Tag Archives: writing

Dear James Patterson….

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18

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.

What If…..

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6

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?”