a material artifact, a thing made not only to be seen but also to be held and smelled, containing language that can be touched, and underlined with an actual pencil, with margins that can actually be written on. And so a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one’s bodily life. One’s bodily life, furthermore, is necessarily local and economic. And so to the life embodied in books must be added to the life of bookstores . . . It is a fair incarnation of the manifold life of books. To go there and find a book I didn’t expect or didn‘t expect to want, to decide I want it, to buy it as a treasure to take home, to conduct the whole transaction in a passage of friendly conversation–that is in every way a pleasure. A part of my economic life thus becomes a part of my social life. For that I need actual people in an actual place in the actual world.

Long live tangibility! Love live slow communication!”

Lemuria, just off the electric George Saunders event, is planning a big 2013 year. This year influence our work efforts, get involved and let us influence your reading interest.

If you haven’t gotten a copy of My Bookstore we still have some signed by Barry Moser.

Real books signed by real authors in a real bookstore for real readers that care.

Finally a piece on My Bookstore and memories of Mississippi bookstores by Jim PathFinder Ewing, our friend, journalist, author, writer, editor, and blogger living here in Jackson.

“I’m definitely browsing in My Bookstore — as well as all the bookstores I’ve known — and enjoying immensely the memories of them in the company of literary friends both found in the book as well as in my own recollections. At the current pace of reading, I’ll probably finish My Bookstore sometime in the next year, or two. But, you know what? I’m finding, it’s like being in a bookstore itself. Browsing is part of the experience.”

Read more of this lovely essay here. It’s a wonderful read.

I am reading these books right now because they “instruct and delight.” There is meat to them, and their messages spark what is already inside all of us on the verge of Springtime: the urge to do, think, and feel in ways that are more true to the happy person that we all have in us.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts… by Susan Cain (New in paperback)

I have heard solid and ecstatic reviews of this book come from all kinds of people, from visual stylists at Nordstrom to economics professors. I think this speaks to the relevancy of the topic; it is important to individuals and to social and work environments. About half of people are introverts, and introverted qualities tend to be misunderstood in our culture.

In this picture is Cain’s “Manifesto for Introverts.”

Lean In: Work, Women, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (Forthcoming on March 11 – we pre-reserve)

This book is the most fitting of the (generally) inspirational books I’ve read lately. Sheryl Sandberg made her way to the top ranks of Facebook, never flinching in her will to have the most impact she could through her career. As the COO of the company, she is one of few women who hold such powerful positions. She is also a mother of two small children, and made time to write a book about all of this because she feels very strongly that women – herself included – need to “lean in” to their careers and estimate their own potential higher. She also explains that companies need to expect this of women as well as men. She asks women and men to perpetuate a culture in business and the working world in general that supports women, so that, in end, the right person fills each job role, whether a man or a woman. Ultimately, this is about making the world a better place. She speaks from experience, and this book, like Quiet, is equally about both personal growth and societal improvement. I read this book in about a day. I recommend it for just about everyone.

The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux puts to use his skills as a seasoned writer, traveler, and (interestingly) reader. He put together this book by connecting excerpts of others’ writing, from ancient to contemporary, under themes that are fresh, and by adding a lot himself. Chock full of quotability, this book will force regular travelers and sedentary people alike to see things differently through Theroux’s eyes. It’s a lovely and crucial push in the directions of elsewhere.

by Whitney

I thoroughly enjoyed Indiscretion.  I did not want to put this novel down; I even read it while on short breaks at work. I went in with really no expectations. All I could gather from the description was that this would be a tale about a love triangle, but as I read on, it became much more.

Charles Dubow is a debut author but y’all know how much I like reading first novels and Indiscretion did not disappoint.

From the beginning, the reader is wooed into wanting to be friends with Harry and Madeline Winslow. They have a wonderful life.  They met in college, married, and have a wonderful son. Maddy’s family has a house in Southampton, where they spend summers and holidays.  Harry has just won the National Book Award for his second novel and has won the Rome Prize to move to Italy and write his third. From the outside, who could ask for a more perfect life?

Walter, the narrator and Maddy’s best friend since childhood, tells the story. He is a subjective narrator; in some of the stories he was not even present at the time it happened. He begins the story during a wonderful summer weekend that a young woman, Claire, comes to Southampton, and meets the group at a party that the Winslow’s are having.  They soon “adopt” Claire and she is spending every weekend in the Hamptons.

