We're going to take a small break today, so please use the comments to recommend your recent literary finds. I'm finally getting around to reading Brock Clarke (Arsonist's Guide to New England Writer's Homes) in anticipation of his upcoming novel Exley. I loved Exley's novels and it's a delight to find this quirky obsessive novelist will be tackling this one.
It's been a busy week, We've gotten some shelves moved to the bookstore and discovered we'll need a truck to move the ones that couldn't fit into the van. Next week promises to be even busier as we count down to a rapidly approaching Saturday. Keep your finger crossed, as I may have big news soon about a special musical guest at the opening party.
(image from The Daily World)Finally, here's a newspaper article you might get a kick out of. Subscription is required to view the pictures (of yours truly) and read the whole text, but it's free for the time being.
More pictures are on Facebook, please be sure to "Like" us while you're there.
You can always browse our books at Jackson Street Books and other fine Independent bookstores.
As always, books ordered here will have a freebie publishers Advance Reading Copy included as a thank you to our blogosphere friends.
We're going to take a small break today, so please use the comments to recommend your recent literary finds.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read that, I thought you said "library" finds. Which I thought was odd, because you run a bookstore. Libraries are your enemy. I don't see why more bookstore owners don't burn down libraries. Eliminate the competition -- it's what capitalism DOES. This is probably discussed on secret book-seller online forums, but I don't know the passwords to get in, so I have no idea what you're up to.
Anyway, seeing "libraries" -- even if it wasn't there -- got me thinking. I do that too often, especially in the middle of the night, and once a thought gets planted in my head, I have to let it out, otherwise it sits there and festers. So here goes:
The libraries I see most are the trolleys of books pushed around the hospital corridors by young volunteers. They give patients the books, mostly cheap romance novels donated by middle-aged women who stole them from hair salons. I don't know how the patients can focus enough to read them, even the ones who haven't lost their minds from dementia, because if I was them, I couldn't get away from he thought of "Oh my God, my condition is so bad that I've had to be admitted to a hospital, and I might die, and why do they serve Jello at every meal besides breakfast, plus with bedtime snacks? Is this place secretly run by Mormons?"
But the patients put up a show of pretending to read anyway. No problem with that. The trouble is, then they give the books and magazines BACK!
Do you know what kinds of filth lives on the skin of a hospital patient? Never mind the overt bodily waste products and chemotherapy drugs that ooze through their skin. I'm talking about the bacteria that cannot be killed by any antibiotic known to man. Bacteria that the patients never had before they came to the hospital, but our place is crawling with that stuff, so everyone's infested. Me too, You never want to shake hands with a nurse, unless one of you is wearing a rubber glove.
So other people touch these books, and the chain of horror perpetuates. Think about that if you buy a used book. Who touched it before you? Did they wipe their nose with the back of their hand before they turned the page? Did they have psoriasis? (One way to tell it to hold the book upside down and riffle through the pages to see if flakes of dried dead skin fall out.) When you think about what might be on a used book, it's enough to make you want to turn on the TV. With your own remote that you don't allow anyone else in the family to touch.
I recommend only buying BRAND NEW books from Dan and Tammy. Unless they have some sort of gamma-ray sterilizing device in the back of their store like the companies that irradiate our food use. And with Washington being a libberul state, they probably don't let people set those up just anywhere. Unless they've got one in the basement that they stole from a hospital that's being put out for scrap because it leaks a teeny, tiny bit of radiation, and what's the harm if you only turn it on occasionally? Not that I'd know anything about that.
Bukko, I need one o them gamma-ray machines! Can you hook us up?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, I'm reminded of the woman who just *couldn't understand* why we didn't want to buy the paperbacks which had a wad of chewed gum dog-eared to the final page of each and every book.
This is 2010, and I'll tweet ya if any such shenanigans happen in the new store.