In the Land of (almost) No Bookstores

My town has no bookstores. Okay, so there is the one, but it's tiny and has a major focus on science fiction and fantasy which are two genres that I like to enjoy on occasion, but not usually the focus of my reading. I have purchased books there in the interest of keeping a bookstore around since all the others have been steadily dying off. I appreciate its presence even if it's not the bookstore I'd prefer. I also appreciate that it's a store that has a section dedicated exclusively to Vampires. I mean, that's just awesome, but I digress.

I'm sure you don't live under a rock, therefore you might have heard something about Borders and bankruptcy and a third of their stores closing. The two Borders stores that really mean anything to me personally, meaning the one I used to work at in my pre-blogging days and the one that is closest to my town (at a staggering 45 minutes away) survived the closings, and I'm pleased about that, but the whole situation plus that whole "45 minutes away" thing got me to reflecting on and generally being melancholy about the bookstore situation in my town.

I don't live very near a major city, but I also don't live in the backwoods middle of nowhere, either. Okay, relative to the surrounding area, I might, but in the grand scheme of things not so much. I don't live in the center of a barren, frozen tundra nor do I live out on the prairie or in the mountains or somewhere where you can drive for miles and miles without even seeing another town, let alone a bookstore. I live in central/northeastern Pennsylvania sandwiched almost equidistantly between Philadelphia and New York City. My town is host to a medium-sized state university, and they have their bookstore, but the bookstore scenario for the town at large is dismal.


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It's practically a weekly thing for me to bemoan the fact that my immediate surroundings seem to be a bookstore deadzone. It wasn't always like this here, and it saddens me to think that with the upcoming Borders closings, others might join my ranks of the nearly bookstore-less. Now, lest you feel too badly for me, we are are not totally book deprived here. We have several local library branches that serve our small towns well, and their high quality used book sales keep me in far more cost-effective reading than I can probably hope to devour in the decades that might well remain of my life span. Alas, I am of the segment of the population that is not really wildly in love with the whole library thing but for the sales. I like owning books.

I miss bookstores. I miss them so much. I envy all you book bloggers who even have the opportunity to somehow affiliate yourselves with a local bookstore for mutual benefit, who can wile away portions of your days sipping coffee and perusing novels in bookstore cafes, who can attend author readings and signings without driving the better part of an hour (or more!). I actively resent that sometimes I feel like my only option when I need to buy a book is to throw a few more dollars into Amazon's already fairly bursting coffers. I took it for granted when I had it, but now I long for the pleasure of wandering the aisles of a bookstore perusing books that I can hold in my hands. Getting books in the mail might be a total high but it can't replace the potential for actually interacting face to face with people who are looking for or can recommend a good book. It can't replace being able to go to a store where if you say something as vague as, "I'm thinking of a book with a white cover that I read about in the Saturday Review of Books a week and a half ago," and somebody will actually be able to find you that book. I'm already tired of the cold, utilitarian book buying options that the internet has to offer now that my alternatives are so limited.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't be like us, the book lovers in my town. Don't let the continued existence of your local bookstore be a forgone conclusion. Don't always buy your books on the internet when you can just as easily buy them from a store, because if you like bookstores at all, like I do, you'll miss them terribly when they're gone even though you were happily sending off your dollars to Amazon up until the moment the reality of it all caught up with you. I understand now more than ever that bookstores are a treasure, and one that I am loathe to go without.

How about you? What's the bookstore situation in your town? Do you have them? Would you miss them if you didn't or are you satisfied buying your books from online outlets?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Watery Part of the World

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.



The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker
Algonquin, April 26, 2011

Synopsis:

Michael Parker has created a wholly original world from two known facts: (1) Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of the controversial vice president Aaron Burr, disappeared in 1813 while en route by schooner from South Carolina to New York; and (2) in 1970, two elderly white women and one black man were the last townspeople to leave a small barrier island off the coast of North Carolina.

