Tag Archives: bookstores

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?

What If…..

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What if a book leaves us unchanged?

People read books for all sorts of reasons: entertainment, information, because someone (or everyone) else is… but what if we read a book, and it makes an impact, reaches out and punches us right in the heart? And what if we cry, and swear that we will change the world that could hold such horrid truths as, oh, say, Grapes of Wrath. Or Tess of the D’urbervilles. Or even Hunger Games–which may not have the staying power of those first two, but still packs quite a wallop in the interesting metaphor and parable of social justice departments.

What if we say all that, and then we pick up the next book in the stack–or advertised on the side of the bus–and keep reading?

Does it still count, that we cried, that we felt what the characters felt, saw the injustice, the fear, the hurt? Or did it never happen? Because it really didn’t happen, did it, that thing that left us shaking until we looked up and realized we were just riding the subway, holding a paperback.

Unless it did happen. Inside us. I can count hundreds of books I’ve read in the last few years, but ask which ones changed me, and I can count them on my fingers. The Smallmart Revolution. The House of Sand and Fog. And the Band Played On. A book of short stories called Hunger by Lan Chang. Rory Stewart’s Prince of the Marshes.  Kite Runner. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Children’s Story by James Clavell. Rumer Godden’s translation of Prayers from the Ark.  I can also tell you exactly what they did, in order: changed where I shopped; sent me to volunteer at a refugee center; taught me to be embarrassed at some of the church rhetoric surrounding AIDS; made me a better Cultural Studies professor, x3; gave me my first naive understandings of white privilege; scared the shit out of me; and renewed my faith in innocence.

I can’t list such specifics for most of the books I’ve read. Every book we absorb lays a foundation, yes, puts another brick in the walls of our beliefs, anchors our approach to life. Every word is valuable–or at least being able to access it is valuable. But not every work changes us, does it? The ones that suddenly, before we can defend against it, turn us sideways, tilt our world’s axis–well, when I sit back and think about, I’m surprised at how small a list that is. I remember passages and themes from many books, but when I think about the ones that visibly affected the way I think, act, speak—–the list shrinks.

So, which book(s) shaped you, turned you into who you are now, or filed away the rough edges of what you used to think? Which books made you say “what if” and then stick with “if?”