Brandon Shimoda’s new collection of poetry, Portuguese is a welcome addition to the poetic canon. A reimagining of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself for the modern age, with a little bit of the Beats thrown in, Shimoda’s collection a continuation of the American poetic tradition. But America has changed. Shimoda brushes up against all the hot topics, without standing on a soap-box–the Middle East, sexual identity, etc.

I have a shirt made of paper–I wear it to the Lebanese wedding

I do not know the bride or groom–I take refuge ini

A paper existence, within

My body–weak–I roll

My body up my arms

Paper starving the distribution

—from “The Cedars of Lebanon”

The result of collaboration between 2 small publishing houses (Tin House and Octopus Books), Portuguese represents an evolution of the publishing industry. When a lot of publishing houses are cutting back their poetry interests, Tin House and Octopus Books are uniting to keep poetry alive.

Unless they’ve written a book I’m familiar with, I don’t recognize the names of the essayists in The New York Times Book Review. But when Katie Roiphe’s new book came out this fall, a book of essays called In Praise of Messy Lives, I recognized her name from an essay in the Book Review. Weird, I know, but it’s because her essay, on the front page, which is unusual in itself, was so fascinating. In “The Naked and the Conflicted,” Roiphe contrasts the treatment of sex by novelists of two generations, that of Updike, Mailer, Roth, and Bellow, with that of younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Benjamin Kunkel, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. She asserts that the former group’s virility has been transmuted by the latter into a kind of “passivity . . . a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite,” where “the cuddle [is] preferable to sex.”

The essay caused a bit of controversy, with some folks reacting quite intensely: “Not only are you contributing to the total annihilation of the literary culture, but also to the destruction of our civilization.” She’s been described as “an uncomfortablist,” a term which, if a criticism, is perhaps less harsh, and one she herself admits is apt. In most of her essays, though, it works, as she critiques what in our culture seems like a trend of bourgeois conventionalism, for example, that our obsession with all types of “healthiness” elevates shopping at Whole Foods to an act of heroism.

If Roiphe’s personal essays can be a bit overbearing, it’s that her method of praising the messy over the conventional in her own case reads a bit like, “if your life is put together you are simply boring, ha ha I win because I have two children from two different men.” But when applied to our culture as a whole, this method elicits some fascinating stuff: could we love Mad Men because our conservative sensibilities crave the spectacle of stylish people who smoke too much, drink too much, and sleep around, or is our obsession with being the perfect parent doing more harm to our children than we realize?

Roiphe’s essays on literature though are by far the best part of the book; like “The Naked and the Conflicted,” they are unconventional yet close readings of works that remind us of why we like to read, and why we like to read about what we read. So I don’t mind that Roiphe makes me a little uncomfortable.

Story Teller by Tim Walker

If you were to judge any book at all by its cover, it should be this one. Story Teller is an amazingly unique photo book that is just as whimsical and eerie as the cover would suggest. Photographer Tim Walker takes fashion and portrait photography to an exciting new place by shooting his subjects (You’ll recognize a few of the subjects- Tilda Swinton and her unforgettably creepy face pops up all over the book) in imaginative and sometimes frightening dream-like sequences that tell an amazing story. I was reminded several times of Lewis Carroll’s imagery while I was flipping through it and got that same prickly feeling as when I read Through the Looking Glass for the first time. A definite must buy for those who aren’t content with your blah-de-blah every day coffee table book.

Murals and Portraits by Richard Avedon

In quintessential Avedon fashion, the brilliant photo collection Murals and Portraits is both shocking while being utterly honest and beautiful at the same time. The photos are grouped into four sections: Avedon’s work with Warhol and the members of the Factory, the series covering Alan Ginsberg and his family, the Chicago Seven war activists, and the photos that were taken during Avedon’s first and only trip to Vietnam in 1971. I find it a little hard to fit a description of this book into just a paragraph because of the range of emotion that fills it’s pages. Jumping from the shocking and strangely effortless pictures taken of Warhol and the members of the factory to the weirdly stand-offish and cold portraits of mangled war victims somehow works, although it feels like it shouldn’t. Maybe that’s the beauty of Richard Avedon’s work though, showing history as it really happened: good and bad, all happening at the same time.