In this fiction based on historical fact, Parker weaves a tale of adventure and longing as he charts one hundred and fifty years in the life and death of an island and its inhabitants- the descendants of Theodosia Burr Alston and those of the freed man whose family would be forever tethered to hers.

It's a tale of pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, that takes place on a tiny island battered by storms, infested with mosquitoes, and cut off from the world-as difficult to get to as it is impossible to leave for those who call it home. From Theodosia's capture at sea to the passionate lives of her great-great-great-granddaughters to the tender story of the black man who cares for them all his days, this is an inspired novel about love, trust, and the often tortuous bonds of family and community.

What are you "waiting on" this Wednesday?

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The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld

Let me give you a tour through bizarre thought processes for notorious book acquirers (using myself as a case study, of course). Once upon a time, I put Jed Rubenfeld's other book, The Interpretation of Murder, on my big bookish wish list, and there it stayed and stayed and stays still along with my intention to read it "someday." Years later, here I am a book blogger and into my e-mail box comes an offer of a review copy for Jed Rubenfeld's new book, The Death Instinct. Why do I say yes? Not just because the premise sounds good, though it does. I say yes because I have the author's other book on my wish list, as if having a book on my wish list is as good a testament to my enjoyment of an authors's work as actually having read a book by them, just like I occasionally buy books on the grounds of having other unread books by the same author on my shelf at home, and "of course, I'll love that author, right?" This may perhaps be why I have such a freakish amount of unread books. Maybe. It's definitely the reason that I recently enjoyed my first taste of Jed Rubenfeld's historical mysteries.


It's a beautiful day in September 1920 when old friends Detective Jimmy Littlemore of the New York Police Department and Dr. Stratham Younger reunite in Madison Square. Their purpose for meeting again is a girl who left a cryptic note and a tooth for Younger's friend Colette, a French radiochemist who studied under Marie Curie. At the same time, a terrible thing is about to happen on Wall Street. Just as the bells ring noon and hundreds of financial district employees swarm onto the street for their lunch breaks, a horse-drawn wagon turned bomb explodes through Wall Street killing and injuring hundreds of people. Soon, Younger, Littlemore, and Colette are wrapped up in a far-reaching web of mystery that will find all three dodging death in the solving.

The Death Instinct is jam packed full of interrelated mysteries and rife with rich historical detail. In Rubenfeld's hands we are transported from Prohibition era New York where vets returning from the war struggle to find jobs to a Washington D.C. where modern-day politics have already taken shape even though the city seems incomplete, to ravaged post-war Vienna where Sigmund Freud is still learning new lessions about psychoanalysis in the aftermath of the conflict. Impressive are the variety of storylines Rubenfeld successfully manages to weave into his story, with a mystery or two per main character.

Rubenfeld's characters aren't so lovable as they are downright admirable. Littlemore's integrity is steadfast and his amazing feats of deductive reasoning downright sherlockian as he navigates the backward politics of both Washington and New York in pursuit of the truth about the Wall Street bombing and its implications for the U.S. Treasury and U.S. banks. Dr. Younger's courage and heroism follow him from his career at Harvard to the battlefield and to Europe again in pursuit of Colette and her unfinished business. He might have a short fuse and have a history as a bit of a lady's man, but Rubenfeld makes his Younger's heart of gold shine through. In Colette, Rubenfeld marries strength and determination with a stunning naivete to create a character who is determined to defeat her past before it can catch up with her.

Rubenfeld covers a lot of ground in The Death Instinct between the historical scene setting, the fleshing out of his main characters, his employing of real historical figures, and the many mysteries both current to the time period of the book and left over from each character's recent past. My one complaint, then, is that sometimes it seems as if Rubenfeld is tackling too much and all the moving parts occasionally get in the way of the story itself. While the historical detail and Rubenfeld's successful efforts to render historical figures with accuracy create an incredible sense of that moment in history, sometimes the detail and the tangents get in the way of what would be a pageturner of a mystery.

