Obviously, you can tell a lot about a person by their books. I’ll go so far as to say that you can tell practically everything about a person by his/her books. Celebrity’s phony books really crack me up. It’s better to have no books. If you don’t read, own it.
Frank Sinatra’s real books library.
“Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.”
– Charles Churchill
Great use they have, when in the hands
Of one like me, who understands,
Who understands the time and place,
The person, manner, and the grace,
Which fools neglect; so that we find,
If all the requisites are join’d,
From whence a perfect joke must spring,
A joke’s a very serious thing.-Charles Churchill, The Ghost (book IV, lines 1379 – 1387), 1762
The End of Food
cover design by Mark Robinson, 2009
photograph from “school play” by julia fullerton-batten
The UK’s World Book Day - now in its 14th year –  is a celebration of books and reading traditionally aimed at school children. Teenagers embracing the brave new world of digital reading are the focus of this year’s WBD. In a survey conducted for today’s event, 40+% of teens have read a book on a computer, mobile phone, pad or some sort of e-reader. Teens are being targeted with a new website, Digi-tale, which offers a downloadable new story from bestselling author Louise Rennison, of Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging fame. “How to Make Any Twit Fall In Love With You” will be delivered to fans’ computers or mobile phones in a series of episodes, with an interactive feature that allows readers to change the names of characters to those of their friends. Fabbity fab!! (At the risk of sounding like a lunatic Luddite (sorry Lord Byron), I can’t believe it’s necessary to have episodic books where you can insert you and your pals into the story via a search-replace function to appeal to teens. The serialized novel is one thing, but this “twist” does not exactly inspire, suggesting perhaps that narcissism has become de rigeur).
Of the teens surveyed, wizards and vampires were –  unsurprisingly  – the literary topics of choice, with the Harry Potter series and the terrible Twilight books topping the list of teens’ favorite reads. Also in the top 10 were Lord of the Rings and The Da Vinci Code. The survey revealed teens’ top “book crushes”, with the hottest literary character prizes going to schoolgirl wizard Hermione Granger and Twilight’s shirtless moron/werewolf Jacob Black. All is not lost, Narnia hero Prince Caspian, Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy and Jacqueline Wilson’s tomboy Tracy Beaker also landed high on the eclectic hot-list. Grownups surveyed recalled their most beloved adolescent read as fave of the pimply set, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and 1984 remain enduringly popular reads in both age groups.
So the e-reader will be the savior of the young the world is changing, the genie is out of the bottle, as diesel trains replaced steam, as the printing press replaced the parchment and quill the e- reader will be the medium that progresses literacy in future, for it isn’t really important what children read on, just important that they read, now leave me alone while I shuffle through the remaining 37 years of my life.
Does this guy just scream “Philadelphia”, or what?
It’s 1994 all over again.
Borders – born as a used bookstore in Michigan 40 years ago and long seen as the less idiotic of the large chains – filed its long-expected bankruptcy yesterday. The global reaching retail chain that helped define the age of the book superstore leaves empty malls, airport terminals and a struggling book industry wondering what indignity will follow. Borders will close hundreds of its stores in the next few week, unceremoniously sending its employees the unemployment line. Also worried are book publishers – who are getting burned to the tune of millions owed to them by the bereft chain – and mall owners, whose shopping centers are anchored by Borders’s superstores. Yes, there are still malls and shopping centers anchored by Borders. Barnes and Noble could come out smelling like a rose. But it’s not likely. The biggest threat to Barnes & Noble is the same threat that exists to independent book sellers and to anyone engaged in the sale of printed books, the Internet.
Remember in the early 1990s, when independent bookstores were closing all over the country as Borders and Barnes & Nobles moved in with their super low prices and coffee couches? When the chain bookstores were seen as great predators gobbling up local booksellers? And then Megastores like Walmart and Costco started selling bestsellers, so that neighborhood bookstores were weathering threats from all sides? Then came the internet and Amazon and most of them had to shutter their doors? The number of independent bookstores has been declining for some time, but creepily, the sales of books themselves are declining for everyone. Besides the obvious fact that people are quantifiably dumber than ever (I can count on 1 hand people I know who consider reading a habit up there with their Zumba classes or marathon running, their Thursday night gathering at some stupid bar).
And, entire categories of books, like reference books and travel books are just passe junk, now that all that information is available instantly and for free on the Internet. Now that everything is dominated by Amazon, the big chains are kaput, too.
Here’s hoping that someday the Kindle will be the new Betamax.
Here is a woefully incomplete list of bookstore casualties of the past few years:
RIP Borders, East Kensington, London 2000 - 2009
Rejection, betrayal, mental illness, death. In honor of stupid Valentines Day, these are my choices for the most devastating romantic reads. Read ’em and weep. Literally!
Villette. Our unreliable narrator says that she wants to leave the reader free to imagine a happy ending. But there is no happy ending for Lucy Snowe, a heartbreakingly lonely woman escaping a tragic past who, having found the love she never expected, comes face to face with the heartache she had tried so long to escape. With her eccentric colleague M Paul, Lucy spends “the three happiest years of her life”. Alas, Lucy’s happy days are severely numbered. M. Paul’s ship is destroyed by a storm on his return from the West Indies, falling victim to the “destroying angel of tempest”.
Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night, she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling Imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven’s threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary. (Lucy Snowe)
