Archive for Book Love

| October 17, 2011
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The Thrill of the New

a tree springing from a sandy beach; or is it a mutant piece of driftwood?

I recently visited the Leesylvania State Park in Virginia for the first time. At the park’s eastern edge, I was granted vistas of the Potomac River like none I’d ever seen before. I had a sense of what has been called “the thrill of the new” – that wave of pleasure that can overtake you when you find yourself in the presence of something familiar enough to be comprehensible, yet alien enough to force you make you truly notice it, to struggle to find referents within your experience that help make sense of this new pattern or sensation. Our minds enjoy being worked. Not overwhelmed, but challenged.

gnats caught in a spider's web

I took a pair of snapshots that help illustrate, for me, at least, this “thrill of the new,” this invitation to see familiar forms arranged in strange, unexpected ways. The upper one, the tree on the river’s beach, looked like a piece of driftwood the Potomac had deposited on the sand, which had then magically elongated into a full-grown tree, growing where no tree should be able to take root. The lower photo is of several dozen gnats caught on a spider’s web. Due to the angle at which I approached the web, with the gray-white sky and the gray-blue river behind it, the web disappeared from view, leaving only its captive contents visible – dead insects that seemed to form a cartoon sketch of a one-eyed, dancing man.

As a species, we seem to be powerfully drawn to new sensations. Researchers have identified that one of the key differences between our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens sapiens, and other species of hominids, such as Homo neaderthalis, was our ancestors’ refusal to allow natural barriers to cut off their exploration and expansion. Our ancestors found ways to ford rivers, to cross oceans, and to scale walls of mountains. What drove them forward? Scientists speculate it was an insatiable desire for the new. Recent genetic research on the remains of our ancestors, both direct and indirect, indicate that members of Homo sapiens sapiens pursued sexual relations with any creature that even vaguely resembled them – not only Neanderthals, but other contemporaneous hominids, as well, such as Homo erectus and Homo habilis. There is even speculation that the emotion that drove the earliest seafarers to take the mind-bending risk of sailing their tiny craft beyond the sight of land was a hunger for the new, particularly new types of sexual partners. When they reached Australia from the shores of Asia, they must have been sorely disappointed… unless some experimented with kangaroos or koala bears.

Yet people also have a countervailing need for the comforts of familiarity, especially when they find themselves in new and possibly threatening environments. Social researchers and psychologists have investigated a possible connection between Americans’ high level of mobility (their proclivity for moving from state to state) and their love of chain stores. The upshot? As much as Americans may gain economic advantages and aesthetic pleasures from experiencing the sights and attractions of a new home town, this exposure to newness and the stress it causes makes them prone to seek out the comfort of the familiar, such as dinners from Applebee’s and stone-washed chinos from the Gap.

As both a novelist and a reader of novels, I am constantly in search of the thrill of the new (not necessarily kangaroo sex, mind you). For what is the original meaning of the word novel? I very rarely read any fantasy set in Tolkien-style secondary worlds, because I find much of it to be repetitive and overly derivative of earlier books. It bores me. It too often fails to surprise or delight. For many readers, however, this is a feature, not a bug; they prefer books which feel profoundly familiar and homey. The familiarity and predictability are comforting and reassuring, perhaps a welcome balance to other aspects of those readers’ daily lives, which may not be comforting or reassuring at all. I’m not immune to a desire for literary “comfort food;” I take mine in the form of comic books, which, if they are to be truly satisfying, must remind me at least somewhat of the comics I read in the 1970s, when they were a refuge for me from strife at home and at school. When it comes to comics, I like the sense of hanging out with old friends from childhood. But I tend to like my fantasy to be more challenging. The thrill of Gene Wolfe’s The Books of the New Sun, for example, was that he took so many very familiar elements – the epic quest, the magical sword, the commoner who might someday be king – and spun them into a multi-volume adventure of personal discovery unlike any the genre had seen before.