Overall, though, I found The Death Instinct to be an ambitious romp through the post-World War I world. Readers will be torn between wanting to savor all the history Rubenfeld has thoroughly re-created and wanting to rush to the end to discover the solutions to The Death Instinct's many intriguing mysteries.

(Many thanks to Lydia at Riverhead Books for providing me with a copy for review.)

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Touch

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.



Touch by Alexi Zentner
W.W. Norton and Co, April 4, 2011

Synopsis:

In Sawgamet, a north woods boomtown gone bust, the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer, and the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the mysteries and magic lurking in the woods. Stephen, a pastor, is at home on the eve of his mother's funeral, thirty years after the mythic summer his grandfather returned to the town in search of his beloved but long-dead wife. And like his grandfather, Stephen is forced to confront the losses of his past.

Touch introduces you to a world where monsters and witches oppose singing dogs and golden caribou, where the living and the dead part and meet again in the crippling beauty of winter and the surreal haze of summer.

What are you "waiting on" this Wednesday?

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Saying Goodbye, Turning Over a New Leaf, and Other Bookish Randomness

It's Sunday, and I've been stocking up on some bookish randomness all week long. A blogger who, you know, stays home once in a while and writes some posts would perhaps divide this all up and write lots of little posts, but you know me, and I'm going to combine it all into one big one. You get a lot of bang for your buck here at Leafing Through Life. It's okay, you can thank me later.

First off, I was really saddened to hear of Brian Jacques' passing this week. Oftentimes when an author passes, their name is familiar to me, but their work is not, but I grew up with Jacques' Redwall series. They were among the first books I ever tried to get my parents to read because I was so taken with the stories of Redwall Abbey and it's characters. These books are brimful of action, adventure, love, valor, and a treasure trove of unforgettable animal characters not to mention epic feasts of the most delicious-sounding foods. Thankfully I fell behind in the series, so I've got a good many still left to read, but the world has lost a great storyteller in Brian Jacques. Matt London says it way better than I can in his Personal Reflection on Brian Jacques on Tor.com.


Consider yourself duly forewarned. I've done a goofy thing that I'm pretty sure I don't regret. I accepted a children's picture book for review. I wasn't going to. I didn't even mean to. I intended to politely refuse, but when I took a look at the cover photo of Peachtree Publishing's Three Hens and a Peacock I got all mushy inside and began whining to myself, "Aw, but I like picture books. I miss them, and it looks really pretty, and it will probably be all kinds of nostalgic fun even though people that read my blog will probably be all like wha??" So I took Emily from Peachtree up on her generous offer of a review copy and will (probably temporarily) be turning over a new leaf (a new leaf? Get it? LOL!) and reviewing it here. I'll post the review other places, too, so that it'll get more mileage than my likely limited children's book reading following here. But come on, look at it. Who could refuse a face like this?





Last but not least in my treasure chest of bookish randomness, are you using Edelweiss? If not and you're the kind of blogger/reader who's interested in finding out what's forthcoming from your favorite publishers, whyever not? A few weeks ago after a serendipitous moment on Twitter, I requested a demo of this online collection of publisher's catalogs. Joe Foster spent a half an hour or so showing me the ins and outs of using the site's many features to scope out forthcoming books, tag them for later reference, filtering the ones of interest, and so on (Thanks again, Joe!). Ever since, I've been gleefully perusing many publishers' spring/summer offerings, tagging books for Waiting on Wednesday posts, adding to my unwieldy wishlist, and using it as a reference point whenever I hear any stirrings of a new book by an author I like. I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg, though. If you're interested in what's upcoming, you should definitely be checking out Edelweiss. Need a little help figuring out how to use it? Check out Joe's excellent guest post at The Book Lady's Blog for the nuts and bolts and you'll be ogling exciting new books in no time.

That's all in bookish randomness for today. Hope your week is full of great books and many hours of great reading!

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Peach Keeper

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.



The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen
Bantam, March 22, 2011

Synopsis:

Sarah Addison Allen's new novel invites readers into the author's enchanted world of Walls of Water, a small Southern town full of sticky heat, dark secrets, and characters so real they cling onto your heart like Spanish moss.

