The bookstore answer

Daniel Kehlmann

In an essay for Browse: The World in Bookshops, novelist Daniel Kehlmann imagines a conversation about bookstores. He has one of the participants in this conversation make a statement that I would like to break down into parts:

The model of the big chains has failed — inflexible, rarely appealing, always the wrong books in stock, often employees who don't know much.

Does this sound like the Barnes and Noble nearest to you? I think the statement overstates the case, but still it holds a lot of truth. With some exceptions, their employees do tend to be short-timers with little knowledge about the books they sell. Despite the size of the stores, they seem to focus on those books that sell best, stocking lots of copies of these, while ignoring less popular books even by the same authors, let alone less well known authors. Often I can browse for a long time without finding anything I am looking for. There's often nothing I either haven't already read or already seen on their shelves and rejected. The "new book" tables can be interesting, yet it is shocking how many old books are placed on these tables by staff members who apparently don't know any better.

But the small, nice, cosy bookshops with limited space and enthusiastic booksellers can't be the answer.

Why not? Because of that limited space. They, too, must pay attention to those books that sell a lot of copies, leaving even less space for more obscure books a few readers, myself included, are looking for. A shopper can always order books at these stores, but the same can be done at Barnes and Noble (or from Amazon). And smaller stores are less likely to offer discounts.

I have been impressed with Tombolo Books, a new store that opened a few months ago in St. Petersburg, Fla. I have purchased several books there that I have not seen at bigger stores. Still I am always disappointed by Tombolo's limited shelf space. After 10 minutes of browsing, or less, I am usually done. That's not much reward after a 30-minute drive.

The answer is therefore: big bookshops that are, however, not part of a chain.

A bookstore like this is risky business. A larger storefront means a higher rent, and perhaps more employees. That means selling a lot of books to succeed. Yet a few stores like this have shown the model can work. I have written before about how impressed I was with Parnassus Books in Nashville and McLean and Eakin Bookstore in Petosky, Mich. The latter is in a relatively small city with seasonal tourist trade and lots of winter snow. Yet this downtown store, with three levels and a large selection of books, has survived for a number of years. Parnassus has a strip mall location on the edge of a large city. Younger than McLean and Eakin, it also appears to be thriving.

Both stores emphasize books, not coffee, gifts, greeting cards and the like. McLean and Eakin carries an excellent selection of upscale board games, but these are in the basement, not the main floor, which is filled with books. When I last visited, I left with a shopping bag full of books (and one game) that I had never seen elsewhere.

Other successful large, non-chain bookstores have succeeded by selling used books as well as new ones. I am thinking particularly of Powell's in Portland, Ore., and Haslam's in St. Petersburg. Both have been around for a long time.

Such stores combine many of the advantages of the large book chains with the advantages of the small independent bookstores. Risky or not, there are enough success stories to suggest they may be, as Kehlmann says, the best answer.

Rambling through a summer

With Bill Bryson, a lack of focus is actually an asset. He is always at his best when he is allowed to ramble in his books, moving from one topic to another, wherever his interests take him. One Summer: America 1927 (2013) is just such a book.

So much was going on in America during the summer of 1927 that Bryson is free to ramble at will, turning up fascinating stories and trivia wherever he turns. This was the summer Babe Ruth hit 60 homes runs (and Lou Gehrig almost as many), Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, Gene Tunney beat Jack Dempsey, Henry Ford introduced the Model A, Al Capone became the most powerful man in Chicago, Walt Disney introduced Mickey Mouse to the world, silent movies reached their peak with Wings just as talkies burst upon the scene, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed and on and on.

And so Bryson wanders from flagpole sitters to the severe flooding that covered much of the Midwest in water that summer to the invention of hot dogs to flappers to Prohibition. He tells us that Babe Ruth spent his first paycheck on a bicycle. The IQ test was designed to determine stupidity, not intelligence. The Rockettes were originally called the Roxyettes after Roxy Rothafel, founder of the Roxy theaters.

There is never a dull moment reading these nearly 500 pages. It makes one wonder what someone like Bryson might someday be able to write about the wild year 2020, with the impeachment of one president, the scandal uncovered in the administration of the previous president and the virus that shut down not just the country but the entire world. Bryson himself is too close to these events, hardly objective enough to do them justice. But 90 years from now, give or take, some writer will give it a go and amaze readers with the wonder of it all. Let's hope this writer will be the equal of Bill Bryson.

