The future of the book(store)

First of all, the important news: If you are a reader in the Key West area, get your butt down to Voltaire Books, at the corner of Simonton and Eaton streets -- they're going out of business and the stock is 50 percent off. Fabulous deals to be had, and you'll be helping out some very good guys in taking the books off their hands. This is happening at the same time as the national collapse of Borders, which is giving us a strange feeling in Key West, an allegedly literary little city if there ever was one. I'm sad that Voltaire is closing -- I loved to browse there, tried to buy books there when I was buying books and gave gift certificates as birthday presents for the last couple years. But even though the bibliogods are probably going to strike me down for thinking this, much less writing it, I don't feel like this is a sign of the book apocalypse.

For one thing, I just returned from a conference about the Future of the Book (more on that in future posts, I hope) and the future, it is clear, is largely digital. Not entirely and not for everyone. I expect to read print books for the rest of my life and after that .. well, that's not my problem.

I also think some part of me, having watched bookstores come and go over the years, knew not to invest too much emotionally into Voltaire. I supported them as best I could but I did not pin all my hopes on the future of the book on them. It was a wonderful little store for a time and now it's gone. Just like Blue Heron and lots of other bookstores I have loved and supported. Also: I work in a library. I have plentiful access to books -- new, old, donated, advanced review copies. Personally, selfishly, I don't feel a dearth of books. (When my husband sees me coming home with bags loaded with books I think he wishes I did.) You can buy books here, too -- we have donations and library discards for sale for as little as a quarter -- and paperbacks for free!

And there's this: We still have Key West Island Books on Fleming, just off Duval -- the venerable institution is now under new ownership and it's time to return and support them. It's a lot cleaner and less cluttered, too. They've always had a great selection of used books; now the challenge will be to see if they can pick up the new book market, beyond top 10 bestsellers and local interest titles. If not, that's OK -- there's always Amazon and it will give new justification to the occasional Books & Books binge on mainland trips. (A side note to fellow islanders: If you visit Miami and do not take the time to stop by Books & Books you are cheating yourself -- they have several locations but I recommend the Coral Gables flagship store -- amazing selection, dream atmosphere ... and a nice little cafe with terrific panninis.)

Santas in July

Late July in Key West means a couple things. It's hotter than Hades. You start seeing interesting blobs on satellite images of the Atlantic. If you live in my house, you spend most of your nonworking waking time watching the Tour de France. And if you hang around Old Town, you suddenly have sightings of Santa wherever you look. Only it's not supposed to be Santa. The hale white-bearded fellows are entrants in the annual Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, a guaranteed publicity winner for the tourism council (and I've been as guilty as anyone; I once wrote a cover story called "The Papas and the Papas" for the late, lamented Tropic magazine, chronicling one year's contest). An earlier story I wrote about Hemingway's long, strong, posthumous celebrity pointed out that Amherst doesn't hold Emily Dickinson lookalike contests -- only now they do.

I've always hoped one year the winner would be the rare entrant who looks like the younger, darker-haired, nonbearded Hemingway -- as Hemingway looked when he actually lived here in the 1930s. You do get the occasional entrant who gives it a try but since previous winners serve as the judges, the late-Hemingway look appears to have a lock on the thing.

All of which is a longwinded introduction to a couple of recent book reviews, one of which has a strong Hemingway connection: My review of A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses ran in Sunday's edition of Solares Hill. And a couple Sundays before that they ran my review of Janet Malcolm's Iphigenia in Forest Hills. Both interesting, well reported and written books of nonfiction, though naturally very different. I liked the Malcolm book a lot about the court system; not so much with her pronounciations on journalism. And I liked Trubek's tour of writers' house museums though she was a bit snarky in approach at times. I hadn't realized how many of these museums I had toured until I really thought about it though to be fair two of them are in my backyards, past and present (Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway, whom Trubek holds up as sort of polar opposite of house museum ethos).

Like many a Key Wester, I'm almost as sick of Ernest Hemingway as I am of Jimmy Buffett -- but lately I've been thinking it might be time to read him again. One reason is the hilarious portrayal in Woody Allen's recent movie "Midnight in Paris" -- young Hemingway again, before he was the self-created celebrity and legend. Another is simply in reaction to all the late-Hemingway hysteria; I haven't read the short stories and early novels since I was in my 20s and I have learned that books take on a whole new dimension when you bring some life experience to them. Maybe it's time for A Farewell to Arms. After I finish re-reading Jane Austen.

Is this just fantasy?