When Willa Jackson's marriage to her college sweetheart crumbles, she returns to Walls of Water, the town where she grew up and where her family still lives. While struggling to find her place in a town that's no longer her true home, Willa uncovers a family feud that runs so deep it has caused two sisters not to speak for six decades, and finds a strangely secretive man who may be exactly what she needs.

Okay, I am in serious, serious cover lust with this book. I must have it - the cover! The book!

What are you "waiting on" this Wednesday?

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Open House by Elizabeth Berg

This is just a warning. It might look like I'm reading the Oprah's Book Club collection this year. Okay, I might actually be reading the Oprah's Book Club collection this year, but it's not deliberate, really. Okay, well, it's kind of deliberate in the sense that I'm reading the books on purpose, but not purposeful that they all seem to be part of Oprah's book club. You see, my mother and I share our books, so when I read a book from my shelves it doesn't always leave the house. Sometimes it hangs out for eons just in case she might read it. The converse is also true. I am a notorious offender when it comes to never reading the books she's read, regardless of their merit, and so the stacks just get larger and larger, whereas if I read what she's already read, maybe we can make some space. So, one of my many reading goals this year is to read some of those books. As it so happens, mom went through a lengthy Oprah's Book Club phase, which means, I might be looking at a lot of such titles. Open House by Elizabeth Berg is the first of these, and I'm happy to report that neither Berg nor Oprah disappoints with this one.


You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone. You stare at the man you love and know you are staring at nothing: he is gone before he is gone.

Sam Morrow's husband David has left her and their 11-year-old son, Travis, and she has come unmoored. She doesn't know what to do or who to turn to and there's no one that seems terribly fit to give her any of the help she needs. That, and she can't seem to stop desperately wanting David to come back despite her mother's and her best friend's assurances that she's better off without him. She goes through a woman's stages of grief alternately crying and shopping and determining to become a new and better person. It's not long until she realizes that she'll need a roommate or two not to mention a job to be able to keep living in the house she once shared with her husband.

The following weeks find Sam opening up her house and sometimes her heart to a variety of new people. There's Lydia, a friend's elderly mother who hasn't given up on love. There's King, a man who has traded in career and prestige to work odd jobs and learn to enjoy life. There's Lavender Blue who hates her real name and the world and thinks life has nothing good in store for her. There's Edward, the gay hairdresser, who brings hair styling to the table as a fringe benefit of having him as a tenant. It's this motley collection of people that will teach Sam that, even if one chapter of her life has come to an end, her life and love are far from over.

I really enjoyed Open House and was taken by surprise by Berg's writing which is surprisingly powerful in its own understated way. Berg's story helped me to understand and relate to a life utterly unlike mine, and she drew my sympathies to a narrator whose situation, while not atypical, is foreign to my own experience. Despite our differences, I related to Sam as she struggled to find her footing in a world where the familiar has been stripped away. The wrenching pain of the end of a marriage is vividly rendered, and Sam's slow healing is cathartic for both her and the reader.

Back in the kitchen, I gulp down another cup of coffee. Then I mix eggs and milk in a blue-and-yellow bowl that tiny shop in Paris, our weeklong vacation there, I stood at the window one morning after I'd gotten up and he came up behind me and put his arms around my middle, his lips to the back of my neck, add a touch of vanilla, a sprinkle of sugar. I put a frying pan on the stove put his lips to the back of my neck and we went back to bed, lay out two slices of bread on the cutting board. These hands on the ends of my wrists remove the crusts. I'm not sure why. Oh, I know why. Because they're hard.

Now, if you're anything like me, you've read this story or maybe watched it on TV half a dozen times. Girl gets married young, girl gives up self for husband and family. Then the husband leaves, and the woman has to pick up the pieces and rediscover herself at the same time. You've read it, but you haven't read it done this well. Berg has taken an old story and with a convincing narrator and a keen eye for emotional nuance has succeeded in making it fresh again.