The decisions, good/bad, that the characters make that summer will affect the rest of their lives. it is a roller coaster ride learning the back stories and current stories of their lives.   I just had to know where the story was going next.  The journey to the end is riveting and I was sorry for it to finish.

Indiscretion will be released the first week in February, 2013.

Love and Poetry have been going steady for awhile now. Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets are a classic stand-by, but as Elizabeth Bennet advised so wisely: “I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve [love] entirely away”, so if you are planning to give your Valentine a good poem, make sure it is a good one. And maybe steer clear of sonnets.

The Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Ted Kooser, began sending Valentine poems to his lady friends in 1986 and a tradition was born. All of these poems are collected in Valentines, along with illustrations by Robert Hanna. These poems are not overly sentimental (a sign of a good poet) rather he writes of the holiday we all love (and loathe) with candor. All kinds of love make appearances in this collection: unrequited, worn and tattered, lingering, passionate, and impartial. But Ted Kooser’s modern interpretation of an age-old subject is fresh and full of vitality.

For You, Friend

this Valentine’s Day, I intend to stand

for as long as I can on a kitchen stool

and hold back the hands of the clock,

so that wherever you are, you may walk

even more lightly in your loveliness;

so that the weak, mid-February sun

(whose chill I willl feel from the face

of the clock) cannot in any way

lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind

(whose subtle insistence I will feel

in the minute hand) cannot tighten

the corners of your smile. People

drearily walking the winter streets

will long remember this day:

how they glanced up to see you

there in a storefront window, glorious,

strolling along on the outside of time.

Pablo Neruda wrote the Captain’s Verses to Matilde, his lover and companion in exile. The poems are full of passion and energy. Plus, what says passionate love more than poetry in Spanish. Neruda writes of the highs and lows of love (yes, sometimes he gets angry) but the translucency gives his poems more power.

Night on the Island

 

All night I have slept with you

next to the sea, on the island.

Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,

between fire and water.

 

Perhaps very late

our dreams joined

at the top or at the bottom,

up above like branches moved by a common wind,

down below like red roots that touch.

 

Perhaps your dream

drifted from mine

and through the dark sea

was seeking me

as before,

when you did not yet exist,

when without sighting you

I sailed by your side,

and your eyes sought

what now–

bread, wine, love, anger–

I heap upon you because you are the cup

that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

 

I have slept with you

all night long while the dark earth spins

with the living and the dead,

and on waking suddenly

in the midst of the shadow

my arm encircled your wrist.

 

La Noche un la Isla

Toda la noche he dormido contigo

junto al mar, en le isla.

Salvaje y dulce era s entre el placer y el sueno,

entre el fuego y el agua.

 

Tal vez tu sueno

se separo del mio

y por el mar oscuro

me buscaba

com antes,

cuando aun no existias,

cuando sin dicaisarte

navague por tu lado,

y tus ojos buscaban

lo que ahora

–pan, vino, amor y colera–

te doy a manos llenas

porque tu eres la copa

que esperaba los doned de mi vida.

 

He dormido contifo

toda la noche mientras

la oscura tierra gira

con vivos y con muertos,

y al despertar de pronto

en medio de la sombra

mi brazo rodeaba tu cintura.

What would romantic poetry be without E.E. Cummings Erotic Poems? The words are stark on the page, tightly edited and cropped and exposed. Cummings seeming stream-of-consciousness work lends itself easily to the subject of physical love. The poems are sensuously rough and gritty. When you read them, you can’t help but imagine him typing furiously away on his typewriter, to passionate to bother with capitalization except for emphasis. A woman has just left and the floor is striped with the shadows cast from his blinds. I may not know what he means, but I have felt what he has feels.

ii.

when i have thought of you somewhat too

much and am become perfectly and

simply Lustful….sense of gradual stir

of beginning muscle, and what it will do

to me before shutting….understand

i love you….feel your suddenly body reach

for me with a speed of white speech

 

(the simple instant of perfect hunger

Yes)

how beautifully swims

the fooling world in my huge blood,

cracking brains A swiftlyenormous light

–and furiously puzzling through,prismatic,whims,

the chattering self perceives with hysterical fright

 

a comic tadpole wriggling in delicious mud.