A new year means the majority of us have made some kind of New Year’s resolution. And sadly, according to a New York Times article that I read recently, one third of those resolutions will be broken by the end of January. So what’s a potential resolution-breaker to do? How about adding a few worthy books to your arsenal.

The same New York Times article also stated that resolutions are likely broken because people “eventually run out of willpower, which social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control.” Two new health and diet books that I feel could help establish some useful habits as well as give resolution-makers’ willpower a boost are Thinner This Year by Chris Crowley & Jen Sacheck, Ph.D. and The Happiness Diet by Tyler Graham & Drew Ramsey, MD.

Thinner This Year, part of the  Younger Next Year series, advises readers to avoid “dead foods” or nutrient-poor foods such as highly processed foods with solid fats and lots of added sugars. Along with a straightforward diet plan, the book also sets up a meticulously researched exercise program that includes 25 whole-body strength exercises-what the authors call the “Sacred 25.”

**Chris Crowley of Thinner This Year will be visiting Lemuria on Wednesday, February 6th!**

The authors of  The Happiness Diet have fused neuroscience and nutrition in order to illustrate the pitfalls of the Modern American Diet, or MAD. Like the authors of Thinner This Year, Graham and Ramsey focus on America’s detrimental shift to a more processed diet, and provide straightforward solutions for eliminating processed foods and replacing them with nutrient-rich foods that improve both health and mood. With a range of advice, from a list of “good mood foods” to instructions on how to pickle your vegetables at home, The Happiness Diet emphasizes a return to a simpler and more conscious relationship with food.

Both books set their readers up with the tools to establish healthy habits and provide a guide to navigate today’s consumer food market, which does not always have the consumer’s best health options in mind. Here’s to keeping our New Year’s resolutions!

by Anna

Periodically we have shared our thoughts and others thoughts about the state of books and the publishing industry. There is no doubt that e-readers and Amazon have affected our business. Despite all the upheaval, there is one thing we know for sure: we love books, the paper kind.

You may remember a book that came out in November called My Bookstore: Writer’s Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop. As we start off the new year, I thought Emily St. John Mandel’s Afterword put things in perspective. In this excerpt, Emily reflects on comments made by Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love and Great House, at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn:

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She [Nicole Krauss] had recently returned from a national tour for Great House, and she began telling us about conversations she’d had with a few people along the way who told her that they buy only e-books. When she asked why, they told her it was because it was more convenient. She found this interesting, she said. When, she asked, did convenience become the most important thing?

I personally have no quarrel with e-books and believe they’ll continue to co-exist with print, but there’s something in Krauss’s sentiment that resonates. I think it applies to the decision of how and where we buy our books.

There was a time when we–all of us, the general public–were referred to as citizens. At some point this shifted, and now we’re mostly called consumers. I have some real problems with this change because while citizenship implies rights and responsibilities, to my mind consumerism mostly just implies shopping.

And yet shadows of the original word remain. The word consumer, I’ve come to realize, comes with its own imitations of responsibility, in that it reflects a very basic fact of life in a capitalistic society, which is that we get to change the world we live in by means of where we spend our money. This concept is hardly new, but if it happens that you’re somebody who enjoys having a bookstore in your town, I would argue that it’s never been more important.

-Emily St. John Mandel

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I like that Emily’s message can be applied to any local business: your bakery, your favorite local restaurant, the grocery store around the corner, the mom-and-pop garden nursery and so on. These places give us community. Places like Best Buy and Wal-Mart and Amazon don’t do that. In 2013, we hope that we can continue to be your local bookstore as we, and many other local businesses, do our best to serve our community.

Bookstore Keys Series on Lemuria Blog

From 2011/2012: Reading One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of amazon.com (March 19) Where will e-book sales level out? (June 2) Indie Bookstores Buying from Amazon? (June 1) BEA Roundup (May 19) Lemuria’s Headed for NYC (May17) Barnes & Noble Bankrupt? (April 28) Decluttering the Book Market: Ads on the latest Kindle (April 14) Independents on the Exposed End of the Titanic? (April 6th) Border’s Bonuses (March 30) The Experience of Holding a Book (March15) 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)