Raven's Tale Books - Random Thoughts on Reading

using words & random thoughts

retail in America - 4.25.10
I'm reading a very well done book, Eaarth - yes, that's way it's spelled - to stress that because of climate change our planet is a very different planet than the one that we were born on. It's by Bill McKibben, and last night, as I was reading, the following fact struck and disgusted me - the amount of retail space per person in the United States doubled, from 19 to 38 square feet, between 1990 and 2005. That explains so much of why retail is so screwed up in this country - no thought was every seemingly given to think about this overbuilding as overbuilding, it was "let's build the sexiest, flashiest, newest, newest, newest stores and malls - and they can't help but come" - and the hell with whatever stores were nearby there before, and the hell with the community fabric of all those towns and cities..

big box bookselling - 4.25.10
So Borders was able to rearrange their massive debt and keep going - oh well. For 2008-2009 the Borders superstores were down 13.7% in sales, Waldenbooks were down 19.3%. Barnes & Noble dropped 3% in the same period.

When Vicky and I left Waldenbooks in the early 1980's, they had more than 1,000 stores and the B Dalton chain had more around 1,400 stores. Now, Borders has slashed Waldenbooks to just 175, and Barnes & Noble has cut B Dalton to a wee 4 stores - to be renamed Barnes & Nobles. The models have changed, they have gotten rid of so many smaller stores, replacing them with superstores - now we will see how that evolve the superstores. There are 726 B&N superstores battling against 515 Borders. Sales at Borders, as a chain, are less than 67% books. I leave you with just numbers from March & April issues of Publishers Weekly.

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that's odd - 4.13.10
There I was shopping and browsing around Safeway when I saw Hunter S. Thompson looking through the cracker aisle. Yes, HST has died and been blasted into space, but my eyes saw him. Well ... a suburban, low-key dressing, shorter, heavier, average-looking, cracker-fixated version ... OK, my mind races at times when surrounded by processed foods.

Walking down a wet street - maybe an hour after a brief rain - I was startled by the deep sounds coming from a street drain. It reminded me of the stories of a vast underground city under the snows of the campus of the University of Vermont, back in the 1970's. Walking across the main campus in the frigid weather of a winter, meant passing by huge billows of steam-smoke venting up from small melted-bare grates placed periodically around the central campus. At times, depending upon my state of mind and/or alteration, I stared into the white clouds and listened intently for the sounds of huge underground machinery and the sounds of subterranean men (I always thought of a sweaty Ernest Borgnine in a dirty undershirt) barking out orders to the drones to keep shoveling. But, these post rain shower streets did smell innocent.

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EBOOKS ... there's something ... just NOT a book
Don't think me a total Luddite,
but the thought of an ebook being a book
is like a movie being a photo,
or a photo being a painting,
or a car being a bike ... OK OK ... I'll stop.
                       They just aren't the same technology,
                       they don't really serve the same function,
                       and they don't contain (please allow me) any of the same aesthetic.

I've been reading books for more than fifty years (look everybody an old fart) and if I had to push a button instead of touching paper to turn a page - I would have stopped reading years back. The tactile pleasure of holding, feeling, touching, and then smelling a book is a vital part of the sensual experience of reading. It is an ingrained part of the whole happening of reading. The thought of replacing that with the smell of plastic and depressing a button ... is just that ... DEPRESSING.

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You've got to read ___ !
Ever had somebody tell you that you just MUST read some particular title, "IT'S GREAT", only to have it utterly fail to interest you? Then, maybe days, weeks or months go by - and you return to the book for another try. And it fails to grab you again. Maybe your friend is continuing to tell you that you MUST read it, "it's one of the BEST books ever written." So, bowing to peer pressure (maybe fearing that you just aren't "getting it" or aren't smart enough) and because you want to be a good sport - you give it another try. At this point, or after many more attempts, the book gods smile upon you and you find yourself reading ONE GREAT BOOK. This is just another wonderful thing about reading - some books will be glad to wait years until you're ready for their pleasures. Your mind just has to be in the right place.