Best lists aren't just for the end of the year -- and they're not just for professional book critics, either. Right now, NPR has a fun exercise going, compiling a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. They're soliciting suggestions (five titles at a time) from listeners/readers and in four days they've received more than 4,600 posts. Take that, all you reading-is-dead handwringers! There are a couple rules -- you can suggest a series as one of your entries, as long as that series is written by a single author. And YA is banned, which made it a little difficult for me because Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy would have been high on my list.

Still, even though I would not consider myself a big reader of scifi or fantasy, I managed to come up with five. * Here's my list, in no particular order: Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (always glad to give this one a mention; it's alternative historical fiction, Napoleonic wars with dragons and it's AWESOME). Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, a loopy literary alternaworld to which I will be forever grateful for getting me through the Horrible Hurricane Year of 2005. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis -- highly recommended for people who like medieval stuff and/or time travel. American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which needs no help from me but is pretty cool, and will soon be a major motion picture. And The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, a book about a book that is powerful and strange. Both books, I mean. Just read it.

If you are into books, by the way, and you don't follow or check NPR's books coverage (it's compiled at their website and has the requisite Facebook and Twitter feeds) then you are missing out. And if you prefer to get your radio auditorially but can't listen to NPR all day long, they do a nice podcast of compilations of their books coverage every week or two.

The Guardian, another bastion of book coverage in the popular media, has also compiled a 100 best list recently, their picks for best nonfiction titles. They solicited reader suggestions after the fact; my contribution was The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Amazing book about biodiversity and evolution and island biogeography and if those sound like heavy, dry subjects then trust me, in Quammen's hands they are not. If and when I have to do a serious weed of my own book collection, this will be one of the last to go.

* Addendum from 8/18/11 -- Since writing this I have joined the George R. R. Martin Cult and am midway through the third book in his Song of Ice and Fire series -- and they really as addictive as everyone says. Martin didn't need my help -- he still scored high on the final list -- and I'm not sure which of my initial five I'd knock out. Either American Gods or the Thursday Next series, which is loopier than straight-up fantasy anyway.

Reading about reading Jane Austen

Like just about every female English major on the planet, I am a Jane-ite. I read the books. I watched the movies. I watched the various miniseries. It was a screen version -- the 1980 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," shown on Masterpiece Theater -- that first sent me to read Austen as a youngster. As an adult in the 1990s, when the BBC began a new round of Austen adaptations, I bought the new P&P miniseries on VHS. I bought it again on DVD. I go to the movies for new adaptations and then I buy THEM on DVD. I own a gigantic Modern Library Jane Austen compendium and a couple of the novels as individual volumes.  They're free on Kindle so I have them there, too. I have never, however, been a big consumer of the rest of Janeworld -- the zombie mash-ups, the novels where Jane solves crimes, etc. I read The Jane Austen Book Club and thought it was OK. But generally, I prefer the original.

Only I realized recently that it has been quite some time since I've actually read the original. For the last decade and a half -- yes, OK, since the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" -- my Austen consumption has been almost entirely onscreen.

And that's too bad, as William Deresiewicz reminded me in his appealing new memoir, "A Jane Austen Education." He doesn't diss the movies (well he does, a little; more on that later). But his focus is all on the books, the actual Austen, and the life lessons her small but significant output offered him.

The book is broken into six sections, one for each of the published novels, with a lesson or moral value he received from each. That can feel a little pat and I disagree with a couple of his choices -- he has "Persuasion," my favorite Austen novel, teaching him about true friendship. He makes a good case but, to me, that novel is all about constancy, and learning to have the courage to do what's right for you, even if the people around you disapprove.

As a memoir of a relatively privileged, intelligent but self-absorbed young man's journey to self-awareness and maturity, "A Jane Austen Education" is fine -- it's just that memoirs aren't really my thing, especially memoirs about learning not to be a jerk. Congratulations! I'm happy for you and those around you, really, but is that worth a couple hours of my time? As an evaluation of Austen's work, by someone trained to think critically about literature but who writes for what Virginia Woolf famously called the common reader, it is superb. And it has inspired me to pull out my 1,364-page, 3-pound (yes, I weighed it) edition of the Complete Novels. They are arranged in order of publication; I'm 56 pages into "Sense and Sensibility" and wondering why I've been neglecting Jane -- the real Jane, not her on-screen stepchildren -- so long.

About the movies: While I will swoon along with everyone else when Colin Firth-as-Darcy dives into the pond, my favorite screen adaptation remains "Persuasion" starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. I've always had a Ciaran Hinds thing. And more significantly, it was the first Austen adaptation that struck me as remotely realistic -- the rooms were small and dark, the clothing was not unfailingly elegant, Anne Elliott did look like a woman past her prime and depressed. And the acting is superb. Plus you don't need to commit an entire weekend (or sick day home on the couch) to watch it.