As a writer, supplying the thrill of the new can be like walking a tightrope, however – lean too far one way and you risk the boredom of over-familiarity, but lean too far the other and you may plunge yourself and your would-be readers into the chasm of a lack of referents, a dark whirlpool of unfamiliarity. In my twenties, I went through a period when I was mad for anything Beat. I read book after book by Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsburg, and their legion of friends, plus scads of biographies and memoirs. After reading the early novels of William S. Burroughs, I picked up a copy of his Naked Lunch with great anticipation. Yet I wasn’t able to force myself to read more than forty pages. It was too alien. It lacked referents, handholds for me to grab hold of as I traversed its pages. Reading it quickly became a wearisome mental exercise of forcing streams of words through my head and struggling to make sense of them… not an activity conducive to the desired altered state of consciousness we call “losing oneself in a good book.”

Aside from the aforementioned Gene Wolfe, which writers have been the most successful at walking the tightrope and eliciting the thrill of the new for me? The two writers who have been the most consistent at performing that trick, over a great number of books and an equal number of years, stretching from my early teen days to my present middle age, have been J. G. Ballard and Robert Silverberg.

Ballard spent much of his childhood overwhelmed by the new — the life-threatening new experiences of the Japanese conquest of Shanghai and its European quarter, the crumbling of the Eurocentric society he’d grown up in, his family’s transfer to a prison camp at Lunghua, and the eventual Japanese military defeat. Upon his return to England after the war, he became fascinated by the Surrealist painters. He also embarked upon a course of reading medicine at a university; he never completed a medical degree, but he was forced to confront the human body from a vertigo-inducing new perspective, and the coldly precise, oftentimes merciless language of medical journals insinuated itself into much of his fiction.

His sold his earliest stories to science fiction magazines, most prominently to New Worlds, soon to be edited by Michael Moorcock. He dedicated himself to the exploration of “inner space” as opposed to “outer space,” stories that focused on the psychological impacts of bizarre alterations in human experiences of time and their physical environments. His first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), written in less than a half a month, was a fairly conventional disaster novel about hurricane-force winds that envelop much of Earth and drive civilization to the brink of extinction. Its most significant impact was that its sale allowed Ballard to become a full-time writer.

His next three novels, The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964; also known as The Drought), and The Crystal World (1966), were also disaster novels. But they were an entirely different sort of book than the hastily written and mundanely plotted The Wind from Nowhere. With these books, Ballard expanded his explorations of Freudian and Jungian psychology and the visual inversions of his short stories, inspired by the Surrealists, into long form. Rather than present heroes who struggle against the dislocations and social and personal breakdowns brought on by overwhelming, worldwide environmental disaster, Ballard painted protagonists who not only surrendered to the entropy flooding in all around them, but who welcomed it, because it fulfilled their deepest psychological needs and desires.

No prior science fiction disaster novels had been written from such a perspective. Ballard’s determined rejection of the “heroic, problem-solving engineer” protagonists of much American and British science fiction since the time of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories and John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction scandalized many writers and critics in the science fiction field. The scandalized included noted writer and reviewer Algis Budrys, who had this to say about Ballard’s disaster novels in the December, 1966 issue of Galaxy:

“A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don’t think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water.”

The passage of time and the impacts of his influence in the works of subsequent writers have rubbed the transgressive edge from Ballard’s early-career disaster novels. Unless a reader is pretty much a virgin to the SF field, he or she will be unable to experience The Drowned World with the same fresh eyes and sense of dislocation that a typical reader of 1962 would have, just as enthusiasts of classical music can no longer hear Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring with the same ears as those employed by the audiences of 1913. However, thanks to Ballard’s extraordinary mastery of visual imagery, these three books still powerfully conjure a trio of bewilderingly changed Earths and manage to deliver on that treasured “thrill of the new.”

Perhaps a bit ironically, Ballard’s final four novels, Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006), were so similar to one another, thematically and stylistically, that I found myself enjoying them in sequence much the same way a voracious reader of Agatha Christie’s mysteries would her connected works — as familiar, comfortable fictive “pillows” on which to rest my weary head. Ah, yes: that typical Ballardian hero, so indecisive, so alienated from himself, his family, his lovers, and his environs, so easily influenced by anyone with a powerful agenda; that restless professional and middle class, searching hungrily for fresh transgressions to shock them out of their stifling ennui; that gorgeous, off-kilter evocation of high-crust suburbia… I’ve read it all before, but I’m happy to read it again and again! Still, a retreat to a comfortable rut on Ballard’s part in his late career in no way diminishes the impact of his early disaster novels or such iconic mid-career works as Crash. (Bonus: here’s a graphic artist’s examination of the effectiveness of the cover art and designs of Ballard’s many books.)