The art of hearing voices

In The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, Jan-Phillip Sendker tells of a man who not only hears heartbeats but can distinguish one heartbeat from another from across the room. In a sequel, A Well-Tempered Heart (2012), he writes about a 38-year-old woman, the man's daughter, who hears a voice nobody else can hear. And like her father, Julia must travel to Burma to find answers.

Julia is a prominent attorney in New York City who can no longer focus on her work. That voice she alone can hear keeps asking her questions and giving her advice. Who are you? What do these men want from you? Be on your guard. Forced to take a leave of absence, she decides to visit her half-brother in Burma, a mystical man named U Ba. Perhaps he can help silence the desperate woman's voice within her.

Sendker diverts to another story in the middle part of the novel, a story about a Burmese woman and her two sons in a time of war. This apparent diversion, of course, is really another part of the same story, the explanation of Julia's mysterious voice.

The novel becomes a love story by its end, a story about love in its many dimensions.

Sendker writes with a lyrical and mystical quality that will appeal to some readers, while turning off others. I find myself somewhere in the middle.

The bias of the experts

(N)o one is less welcome in the literature departments than the accomplished filler of multiple shelves of books.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Georges Simenon

Paul Theroux writes specifically of French novelist Georges Simenon in the essay quoted above. Simenon's books may, in many cases, have had high literary quality, but there were so many of them. And most of them were murder mysteries. Academics might sometimes accept a mystery writer like Raymond Chandler for class discussions, but Chandler wrote relatively few books. Simenon was a "filler of multiple shelves of books."

Quantity tends to be equated, and not just in academic circles, with a lack of quality. Might this in any way explain why Anthony Trollope, who wrote so many novels, is less highly regarded than Thomas Hardy or the Bronte sisters, who wrote relatively few? As for modern literature, I can recall when a young Joyce Carol Oates, having few novels under her belt, seemed to be more highly esteemed in literary circles than she is now, near the end of a prolific career.

This may have something to do with the difficulty inherent in giving serious study to a large number of books. It would be much easier to become an expert on the works of a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Herman Melville than a writer like Trollope, Oates or Simenon.

Then there is the matter of popularity, not the question of how many of an author's books are published but rather how many are sold. Best-seller lists, with a few exceptions, discourage literary acceptance. Literary prizes usually go to books you have never heard of, let alone read. This is not to say that literary value should in any way be determined by popularity. I rarely read best-selling books, and if I do it's not because they are bestsellers. Yet I believe some best-selling novels, such as those by Ann Patchett and Donna Tartt, deserve more attention from literary scholars than they are likely to get. After all, Charles Dickens was once the most popular writer on the planet.

"How can (so the argument seems to run) a prolific and popular writer be any good?" Theroux asks in  his essay on Simenon. Academics, he says, favor the underdog. They also favor literature only they, not the common reader, can really appreciate, understand and explain.

More casualties of war

The Great War continues to destroy lives even after its end in Elizabeth Speller's intriguing 2010 novel The Return of Captain John Emmett.

The title character is already dead when the novel opens in 1920. Emmett returned to England after the war a broken man. He was put in a home for veterans suffering from shell shock. One day he escaped and was later found with a bullet in his head and a gun by his side. His will left much of his money to people whose connection to him is ambiguous. Now his sister, Mary, wants to learn what drove John Emmett to kill himself and why he dispersed his money as he did, and she asks Laurence Bartram, her brother's childhood friend, to help her find some answers.

Laurence, a veteran himself, also leads a life unsettled by the war. He wants to be a writer but cannot focus on his work. So he welcomes the diversion. He also welcomes spending time with Mary, a girl he was drawn to even in his youth. He falls in love with her, yet discovers she hides a mystery of her own.

Aided by his resourceful friend, Charlie, Laurence learns that Emmett had been placed in charge of a firing squad while in France. The man who was executed was an officer who himself was apparently suffering from shell shock. Now other men connected with that execution have been dying under mysterious circumstances. Might Emmett's death have been a murder, not a suicide?

Speller's story is long, deliberate and detailed, yet never dull or filled with confusing complications like so many mysteries. Anyone who enjoys British mysteries should love this one.

Texas essays

I grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state ...

Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave

Most books of essays consist of magazine articles, newspaper columns, book introductions and the like assembled for the first time in one place. Larry McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas is unusual in that it was written as book of essays. The nine essays are numbered as chapters, and at the end one McMurtry usually previews the next.

