Category Archives: out of things to read

Never Judge a Book by its Black Sack Covering

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books It continues to be a delight to have our lives revolve around the bookstore, to meet folks almost every day who have read Wendy’s book and made a trip to see us, and to be surrounded by ‘bookstore friends’ at the regular events we put on.

But in the middle of all that fun, we deal with the more mundane–and often tedious–jobs such as pricing and shelving the donations and books that show up—usually at the busiest times of the day or week. These unforeseen arrivals often come by the truckload, and that can be a real challenge., since we no longer have hidden spaces to store books until we can find time to sort them. In some cases, we wind up checking their current value on the Internet as well as “stick-n-stash” (as we have ignobly nicknamed pricing and shelving).

A few days ago Wendy was sitting back heaving a sigh of relief, having just dealt with a slew of these incomers; they’d arrived in dribs and drabs throughout the day, and she was proud of having cleared them in a timely manner despite having a record number of customers in the shop.

And then the door opened.

In came our good friend Cyndi Newlon (you can see her in the video tour of the bookstore, playing the corpse in our mystery room). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03cmGdapxPQ

Cyndi runs a writing center at the nearby college, and she’d asked if we wanted “some old library books.” Apparently, today was the day, and “some books” turned out to be ten large tightly knotted black sacks. Each one was seriously heavy, I discovered, as I helped get them out the back of her SUV and up onto the dry half of the porch.

I had been in the process of getting to grips with our brand new power washer, cleaning the soot of our front porch and outside chairs and tables after the recent big fire across the street. The arrival of Cyndi was a mixed blessing – respite from wrestling with the washer, but ….

We knew that the sacks couldn’t be left lying outside, so there was nothing for it but to dive in and start checking. Old library books are a mixed bag, often useless, but sometimes wonderful. We quickly turned up two or three hard-to-find William Faulkners, as well as quite a few rather attractive very old poetry and short story collections.

Our hearts beat faster. We warmed to the task. It’s not easy to explain to “normal” people, but bibliophiles will understand the excitement of digging through opaque sacks of old books, exclaiming over long-forgotten friends, discovering new titles.

And that’s just thinking of them as books. When you think of them as objects to be sold, well, usually with old worn ex-library books you’re lucky to find maybe one or two in every fifty that would worth hanging on to, but we were amazed with this collection. As we trawled through, we found many first editions, along with rare titles containing beautiful illustrations.

So we are grateful to Cyndi and Don for thinking of us and, once again, we learned to be grateful for what on first blush looks like a lot more work at a busy time. And we learned that you never know what good things might be hiding in a bulging black sack.

 

 

The Monday Book: SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS by David Guterson

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snowAlmost twenty years old now, this book was a bestseller in its day, so likely many people have heard about it. One of the things that always struck me about Snow is how slow, lyrical, and quietly understated it is. I loved it, felt drawn into the story, from the opening phrase, “The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace…”

You get right into the story and all its undercurrents with that simple yet powerful opening.

The story centers around a missing fisherman, Japanese ill will following World War II, the sale of old family land, and a love triangle. It’s not a mystery so much as an exploration of human psyches and motivations. The book’s final line – which won’t be a spoiler, I promise – is, “Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”

It’s a lovely read.

The funny thing about reading Guterson for me, though, is that I could never get into his other books. He wrote another about a dying man planning to commit suicide, and I couldn’t get past the first chapter. Nor did I like his short story collection. Go figger.

But it really doesn’t matter, because if Snow Falling on Cedars were the only thing Guterson ever wrote, it would be legacy enough. It’s a wonderful book, deep, rich, complex in its rhythms yet straightforward and believable in its plot. Character makes plot. These characters are so very of their time and place. Get yourself a cup of coffee and a comfy chair, and lose three or so hours. You won’t regret it.