December: notes from the front lines

Dear Annie,

Oh my, you've posted so many things recently that I want to respond to thoughtfully.  I have other books by George MacDonald, and the wonderful combination of L. Frank Baum and Charles Santore sitting by the computer waiting for scanning and blogging.  I need to comb through my shelves for some good books with Latino characters.  And I'll get there too -- just not tonight.

I was in the store 11 hours today, working flat-out the whole time.  Hanukkah starts tomorrow, so the holiday rush has heated up more quickly than in some other years.  (Heaven knows what'll happen to shopping madness next year when the first night of Hanukkah is the evening before Thanksgiving.)  Some of the many things that happened to me today:

-- In YA: at closing time, we had only one copy each of Every Day, The Fault in Our Stars, and Where Things Come Back: I suspect they'll all sell out before noon tomorrow (more coming on Monday).  We seem to be selling more YA books than in the past.  There's a great crop of new ones this year, but I also suspect that more families that have been shopping in my book section since their kids were tiny now have teenagers -- and they keep coming back!

-- After giving a very enthusiastic description of the Anna Hibiscus books to one customer, I reached for the first in the series, only to find it completely gone.  I know that we had 20 copies a little more than a week ago.  A thorough search unearthed our last four copies in the back of an overstock shelf, but I ran to the computer to place an urgent order for another few dozen to get us through the next weeks.

-- An African-American grandmother asked if we had an early chapter book series starring a black girl.  As I pulled books to show her -- we had five series in stock -- another woman (white) came over to listen because that was one of her interests.  There was only one copy of a few of the titles I was showing; I worried about that, but left them amicably perusing all the books.

-- A discussion of the depressingly bad grammar in the Junie B. Jones early chapter series veered into talking about Latin -- the customer teaches it at the college level -- and its strict grammar.  I really liked the woman, and before long we were talking about college texts of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic.  I could have gone on in that conversation for a while, but too many others called.

-- Someone walked past me carrying volumes 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the Wrinkle in Time books, leading me to worry that we were out of #1.  No, she smiled, her daughter had read the first and wanted to read all the rest of them.  That quick interaction meant I didn't have to stare at the gap on the shelf trying to remember what had been there.

-- The man who ordered the gorgeously illustrated three-volume hardcover boxed set of The Lord of the Rings ($100) came to pick it up.  But I have yet to sell one of our four-volume paperback boxed sets of the complete Calvin and Hobbes comics (also $100).

-- I had to explain that although, no, we don't have a book with animal characters that would explain sex to a three year-old, we do carry some good ones with people.  I don't know what the outcome was on that.

These conversations are all part of daily life in the job of a bookseller, but the volume and variety increase at this time of year.  It's what makes things interesting.

Love,

Deborah

Summer reading, fallen angels and woodpeckers

Dear Annie,

Here I am in Maine, with the usual several days of getting systems functional.  We have internet now -- and it has survived the first crashing thunderstorm.

I'm glad you've managed to revisit some more YA books of your youth.  Like you, I've started reading some books I'd set aside for this part of the summer.

Today's treat is 
Where Things Come Back, a first novel by John Corey Whaley.  It provoked some cheerful speculation about the state of young people's literature when it won the Printz Award (best YA literature) in January.  It's a fascinating melange of philosophical musings, small town claustrophobia, family trauma, mystery and media spectacle.  Reminds me a bit of John Green books in the ways the characters are trying to make sense of their lives in trying circumstances.  Not as consciously intellectual, but wonderfully written.  I'm going to try to avoid spoilers in what follows, but am offering enough to let you know it's not just a nice book about a woodpecker.

We start with 17 year-old Cullen and his younger brother Gabriel, their good friend Lucas, their dead-from-an-overdose cousin and the hazing tensions of high school in a small Arkansas town.  Then a birdwatcher comes to town and claims to have spotted a rare bird which was believed to be extinct.  As the town slowly realizes the business potential involved, the boys resist the mounting enthusiasm.

It's hard to say what bothered me so much about John Barling and the whole bird thing without painting myself as an angry-for-no-real-reason teenager dressed in black and moping around like Charlie Brown all the time.  But it was the same for Gabriel, and Lucas, too.  It was as if we got the joke that everyone in town had been told.  We knew the punch line.  And it would've been much easier to sit back while all of Lily fell under the awe-inspiring spell of the possibility of second chances, or rebirth, but we just couldn't do it.  I may not have liked the people in Lily that much, but I felt sorry for anyone being massively scammed.

A new, apparently unrelated character pops up in a Georgia fundamentalist community: Benton Sage, who in alternating chapters goes on a mission to Ethiopia, becomes disillusioned, and is introduced to The Book of Enoch, a strange and ancient text about the fall of angels and God's reasons for sending the flood.  So we have an elusive bird redeeming a town called Lily, and searching-for-meaning Benton, when -- wham! -- Cullen's brother disappears.  Things become more confusing and scary.  Most of the book is from Cullen's perspective, muddling through an awful situation.  More characters appear.  The moment at which they all cross paths is a stunner.  But the point of the book isn't the solution to the mystery.

Near the end, Cullen speculates about the meaning of life.

I'll tell you now that I still don't know the meaning of mine.  And Lucas Cader, with all his brains and talent, doesn't know the meaning of his, either.  But I'll tell you the meaning of all this.  The meaning of some bird showing up and some boy disappearing and you knowing all about it.  The meaning of this was not to save you, but to warn you instead.  To warn you of confusion and delusion and assumption.... To warn you of two-foot-tall birds that say they can help, but never do.

Definitely worth putting on your next-summer list.

Love,

Deborah

Summer reading

Dear Annie,

I've only read the first Gregor, although we sell a fair amount of all of them.  One of the indications of a good series is when readers keep coming back for more.  I think I read it during one of those intense times in ordering season when I read half a dozen books a week and place orders that will arrive six months in the future.  Gregor hasn't stuck with me.  That said, the one vivid image I hold from the first book is the laundry room, which is the portal to Underland.  In my mind, I see the cavernous laundry room in my parents' -- your grandparents' -- basement on West 77th Street.  So I guess my belief about Underland is that it's beneath the Upper West Side, probably below the Museum of Natural History.

The other element I've held onto is the into-the-rabbit-hole nature of Gregor's fall.  It was my impression not that the cockroaches (great comic relief!) and other animals were huge, but that the humans shrank as they fell.  Am I making this up?

You so deserve some relaxed reading time!  Around this time of year, I start packing some books I haven't read into a going-to-Maine box.  I'll dig through the box when we get there in August and work my way through a number of them while lying in the hammock.  Some are books I've ordered and know I need to read before they arrive.  And others are ones I just really want to read because I hear they're exceptional.

Here are the three YA books that I really want to read by Labor Day:


Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi. It won the Printz Award for best YA book two years ago.  Dystopian future with environmental breakdown in full swing.  About a boy who works mining beached oil tankers for their scrap metal.  Into his world sails a perfect clipper ship.  Sounds dark and fascinating.



Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley -- the winner of this year's Printz award.  Nothing futuristic or magical.  A high school boy whose brother disappears, and whose town becomes the focus of the search for a rare woodpecker.  I have high hopes for this one.

And
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, which just came out.  It's a World War II drama.  Two young women -- one a pilot, one a spy, each other's friends -- crash in Nazi-occupied France.  The intelligence agent is captured -- her interrogation and confession make up a large part of the book.  The other things I know about this book are that it's full of twists and surprises -- so the reviews are a bit squirrely -- and the writing is riveting.

Anybody out there read any of these?

Love,

Deborah