The book was published in 1968, when McMurtry was still a young Texas writer, and reprinted 50 years later. It is a little jarring when he repeatedly refers to the president from Texas and you realize he is talking about Lyndon B. Johnson. Yet otherwise these essays hardly seem dated at all. Well, there is the one about the Houston Astrodome, then the newest wonder of the world.

McMurtry's essays, on the whole, reflect the same theme as most of his novels: the surrender of rural Texas to urban Texas and the cowboy's flight to the city. The author comes from a family of cowboys. He writes movingly of his grandfather, father and uncles, all cowboys who lived to see the end of the cowboy era. Although he grew up practically without books, it was books and not horses and cattle that directed his own life.

McMurtry writes about other Texas writers, and there haven't been many. He is less interested in those like Terry Southern and Katherine Anne Porter — who may have been born in Texas but you would never know it from their writing — than those like Roy Bedichek, W.P. Webb and J. Frank Dobie, who wrote about Texas, although few people outside of Texas have ever heard of them. And, he concedes, few people in Texas have actually read them. McMurtry has read them, and his essay on their books is instructive.

He also writes about how his novel Horseman, Pass By was made into the movie Hud. It was filmed in Texas, and McMurtry witnessed some of that filming. Having lived with real cowboys, his comments about actors like Paul Newman pretending to be cowboys are priceless. Newman actually looked more authentic than most, he says.

His reflection on western movies in general prove interesting. Is he bothered that Hollywood's vision of the West has been mostly fantasy? Not at all. Romantic movies are mostly fantasy, too. Same with war movies and gangster movies. Real cowboys, he says, have always loved cowboy movies. Who doesn't love a good fantasy?

Larry McMurtry's essays, especially half century later, may be about as popular as the works of Bedichek, Webb and Dobie. But I found them to be rewarding reading.

Reading old books

It's a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

C.S. Lewis

This rule of thumb offered by C.S. Lewis in an essay called "On the Reading of Old Books," reprinted in God in the Dock, seems like good advice, but we before we let it guide our own reading habits we may want to define our terms.

Lewis, remember, was a professor of literature specializing in works from the Middle Ages and before. In other words, to him "old books" were written before the 16th century. He was thinking of writers like Plato and St. Augustine, whom he specifically mentions in his essay. Even though he was writing in the middle of the 20th century, he apparently considered the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to be "new books." You and I might want to think of these terms a little differently.

When I was writing reviews for a newspaper and receiving books from publishers regularly, I thought of "new books" as recent publications: still in bookstores and certainly still in print. In just a few months time they became "old books," and publishers were probably no longer interested in reviews. My job required me to read mostly new books or sometimes old books recently reprinted. I can recall reading and reviewing all of J.P. Marquand's Mr. Moto books after they came out in new editions. They were old books that qualified as new and something of a treat for me.

Since I retired I have changed my definitions of old and new books. A new book is anything published within the last few years, keeping that term purposely ambiguous. Old books are everything else. In recent months I have read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (1970), Jesse Stuart's Trees of Heaven (1940), D.E. Stevenson's Young Clementina (1938), Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838), Georges Simenon's Maigret in New York (1947), Richard Armour's Drug Store Days (1959) and a variety of other books I would consider old. I enjoyed them all and benefited from them all.

You may define your terms differently. However we may define them, I think there is value in the advice C.S. Lewis gave about reading "old books," even if a one-for-one ratio hardly seems necessary. Here are some reasons for reading old books.

1. Books are not like bread. They need not be fresh to be good.

2. No period of history holds all the wisdom, all the truth or all the beauty. Reading older books reminds us of this.

3. Time has a way of filtering out unworthy books. This is probably even more true of the "old books" Lewis was talking about that those I mentioned. Readers are less likely to keep and publishers are less likely to reprint bad books. The 19th century books or the early 20th century books you can still find in a Barnes and Noble are likely to be a pretty good books, well worth reading. Otherwise they would not have survived the competition with newer books. Of course, there are countless old books of value you will never find at Barnes and Noble.

4. Lewis argues that we "need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period." Writers, however different they may seem from their contemporaries, actually have a worldview similar to those contemporaries. Reading old books helps us see the mistakes of earlier periods as well as the mistakes of our own.

One argument Lewis makes strikes me as foolish. "The new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in position to judge it." OK, I'll buy the first part of that statement. New books are still on trial, but the same is true of old books. People continue to debate the merits of works by Dickens, Twain and even St. Augustine. As for the second part of his statement, everyone who reads a book is in a position to judge it. An amateur's opinion may or may not be as valuable as that of a literary scholar or literary critic, but amateur readers are the ones who determine best seller lists, book club agendas and even which books make it as far as second editions. Simply by buying a book one expresses a judgment, and that judgment has value, too.