My husband's favorite, on the other hand, is the 1999 Mansfield Park. He says it's because it's the only Austen adaptation that acknowledges the existence of sex. Which is just why Deresiewicz, apparently, hated it: he refers to it as a "travesty" because it "turns prudish Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth."

And  for the record, the Kate Beckinsale Emma is way better than the Gwyneth Paltrow version and I much prefer the recent (2008) two-part BBC Sense and Sensibility to the much-lauded Emma Thompson/Ang Lee movie. Love Emma and all  but Elinor Dashwood is supposed to be nineteen. And Hugh Grant (way too good-looking for Edward Farrars) looks like he just left a fancy dress party at Oxford or something. The more recent version didn't have any big name actors I recognized (unless you count Mark Gatiss, the hapless patient-killing veterinarian from "League of Gentleman" as the useless older brother) but it was, like the huge majority of BBC productions, well executed all around.

Kids today, vol. LCXVIII

I am way late to this particular dust-up but thought I'd weigh in anyway. Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece bemoaning YA (that's young adult) literature as too violent, degenerate, disturbing, etc. etc. I might agree there are a few too many vampires -- thank you, Stephenie Meyer! -- but the notion that we're damaging fragile young minds with upsetting content ... oh, PUH-LEEZE. Which is a point many others have made very well, mainly on Twitter through a hashtag called #yasaves (you don't have to have a Twitter account to search it, did you know?).  There has been a lot of response, from writers and others -- accounts of the dust-up here and here and one I particularly like, by Linda Holmes from NPR's blog Monkeysee, here (my favorite line: "I also took an entire class in high school where we read books about killing your family, double suicide, drowning, being murdered in your bed ... it was called 'Shakespeare,' I believe."). Another funny piece about trends in YA lit by writer David Lubar dating from 2002 is here. And now the formidable Sherman Alexie, whose YA book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, was singled out for censure in the original essay, has responded in the WSJ.

Literature about adolescence, aimed at adolescent readers, often deals with turmoil. It's a turbulent time of life, even if you're not dealing with abuse, cutting, anorexia, vampires or other trauma. And that's OK, even the realistic turmoil that is the most upsetting, in my experience. I still shudder when I think about the books that upset me the most as a young reader: The ones where they have to kill the animals (The Yearling, Old Yeller). Anything by John Steinbeck. One I can't remember the title of for the life of me but it was about a family of kids were trying to stay in their house after their parents died; it was set in the '30s, I think, and the oldest sister was being pressured to marry a creepy neighbor guy. All of these were assigned to me in my wholesome rural public school in the 1970s.

Like many of the commenters on this subject, I also read a lot of adult literature with graphic content when I was pretty young, like in junior high school  -- Fear of Flying,The World According to Garp, Wifey, other, various paperbacks I somehow got hold of at friends' houses. I read The Outsiders, the book that the Wall Street Journal writer considers the founding text of this evil trend -- and its sequel, That Was Then This Is Now. Conservative family types take note: that book effectively scared me off ever trying LSD.

And even though some of those books were disturbing and upsetting, I'm glad I read them. I would hate to have somehow made it to 18 thinking the world was the one depicted in Anne of Green Gables or Narnia or the Little House series -- books I loved and kept reading as into adolescence, by the way. What a terrible shock it would have been, on reaching adulthood, to learn the terrible truth at such an advanced age.

This idea that childhood should be extended through adolescence, and kept in some kind of bubblewrap of niceness and good behavior is delusional and I don't think you're doing kids any favors, either. As Judy Blume put it, kids are pretty good judges of their own reading. If they don't like it, they'll put it down. That was always my reaction to the insanely popular -- and disturbing -- Flowers in the Attic series by V.C. Andrews. Same thing with the works of Stephen King.  I took a look and decided they weren't for me. Then I went back to reading Jane Eyre and Jane Austen and the gentle sex-free romances of Georgette Heyer that we had around the house. Sounds like a conservative family values book reviewer's dream, right? Except for the Garp and Wifey parts, I suppose.

Last rant: the aspect of the WSJ piece that REALLY irritates me is their recommended titles for young readers -- separated by gender! What the hell!??!!! What is this, 1952???? One of the truly great things about reading is that you can learn about all kinds of experiences from anyone. Pigeonholing kids and their recommended reading, by gender or any other division, is stupid. And, I might add, pointless.