Tag Archives: books

Dear James Patterson….

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Dear Mr. Patterson,

I’m sure your mom loves you; probably you’re a nice man who is good to dogs and small children, and you try not to run over any manatee in your private pontoon boat near your inlet coastal home.

But frankly, dude, I am so over you.

My husband and I run a used bookstore, and not a week passes that one of three things doesn’t happen:

(Sorry, did you follow that okay? I’ve read a couple of your books, so understand that you prefer simple syntax.)

1)      The door opens and someone staggers in bearing a box full of battered mystery and thriller paperbacks; about 1/3 of them are yours. The others will be Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, or Patricia Cornwall. (Not that your private life is any of our business, mind.) The person trading these in will dump them on the table and head straight for classics, waving a dismissive hand behind him- or herself. “These aren’t mine; a friend was moving and said I could take them. Never read trash like that. Have you got any Hemingway First Editions?”

2)      The door opens and a customer comes in asking for you (your books, I mean; we all know you don’t get to Southwest Virginia very often.) I point out the shelf you share with John Grisham (again, your private life is your own) where we now stash you for $4 a paperback, $6 a hardback; it just saves time, not having to price you every day. The person scans quickly, then frowns. “These are old. I want the newest one. Why don’t you have it if you have all these?”

3)      The phone rings and someone offers to sell us “a really valuable set of books.” Three times in five, sir, they are talking about an entire hardback collection of you. We explain that we don’t buy books for cash, and they become irate. “This is a really popular author! Everybody reads him!” Yes, we know. We have a growing stack of this popular author’s older hardbacks creeping up the wall in one corner, because they outgrew that Grisham/Patterson shelf. One day some of our foster kittens were playing nearby, and the pile collapsed. You just missed committing multiple felinicides, James me lad. Wouldn’t that have made you feel terrible?

So, Mr. Patterson, we just want you to know–and no hard feelings–that we kind of hate you. Nothing personal, but you make us feel like book pimps instead of erudite scholars. Plus, your customers are so … loyal. We suggest a Kava, plead with them to try a Jance, lead them to Scottoline, even beg them to consider Hillerman or Stabenow. We extol variety as the spice of life.

Nothing works. It’s your spiciness they crave, Mr. P, you who have filled used bookstores everywhere with your 1,2,3, nursery rhyme titles, with your “same-plot-different-characters” smoke, mirrors, and adverbs routine. You are giving the readers exactly what they want.

{Sigh}. And that’s why we hate you.  So now you know, and I hope you can still sleep at night, riddled with all that guilt.

Sincerely, Wendy and Jack, proprietors, Tales of the Lonesome Pine Used Books

P.S. Please do not send any of those men who read your novels professionally for ideas, to rub us out. We are small town people and would have no defense. Thank you.

Who Would be Brussel Sprouts?

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This morning I went to our town’s farmer’s market, held just a convenient block away from our bookstore. As I meandered among the potatoes, carrots and kale, inhaling nice smells and greeting neighbors, a thought crossed my mind: how is a bookstore like a farmer’s market?

Yes, there’s that locally-run, mom-n-pop element, but I mean, what if the books were the vegetables? Digesting ideas, digesting vitamins….c’mon, play along; this could be fun.

Every farmer’s market has plenty of root vegetables, the underground foundations of what we eat. Starchy, solid, and below the radar? I’m nominating Norman Mailer as the potato bin of the bookselling world: stodgy, yet palatable. Filling, and most certainly omnipresent.

How about kale? It’s maybe the wee bit tricky to make tasty, but it’s a staple filler of any reasonable diet. If you can’t eat it straight, try cooking it in soup. I suggest Jessamyn West. Like kale, she’s been around a long time; like kale, she’s rich in fiber; and like kale, she’s been condensed–into reader’s digest hardbacks during her heyday. (If you’re not familiar with West, she wrote The Friendly Persuasion and Except for Me and Thee. Both give you plenty to chew on without much that’s hard to swallow–like kale.)

Now, the peppers are just coming in: sweet green and red bell peppers, yellow banana peppers, and those spicy, innocuous-looking Scotch Bonnets, hotter than any jalapeno. The Bonnets are easy: Philippa Gregory. You can look like an intellectual while getting your bodice ripped, the same way throwing in a Scotch Bonnet makes you look like a gourmet cook when in reality no one will taste anything else. Spicy peppers in moderation are rather good for you, too, and Gregory has a surprisingly adept turn of phrase plus a few realisms stuck in all that spice. And the heat covers the overdone bits.

Banana peppers – well, those are usually pickled, so let’s say Tom Clancy?

For the bell peppers, sweet yet slightly crisp, I’m going to suggest Maeve Binchy. Her stories are fresh, invigorating, familiar in plot yet tantalizing in delivery. Like a good stuffed pepper, she holds a lot of ideas in that sweet, simple framework.

At our farmer’s market, usually at least two stalls sell baked goods and one has homemade candy and other sweet stuff that’s really bad for you and not filling at all.

Danielle Steel.

And finally, we have that luscious genre of berries: blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries. For these, let’s say cozy mysteries (you know, the murders that take place in bed and breakfasts, or antique stores, or are solved by women running coffee shops). Having varying levels of juiciness, stomach satisfaction, and cost, they share much with the berry family. Also, like berries at the market, cozies are ubiquitous in any bookstore.

All this playing around does leave a question unsettled in my mind, though: Who would be brussel sprouts? Any ideas?