To be more than ourselves

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

C.S. Lewis read for his profession (he taught literature at Oxford and later Cambridge), for pleasure and also, as suggested by the above quotation, for the enlargement of his being. Then he wrote many books that enlarged the being of his many, many readers.

In the books he wrote he had much to say about the books he read and about reading in general, and now much of what he said on the subject has been compiled into a single book, The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others' Eyes.

Lewis loved Jane Austen ("I've been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn't wear out a bit.") and War and Peace ("It has completely changed my view of novels."), but The Three Musketeers not so much ("I don't think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had even seen a cloud, a road, or a tree.") He wondered how Mark Twain could write Adventures of Huckleberry Finn yet nothing else that was nearly as good.

He has much to say about fairy tales and about children's literature in general, and of course his own Narnia stories became children's classics. He once argued: "I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story." As someone who did not read those Narnia stories until I was an adult, I am almost inclined to agree with him.

For parents, teachers or others who worry about the unworthiness of the books children read, Lewis offers this sensible advice: "Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books." Those discouraged from reading "bad" books may stop reading altogether.

And those who don't read, Lewis writes elsewhere, inhabit "a tiny world."

Surprised by Joy Davidman

The late-in-life romance of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman must be one of the most famous literary love stories of the 20th century. Lewis, a respected authority on Medieval and Renaissance literature and popular author of books about Christianity, and Davidman, a poet and novelist who was a former atheist, former Communist and former Jew who converted to Christianity, have been the subject of numerous books and even a notable film, Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

Yet these accounts have generally been from the point of view of Lewis. We see how she impacted his life. One of the pleasures of Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis by Abigail Santamaria is that it reveals how he impacted her life.

Joy's parents were strict and unaffectionate. A less than perfect report card usually meant a slap in the face from her father. Throughout her youth she dreamed of Fairyland, a yearning very much like what Lewis describes in several of his books. She sought her Fairyland in her poetry, in the Communist Party and the Soviet Union (she once idolized Stalin much as she later idolized Lewis) and even in an early form of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology. She married a fellow Communist, Bill Gresham, also a writer, and they had two sons.

Reading books by C.S. Lewis and experiencing a profound religious experience when, still an atheist, she bowed in desperation to pray, her life was transformed. Bill changed, too, and together they joined a Presbyterian Church, both even becoming officers in the church. Bill was the more commercially successful writer of the pair, selling one of his novels to Hollywood, but he drank too much, once fired a rifle in their house while the boys slept and was sometimes unfaithful.

And then Joy began pursuing Lewis, as if he were her Fairyland. She wrote to him, Lewis responded and a long correspondence began. Then she left for England for several months, supposedly to do research for a book, although her real purpose was to meet Lewis and, if possible, win the heart of this contented bachelor who lived in Oxford with his brother. Despite the fact that her husband was alcoholic and attracted to other women, she left their children in the care of Bill and Renee, Joy's pretty cousin, a woman fleeing her own husband. When Bill and Renee fell in love, Joy portrayed it to Lewis as a betrayal, although Santamaria suggests it may have been her plan all along.

In time Joy took her boys to England, she and Bill divorced and she and Lewis were married twice, once in a civil ceremony and again in a Christian one.

Joy Davidman does not come through as a particularly admirable person even in her own biography, yet the author leaves no suggestion at the end that Lewis was ever deceived or taken advantage of. He loved Joy Davidman with all his heart and grieved deeply after her premature death from cancer. Imperfect though she may have been, she made his own imperfect life seem briefly like Fairyland.

Finding (and losing) ourselves in bookstores

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

"We know them. They come into a bookshop to find themselves. Book people."

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, quoting a bookseller, Browse

As a boy, I could lose myself utterly in a book; now I seem to lose myself only in used bookstores.

Michael Dirda, Browse

So which is it? Do we book people go into bookstores to find ourselves or to lose ourselves?

Both, I think. Or perhaps Michael Dirda and the Kenyan bookseller quoted by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor are really saying the same thing. Losing oneself may be a way of finding oneself. This may be what C.S. Lewis was talking about in the lines of his I quoted the other day ("First, surrender," May 1), those about surrendering ourselves to art (or presumably anything else) in order to get the most out of it. And what we get will most likely be something revealing about ourselves.