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Bad Megan Goes to the Book Sale

I wasn't going to go this time. Really, I wasn't. Even though it was 5 days worth of book sale affording me many opportunities to go and peruse used booky goodness, I made other plans to do other things. I went to work, went to a Zumba-thon, I avoided, avoided, avoided. But it was a frustrating week with a caught cold that derailed my planned avoidance and made me cancel plans and get depessed about canceling plans, and it's the middle of winter and I just needed something to look forward to that's closer than spring, and every time I drove past the library, I thought, "I'll stop, just for a second," until on the 2nd to last day, my resolve broke down and I spent an hour scanning the shelves. Thankfully, on the 4th day, the stock is fairly picked over, but not so picked over that I wasn't still forced to exercise some restraint, which I think I accomplished admirably. Enough about that, though. We all know you're just here for the pictures and the list of delicious acquisitions. So here they are - with assorted and haphazard commentary (of course).




The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Not sure this is going to be my thing, but I'm a sucker for a prize winner.)

Carry Me Across the Water by Ethan Canin (I bought this for the title. Terrible, huh?)

Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty (I read Sloppy Firsts just before I started blogging, and put the next book in the series on my wishlist. Now I've got a sparkly new used copy.)

Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell

Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich (Interested to see the results of her quest to see how people live on $6 or $7 an hour when I can't seem to swing life on my own making better than twice that.)

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (I've read about this one all over the place, but Danielle's review is the freshest in my mind.)

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (I'm blaming this one on Eva.)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary (I'm pretty sure this one will always get blamed on Dewey.)

Chosen By a Horse by Susan Richards (And I'm a sucker for broken and then healed animal stories!)

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis (Love the subtitle to this one. I'm tired of being fed this crap about how because I'm a Christian I should love right wing politics. Blargh!)




The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano

Drood by Dan Simmons (Okay, bloggers, I'm not sure how you did this, but somehow you made me want to read this crazy huge tome about Dickens. With glee did I pluck it from the shelf. Crazy this.)

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh (Here's one of those authors I collect but have never read. I know you have these, too. Know it.)

The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart

Cold Rock River by J.L. Miles

And that's all. Remarkable restraint, right? So, which one should I read first?

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The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The time has finally come for me to review The Knife of Never Letting Go, dystopian wonder-book beloved by my blogging friends across the world. I'm not sure why I've been putting it off this long except maybe it's because while I did like it, I didn't love it with quite the fiery passion that everybody seems to love it. This is not to say that I didn't read it through quite quickly and then immediately set about acquiring the other two books in the series.


I think I'm presently deciding to go the more candid route with this review since my thoughts about the book just don't seem to be coalescing into a coherent whole. I mean, we've all read an intelligent, convincing review of The Knife of Never Letting Go, haven't we? Well, now we can read mine. Beware of rampant tense changes and me chattering at you in all three "persons" (1st, 2nd, and 3rd).

So, Todd Hewitt is our main character. Up until the opening pages of the book when things have already begun to go horribly even more awry than usual, Todd lives in the all male Prentisstown. Prentisstown is unique not only in the fact that it is without women but also in that all the men can hear each other's thoughts, an endless torrent of Noise of dubious truthfulness, that makes keeping secrets a challenge.

That's the thing, tho. Noise is noise. It's crash and clatter and it usually adds up to one big mash of sound and thought and picture and half the time it's impossible to make any sense of it at all. Men's minds are messy places and Noise is like the active, breathing face of that mess. It's what's true and what's believed and what's imagined and what's fantasized and it says one thing and a completely opposite thing at the same time and even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what's true and what's not when you're getting everything?

The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.

