Tag Archives: science fiction

The Monday Book: BEWILDERMENT by Richard Powers

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Janelle Bailey, teacher, AP exam reader, and former shopsitter for our bookstore, delivers the Monday book this week. It turns out not to be a favorite….

I definitely went into this expecting to be engaged and enthralled and breathing deeply, thinking differently about something–in that case never seeing trees quite the same–as had happened when I read The Overstory. That did not quite happen.

Oh, I will look at stars and space differently and think about some other things newly–grief, death, parenting and most especially through grief and death–as well, but I feel like lots of this book were just over my head or out of my own realms of keen interest and understanding, in parts, for me to fully appreciate it quite like I had expected to.

I DO love that the book is set in Madison, and I considered/wondered whether and if so when Powers had spent enough time there to understand these few Madison things: the farmers’ market and its offerings, the layout of some of the city, etc. And I found Theo and Robin and Aly to be interesting and compelling characters for the most part. I enjoyed spending this time with them.

I am not upset that I read it, I am just less confident that I will be totally “wowed” by every Richard Powers I pick up like I surely was by The Overstory.

Also and maybe a sidebar or irrelevant, but: I became more irritated by all of the things that were over my head scientifically when, in the very first pages the book gets completely wrong something that I just shared again recently is a peeve of mine: the misunderstanding of which year of life one enters on their birthday. This main character is turning 9 and so COMPLETING his ninth year of life (we celebrate a first birthday, the big “ONE,” when a child has completed their first year of life. Right??), not “eighth year” as the book states at least two different times. So I was fairly irritated the more that the book wanted me to get my head around science and even its more “sci-fi” aspects, when it kicks off with understanding age wrong. Argh!

Meanwhile, in Classics…..

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book of snobsWe installed the Second Story Cafe in our bookstore just over a year ago, and making that possible meant moving things around. Among the stuff that shifted in The Great Upheaval were the Classics, Art, Theatre, and Writing books. They all went upstairs to the place formerly known as “Jack and Wendy’s bedroom,” and spread themselves about in a dignified manner as we tore the rest of upstairs apart, getting the dining room and kitchen set up on either side of them.

Which means they are now isolated up there, poor things, all alone, a little island of thought in a sea of food.

Me being me, I worried. “What if we don’t sell as many? We always sold a lot of Classics before, and now they’ll be the only books up there, isolated, unable to socialize with the other genres ….”

“Steady on, dear!” Jack said. “They’re books, remember? They aren’t living things that think; they provoke thought in living things.”

Jack says our Classics sales may actually have increased since they moved up the stairs. “Perhaps they’ve moved up the ladder as well, getting noticed more.”

Me, I’m thinking that the sweet little students in scruffy hats, and the happy retirees in scruffy coats,  who used to buy our Classics don’t eat out much, but maybe when they do, they favor soup. Our Good Chef Kelley makes three soups every day, and I see a lot of the Barricade Brigade up there, not even removing their fingerless gloves as they enjoy soup in the garret while reading Les Miserables.

Come to think of it, I suppose the Classics do feel at home in their new quarters Certainly they no longer have to mix with the riffraff down on the shop’s main floor–the cheap science fiction tramps in beat-up paperbacks; the lurid thriller covers of horror; the demure looking girls, long lashes resting against cheeks as eyes cast down, gracing the covers of the Amish romances.

God save us from the Amish romances…..

No, really, I worried unnecessarily about the “isolation” of Classics upstairs. They’ve been waiting all their life for A Room of Their Own.

They never wanted to socialize with the other genres anyway. Snobs.