Time for celebration! That’s right! November seventh is National Bookstore Day! Yippee!
I will be celebrating in my usual fashion. I’ll be chasing down the staff and asking for the latest spectacular reads. I’ll be skipping through the sports section, pouting past the self-help, mulling in the literature, and flipping through the pages of various magazines. Best of all, I will leave the store with five new books to read. Hubby limits me to five.
It took a bookstore not a library to foster my love of reading. Do not get me wrong. I love my childhood experiences in the public library. I even had favorite librarians, but when I reached a certain age – let’s say the age of annoyance – I was kicked-out by those same librarians on a regular basis. I promise you; sometimes, they just stopped me at the door!
There was a time I was to cool to be seen with a book, too. This would be my high school and college years. Textbooks were cool. They represented studying and school “research” but a novel smacked of nerdism. Anyone who reads these book talks and corrects my many English mistakes now knows why.
It was a messy bookstore in downtown Nashville that created the monster you now read. In an old wooden five-n-dime converted into floor to ceiling books, I dove into the Tennessee history section. My new passion became reading and retelling ghost stories at the many camps I attended. This decrepit store added to my imagination as images of ghosts haunted the very aisles I perused.
After moving to Memphis, I combined my frugal and annoying nature by reading the local history at Bookstar on the floor. It wasn’t long before I noticed others doing the same thing and I made friends. One of those friends turned me on to mysteries for which I am ever grateful.
I continue my love of bookstores by visiting and buying local history books when I travel. I have ghost stories from Maine, Oregon, Alaska, Ireland, Venice, etc. In Natchez, I met a nice store owner who placed One for the Money in my hands because I was in dire need of a mystery. This is how Janet Evanovich and the Stephanie Plum series came to north Mississippi libraries!
I will be forever indebted to an enthusiastic bookseller on Prince Edward Island. It was his high praise of South American literature that turned me on to Gabriel García Márquez. Love in the Time of Cholera is one of my all-time favorite books.
Be sure to celebrate and annoy your closest bookstore employee this coming week!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
National Bookstore Day (copy)
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (copy)
Is Jane Austen revolving in her wooden coffin or spinning in the family crypt? Perhaps she is waiting casually for the next rain so as to emerge from nearly 200 years dead as a zombie?!? This is exactly what is happening to others in a new book by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
With Austen’s work in the public domain, almost anything is possible, but I like Grahame-Smith’s ability to alter the story and make it ridiculously fun. I see this as a great opportunity to bring campy and classic together for an enthusiastic classroom experience.
Word-for-word text, chapters, and storyline order does not change unless to add zombies. For example, in the open sentence of Austen’s work it states, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” In Grahame-Smith’s version one reads, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
The characters and ethics remain exactly as written in the classic with slight zombie precautions. For example, Mrs. Bennett is consumed with teaching her five daughters the matrimonial arts in both renditions. Readers will find Mr. Bennett less laissez faire towards his daughters and more guiding in their studies of the martial arts. Furthermore, the Bennett sisters all carry small daggers hidden beneath dresses, but refuse to be seen with muskets. The large gun provides onlookers a very unladylike silhouette.
It is a fact during Austen’s lifetime the word zombie did not exist. Grahame-Smith prefers to use words such as undead, unmentionables and plague stricken instead; although, the word zombie is peppered throughout. I imagine a classroom might enjoy doing the same vocabulary exercise.
I do realize I am treading on sacred ground by suggesting this book. By all means, if this sounds hideous, do not read further. I found the reading hilarious. I admit that I thought Elizabeth was destined to become one of the undead by the book’s cover art, but I will be bold and tell you, do not fear. It is her friend Charlotte who withers into plague-dom.
If you do like this format – be advised – the movie rights are sold and another book by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith is out titled Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tweak (copy)
In this season of scary, my last two booktalks discussed a town lost to methamphetamines (meth) and the dangers lurking in our plant world. Combining their messages, I began to wonder if meth occurs naturally in the plant world and ran across a Wikipedia entry claiming it does.
“Methamphetamine has been reported to occur naturally in Acacia berlandieri and possibly Acacia rigidula, trees which grow in west Texas.”
Yes, I am skeptical. I find a normal path’s reversal odd since drugs derive from plants rather than researchers finding them in plants after they are synthesized. It could happen, I guess, but the path to drug use is happening and rather scary.
Two more books to scare you are Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff. The father and son actually wrote the separate memoirs at the same time. They also stopped writing about the same time when David suffered a brain hemorrhage and Nic relapsed into abuse.
The two recovered and finished their perspective manuscripts and decided to let each other read them before publication. David felt it was a fair arrangement since Nic’s abuse had hurt family and friends and he did not want Nic’s book to hurt anyone else. The experience brought them together and both books were published in February, 2008.
In Beautiful Boy we see every parent’s nightmare happening to David as he watches his bright, talented son descend into drugs. David prescribes to the tough love method and just before Nic hits bottom during the writing relapse, David is ready to say, “No, I will not give you money and contact your sponsor.”
By reading both books, readers will get a full understanding of secrets. For example, David claims his son was 17 when he started experimenting with drugs, but in Tweak we find Nic is 11 when he starts. They both claim it is the meth that brought Nic to his lowest, but I found Nic to be more enamored with heroin. It is odd to read how Nic associates the heroin “nod” to being cool and the meth “tweak” to being messed up. I am left wondering if heroin lurks in his future.
Whatever one may think of meth and books about the subject, these two are very useful sources. Whether one finds themselves on the path of patience with a user or the path of abuse, these two books are rough but arrive at hope.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Wicked Plants (copy)
It was a beautiful July day when we hired a guide to lead us up one of the mountains in Alaska’s Denali National Park. Isaac, the guide provided by our remote lodge, packed us lunches for a full day of hiking that included animal sightings and a nap in a wildflower covered meadow. Along the way, we snacked on the abundance of wild berries that Isaac promised were safe.
I must give Isaac’s credentials. All of 25, young Isaac was a botanist with one children’s book on spiders published and a dream to work on an Alaskan crab boat. Both of us trusted his judgment; even though, I was reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer in which the author claims Christopher MacCandless’ death on eating poisonous “Alaskan” berries.
Isaac taught us the difference between safe and dangerous berries on this hike. We now forage on berries while hiking as an energy boost. Um, this was before I read Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants and all those nasty little berries lurking around to poison me.
The full title is Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & other Botanical Atrocities. The fun chapter titles include: “This Houseplant could be Your Last,” “Deadly Dinner,” “Stop and Smell the Ragweed,” “Weeds of Mass Destruction,” and “The Devil’s Bartender.”
In “Deadly Dinner” Stewart points out that everyday edibles can make you sick if they are not prepared correctly. Did you know that corn can kill if it makes up a major part of one’s diet? The disease is called pellagra with symptoms that “came to be known as the four D’s: dermatitis, dementia, diarrhea, and death.” Stewart continues, “the ghastly symptoms of pellagra could have inspired European myths of vampirism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: pale skin that erupted in blisters when exposed to the sun, sleepless nights brought on by dementia, an inability to eat normal food because of digestive problems, and a morbid appearance just before death.”
Yum, pass the corn!
Are you having any chili cookouts this fall? Be sure to cook the kidney beans thoroughly. Undercooked they can cause severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Not a parting gift one likes to bestow on guests.
If Stewart’s name sounds familiar, I wrote about her last book Flower Confidential. She is a fascinating author who describes our plant world and the mayhem lurking in beautiful greenery.