This challenge, however, is one that the many men of Prentisstown are meeting when it comes to Todd, the official last boy to become a man in Prentisstown. Everything's going along more or less as normal with Todd running errands and working on the farm of the two men who took him in when his parents died, Ben and Cillian. Then, one day Ben sends Todd and his faithful dog Manchee (who can talk) out to the swamp on the edge of town to pick some swamp apples (sounds yummy!). On this particular day in the swamp, everything changes. Todd discovers two things that he's always been lead to believe don't exist anymore: silence and a girl. Both things were supposed to have been destroyed by a long ago war with an alien race called Spackle. With these things popping up in his noise, Todd has become a danger to himself if he stays in Prentisstown any longer and is packed off with a rucksack full of supplies Ben already had packed and a journal his mother wrote that he can't read.

Suddenly Todd finds himself on the run with a girl who won't talk, a book that's supposed to help that his rudimentary reading skills renders useless, and years worth of carefully nurtured ignorance. Which is bad because, in Todd's new reality, a lot of people want him dead and he doesn't know why.

I think the biggest problem I had with The Knife of Never Letting Go is that it is so depressing which, oddly, is not usually a problem for me with books. There are no books that are too depressing for me, but this one dances on the line. Ness gives us a boy and a girl and a dog who we immediately sympathize with and root for as they face overwhelming odds against their even continuing to live. You are frustrated right along with Todd that he has essentially been booted out of his home for no reason he can understand, and from there on out next to nothing good seems to happen to these poor kids and when it does, it's so quickly overshadowed by tragedy that you soon forget the good. This should be a transcendant coming of age story that asks penetrating and valid questions about society, ours and theirs. Unfortunately, while there is definitely coming of age and absolutely penetrating questions, transcendence is hard to come by and you, like me, might find yourself peeking through the fingers you have over your eyes to see if maybe something good might just happen.

Okay, I'm making it sound like I really didn't like The Knife of Never Letting Go, but I promise you, I did. Like I said, Ness's characters are ones that you feel immediate sympathy for. They are fleshed out and real in their emotions and reactions. Even Manchee, the dog, is a great character himself. He's faithful and loyal and a little stupid, and you love him. The world Ness has created is bleak and fascinating and filled with mystery that slowly de-mystifies because readers are limited by Todd's perspective. It's a society that has a sadly believable outcome to an unusual problem. It's a society that causes us to consider our own society and the way that we think about things and the way that we so easily delude ourselves. What if people could hear our thoughts? Would we fear silence? Could we divine the truth? Would the lies we tell ourselves change our reality? Even more than that, we come to consider, as Todd approaches the birthday on which he will officially become a man; what exactly makes a man? Is it understanding? Valor? Violence? Self-sacrifice? Jadedness? Or does it all just depend on where you come from?

In the end, The Knife of Never Letting Go is among the best that dystopian fiction has to offer. It gives us a fast paced story that doesn't let go about characters that we come to love, but it also does what dystopian fiction should. It asks the big questions about society and humanity and demands that we consider not only the world the book creates but also the world we live in, which is never so far from the twisted realities of dystopia as we would like to think.

You should read this book (but definitely not when you're feeling down). Fair warning, though. If you read this one, you'd best consider getting your hands on the other two books in the series pronto, because it doesn't wrap up all nice at the end, and you will want to read The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men immediately.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Four Ms. Bradwells

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.



The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton
Ballantine, March 22, 2011

Synopsis:

Mia, Lainey, Betts, and Ginger, best friends since law school, are gathered for an impromptu reunion as Betts awaits Senate confirmation for a Supreme Court appointment. The group, known as the Ms. Bradwells since they started at the University of Michigan in 1979—when only three women had ever served full Senate terms and none had been appointed to the Court—have long supported one another through career changes and failed marriages, births, and deaths. But when the Senate hearing uncovers a nearly thirty-year-old skeleton in the group's collective closet, the Ms. Bradwells find themselves reliving a much darker period in their past—one that stirs up the secrets they've kept for (and from) one another, and that could change all of their lives forever.

I really liked Meg Waite Clayton's last book, The Wednesday Sisters, so I'm looking forward to what she's come up with next!

What are you "waiting on" this Wednesday?

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