It's like that old Steve Martin routine - it's all about ti-ming
Or, it's one of those books that just has no there - there. And your friend is wrong.

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How does the next book come into your life?
   With me (remember, it's all about me) titles come at me from all directions.
There is always the easy - what else has the wonderful writer of what I just finished written?
- or, there is the huge list of books that I've been looking for for years
- or, it's that juicy book that just came in at the store
- or, something intriguing I've just read a review of, saw an ad for or got listed somewhere
- or, a fascinating title that a customer came in to order or was talking about
- or, while straightening the store I come across some gem that MUST be read NOW
- or, Vicky read something and loved it
- or, an ARC (advanced readers copy) comes from the publisher of something to be published in the months to come
- or, there it was in one of the stacks of books by the bed, something I forgot all about
- or, some random thought during the day, or in a dream, steered me towards my next book.
There are more ways that titles jump into my hands, but I must stop myself ... and go read.
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I'm addicted to reading
   "My name is John, and I'm a reading addict." I'm one of those people that is constantly looking for something to read, someone who has a burning need to keep my mind occupied with the written word. As a kid, I devoured the old magazines in the dentist's waiting room, read the pamphlets at the Ford garage, and lived in a house full of readers and their books. Passing books around the family was a way of life. Giving books as gifts was perfect, because you should always try to read the gift - to just MAKE SURE it was the CORRECT gift. For some still unfathomable reason, I stopped reading for a number of years in my early teens, only to come back at it even more intensively ever since. For years (or rather decades) I find myself always reading several novels and some nonfiction, as well as all those New Yorkers, NYT newspapers, and so many other things throughout the house. Our is a well-read house.
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reading freedom
   While the concept of discussing books in a book club has some appeal to me, I don't participate in them because I don't want to HAVE TO READ something. The staggering and lurching from book to book, with only my personal choice being the determining factor, is much of the joy of reading. (Computer, software and tax manuals are the only things that aren't a part of my reading freedom ... and I won't describe what a joy they can be.) To me a book is the perfect BEING IN THE MOMENT sort of thing ... that could just be because of my short-term memory limitations. Now I forgot what I was writing about ...

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I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket. I believe in reading books because others dislike them or find them dangerous. I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

Part of this has to do with Mr. Buxton, who taught me Shakespeare in 10th grade. We were reading Macbeth. Mr. Buxton, who probably had better things to do, nonetheless agreed to meet one night to go over the text line by line. The first thing he did was point out the repetition of motifs. For example, the reversals of things ("fair is foul and foul is fair"). Then there was the unsexing of Lady Macbeth and the association in the play of masculinity with violence.

What Mr. Buxton didn't tell me was what the play meant. He left the conclusions to me. The situation was much the same with my religious studies teacher in 11th grade, Mr. Flanders, who encouraged me to have my own relationship with the Gospels, and perhaps he quoted Jesus of Nazareth in the process. "Therefore speak I to them in parables: Because they seeing, see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."

High school was followed by college, where I read Umberto Eco's Role of the Reader, in which it is said that the reader completes the text, that the text is never finished until it meets this voracious and engaged reader. The open texts, Eco calls them. In college, I read some of the great Europeans and Latin Americans: Borges and Kafka, Genet and Beckett, Artaud, Proust -- open texts all. I may not have known why Kafka's Metamorphosis is about a guy who turns into a bug, but I knew that some said cockroach, and others, European dung beetle.

There are those critics, of course, who insist that there are right ways and wrong ways to read every book. No doubt they arrived at these beliefs through their own adventures in the stacks. And these are important questions for philosophers of every stripe. And yet I know only what joy and enthusiasm about reading have taught me, in bookstores new and used.

I believe there is not now and never will be an authority who can tell me how to interpret, how to read, how to find the pearl of literary meaning in all cases. Nietzsche says, "Supposing truth is a woman – what then?" Supposing the truth is not hard, fast, masculine, simple, direct? You could spend a lifetime thinking about this sentence, and making it your own. In just this way, I believe in the freedom to see literature, history, truth, unfolding ahead of me like a book whose spine has just now been cracked.