Michael Dirda

When we walk into a bookstore we immediately begin a sorting process, discarding (in our minds, at least) those books, sometimes entire categories of books, that don't interest us. When I am trying to find myself in a bookstore, I know I'm not likely to find me in a cookbook or a James Patterson novel or a book about motorcycles. My search takes me to the fiction, especially to literary fiction but also to mysteries, never romances. I browse through history (I've seen a lot of it, so might find myself there) and biography.

And so it goes for each of us. We seek out books that call to us, those that seem like mirrors. We buy those books that look the most like us, or at least those that look like our particular interests of the moment.

Meanwhile time passes, but we are hardly aware of it. In a bookstore, as in life itself, the search can be more rewarding than the discovery. And so we lose ourselves on the way to finding ourselves.

Art vs. Life

Woody Allen has long wanted to be Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director of artful films, but the former gag writer and standup comedian has always been too funny for that. His funniest films usually have jokes about death, art and other serious subject matter. His serious films usually have witty asides or nostalgic references to the lighter side of life. Allen has always been conflicted, and this is the subject of Peter J. Bailey's 2001 book The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen.

Being nearly 20 years old, the book omits a lot of Allen films and focuses mainly on those he made in the 1990s, yet most of what Bailey says still holds up.

A bigger problem is that being published by a university press (University of Kentucky), the book aims for a cerebral audience. A couple of times Bailey delights in reliving the scene in Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan steps out from behind a movie poster in a theater line to put in place a pompous professor talking about his work. Unfortunately, Bailey too often sounds like the pompous professor.

So many Allen characters, Bailey points out, struggle between the lures of creating lasting art and living a life filled with love, laughs, good food and other common pleasures, as if they were mutually exclusive. The latter is often portrayed as an illusion, or as magic. (Watch Magic in the Moonlight, an Allen film made after this book was published.) As Danny Rose says in Broadway Danny Rose, "It's important to have some laughs, no question about it, but you got to suffer a little, too. Because otherwise, you miss the whole point of life." Yet another Allen character finds the meaning of life by watching Marx Brothers films.

While Allen is making up his mind, we movie fans can find art and Bergman-style suffering in Allen's films, but also laughs, love and endless magic.

Beneath the surface

There may be a little bit of Patricia Highsmith in Laura Lippman, a little bit of Ripley in Polly, the central character in Lippman's 2018 novel Sunburn.

Polly is an attractive young redhead whose exterior obscures what's underneath, sort of like a sunburn. In the opening chapters, she walks away from her husband and daughter, simply leaving them on the beach. She hides in a small town, Belleville, Del., and takes a job as a waitress.

Adam, another mysterious stranger, shows up in the same town and takes a job as cook in that same restaurant. He is actually a private detective hired to tail Polly, alias Pauline Ditmars, and find where she is hiding a substantial life insurance settlement paid to another daughter. Polly stabbed to death her abusive first husband, yet somehow still managed to both get out of prison and hide the insurance money.

Before Adam can find the money, he falls in love with Polly, and she with him. So both have secrets, although hers, it turns out, are much more complicated, more sinister than his.

Lippman's plot moves along slowly, but she continually adds new elements, new twists, that keep us hooked. She's a terrific writer of novels of this sort, and this one should not be missed.

First, surrender

You need to be able to sit still to be a reader.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Hunter S. Thompson

Paul Theroux makes this comment in his essay about Hunter S. Thompson in his book Figures in a Landscape. Thompson, although he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other books and articles, didn't read much. Theroux describes him as a "boisterous recluse," which may seem contradictory. Thompson liked to be moving, doing something, even if that something was writing, a seemingly stationary activity. Reading was just too stationary for him.

Today we seem to have a world full of Hunter Thompsons. Whenever I sit in a waiting room, I notice I am usually the only one reading. Others sit, but they play with their phones. Even leafing through the old magazines found in every doctor's waiting room now seems too stationary for most people.

Hyperactivity, once the province of nonstop children, now seems to have spread to their parents and grandparents as well. I shouldn't suggest I have been immune. As much as I love movies, I find it difficult to watch a DVD or DVR movie without doing a sudoku puzzle at the same time. Even when I am reading a book, I break once in awhile to play spider solitaire. I also listen to Spotify while reading and have to fiddle with that frequently.

So reading is hard today, even for those of us who still try to read, and that's because, as Paul Theroux suggests, sitting still is hard. Good reading takes focus, concentration. The more challenging the book, the more concentration it requires.

C.S. Lewis makes this observation in An Experiment in Criticism: "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)"

Whether we are reading a book, watching a movie or visiting an art museum, how can we surrender when we are trying to do something else at the same time?