Category Archives: book reviews

Two Square Inches of Fame

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This is PEOPLE Magazine from Oct. 22. It has a two inch square recommending my book as a Great Non-fiction Read. And while it doesn’t change much of anything I think about myself, it’s changed the way some people think about my book.

A couple of people who weren’t interested in buying the book when I was in their local bookstore hawking it saw that lying open on the table, and suddenly Little Bookstore got a whole lot more interesting. Same thing with Walmart; some friends found out the Big W was stocking me, and my life changed in their eyes.

Might we just dial back a second here? A book that talks about the value of community, how people can take charge of their own lives, not “rent inside their own skins” but really enjoy and examine the decisions they make about why, how, and where they buy books–is embraced by mainstream commercialism, and that makes people like it more?

Irony, thy name is marketing. It’s the small version of what’s on the front cover of the People my two square inches are in. Adele is pictured on the cover, and it says, just below her face on this 2-million circulation magazine, “How and why the singing sensation lives outside the spotlight.”

Ummm…..

Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m more grateful than words can express that people are embracing this book (which they couldn’t do if they didn’t know about it via the media), that they like how it describes life in small towns, that some neighbors from down the street and across state lines have emailed to say “You’re describing what it felt like when I moved to a small town/ got a divorce and started over/ quit my job to start an art studio/ lost my daughter.” There’s just nothing like life in the slow lane to solidify watching the strangeness of mainstream media and its effect on what people think you are.

I am delighted that people identify with, take pleasure from, even repeat what I said about small towns, books, cats and life. And it pleases me no end that the quote people are starting to come up to me at book signings and reel off, with a big grin, is,”I’ll put the kettle on.” (Plus, they ask after Beulah. She’s well, thank you.)

But at the bottom of two square inches of fame, Walmart, Amazon and the rest of the pile-up, Jack and I run a small bookstore in a rural part of Coalfields Appalachia for people who like to read. We are happy. We like our friends, we like our church, we like our store, we’re lucky, we’re careful, and we work hard.

Good enough, gang!

Whuffling Through the Social Sciences

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IN THIS EPISODE: Shopsitter Andrew Whalen gets more than he bargained for while trying to impose a little order on life’s chaos….

Things got a little too real today when I tore apart the “-Ology” bookshelf and set out to rebuild it. This shelf contains folklore, sociology, anthropology, self-help, career advice and research best practices.

At first reorganizing was fun. In a confusing world it can be comforting to establish hierarchies and draw borders. This is the appeal of the low-stakes nerd debate. Does it matter if Kirk or Picard were the better starship captain? No, but it feels good to put things in order (this one always seemed easy to me: one survived the reign of Kodos the Executioner, has the middle name Tiberius, passed the Kobayashi Maru test, and defeated conqueror-of-all-Asia Khan Noonien Singh… the other is Picard).

But some chaos cannot be cornered, tagged and boxed. Some chaos can only be whuffled, which is the word I made up to describe the sensation and action of bottling various fogs. Or the word I thought I had made up until I typed it into a search engine and found it used to describe sniffling, gentle affection and thankless online forum moderation. If we’re going by my definition (not endorsed by the Internet) it’s a feeling that accompanies so much of what we try to set in place. And the more I stared down the “-Ology” shelf, the more I begin to think the whole world is made of whuffle.

Yes, whuffle is verb, adjective and noun. It’s very versatile.

Before the “-Ology” shelf this uncertainty seemed very abstract to me. It came up primarily when considering genre. Is it fantasy just because there are swords? Is it sci-fi just because there are spaceships? Read Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun and get back to me. Welcome back. See what I mean? And that’s before we get into odd-balls like Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. No wonder people just gave up and invented the term speculative fiction.

The “-Ology” shelf was supposed to be different. It represents entirely separate realms of human knowledge! It’s like a UN of social sciences, each field a tiny nation-state with its own territories and agendas.

But my distinct borders kept getting knocked down. What to do with Typetalk, which purports to be a study of the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, but has self-help cover language promising to aid in determining how you “live, love and work”? Things only blurred more from there. When is a study on families anthropology and when is it sociology? Are Coping with Difficult People and Coping with Difficult Bosses really so different that they should be three shelves apart, one in sociology, the other in career guidance? ARGH.

So I started fresh, with a new theory. I could arrange the shelf like a continuity. There was a spectrum at play, beginning with psychology: the individual opening up onto the family, expanding into the society, then reaching out to other societies and forms of governance before finally drilling back down into the individual stories each society treasures. Brain to Folklore, with all of human experience in between. Made total sense for like two seconds. But things just got worse. And by the end I had almost convinced myself that Life-Span Developmental Psychology and Normative Life Crises was interchangeable with Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads.

I look at the shelf now and see nothing but whuffle. No matter how hard we try (I’m looking at you, Dewey, with all your decimals) nothing exists entirely separate and apart. Categories are cool, but they are never definite. All things interlock and nothing is simple. But as maddening and confusing as that can get for the bookshelf organizer, it probably makes for a more interesting world.