One novel from my teen years that never fails to reward me no matter how many times I reread it is Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings (1969), a fix-up of three novellas, “Nightwings,” “Perris Way,” and “To Jorslem,” all published (I believe) in Galaxy between 1968 and 1969. The thrill of the new provided by Silverberg’s novel is the sense of Earth’s human civilization as almost incalculably ancient, humanity having millennia ago achieved its apogee as a star-spanning race that conquered and enslaved multitudes of other sentient species, confining individuals from them in terrestrial zoos, but having since fallen back so far that the residents of Earth, no longer star travelers, now fear being conquered themselves by the descendants of those they had made zoo exhibits. Other books that I’ve read have also reached for this effect, some of them with a good measure of success (I’d list Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse as chief among these), but none have managed it with the poetic weightiness, the sense of the passing of hundreds and hundreds of centuries with their accumulation of dust and detritus, sorrow and regret, that Silverberg so masterfully achieves with just the first few pages of Nightwings. Perhaps the effect would be better described as “the thrill of the ancient” than “the thrill of the new,” but it was certainly new, thrillingly so, to me back in 1976, when I purchased my Avon reprint of the novel.

Experiencing the thrill of the new, just like experiencing the fabled “sense of wonder,” becomes more difficult as a reader grows older and acquires more and more notches on his or her reading belt. Techniques that were so fresh and startling, viewpoints that were initially so strange and wonderful may lose their glow with repeated exposure. Not too long ago, I set out to read Robert Silverberg’s novels of the 1960s and early 1970s that I had somehow missed. I was very curious how I would respond to these books at this point in my reading life. Would I enjoy them, but in that “cozy, comfortable old flannel shirt” sort of way in which I had enjoyed Ballard’s final novels? Or could I possibly respond to any of them in the same way I had responded to Nightwings as a young teenager?

Maybe nothing could captivate me now the way Nightwings affected me back in 1976. But I must say, Downward to the Earth (1970) came darned close. It is the story of a human ex-colonizer, Edmund Gunderson, who travels to revisit the planet where he had once served as colonial overseer to work crews of sentient elephant-like beings and sentient giant sloth-like beings. Since his last stay there, the planet has been returned to the sovereignty of its native life forms, so he arrives as a tourist, not a master. I found Gunderson’s journey of personal discovery among the nildoror and the sulidoror, his learning of the link between the two species, a link neither he nor any of the other colonists, save one, had ever suspected, and the natives’ eventual acceptance of him and provision for his needs to be extremely moving. Not merely moving, but exhilarating because of its freshness. Its intimations of William Conrad’s Heart of Darkness added to the wonder and strangeness, in part because Silverberg’s book ends in an entirely different emotional zone than Conrad’s classic novella does. “The horror! The horror!” is still present, but it becomes inverted by the end of Silverberg’s novel, and quite wonderfully so.

To have provided me, a jaded, middle-aged SF fan who has read hundreds of novels and stories, who has written eight novels of his own, with the thrill of the new — and to have done so with a forty-year-old book… I must tip my cap to you, Mr. Silverberg. Well played, sir! Well played!

And how marvelous to discover that I am still capable of reading with the eyes, ears, and imagination of a twelve-year-old.

Category: Book Love, Miscellaneous Musings, Science Fiction | Tags:
| October 12, 2011
5 comments

Optimistic YA SF: Any Recommendations?

I’m about to embark upon a new type of project for me, a YA (Young Adult) science fiction novel aimed at readers in the sixth through ninth grades. This won’t be my first attempt. But I never finished the earlier effort I started back in 2005 (that got derailed by the death of my original agent, Dan Hooker, the lack of confidence his boss subsequently had in my ability to produce a viable YA book, and Hurricane Katrina, which redirected me to another huge project). I currently have one huge advantage I didn’t have back then, three huge advantages, actually: three sons who are all, in their own ways, very interested in books and stories. My oldest son, Levi, although in second grade, is on the cusp of plunging into middle grade fiction. He has been begging me for many months to write something that he can read. Thanks to him and his fascination with maps, I think I’ve stumbled upon a story I want to tell and that I think would be very appealing to a middle grade audience.

However, the YA field is one I’m mostly unfamiliar with. I haven’t read any YA fiction since my own boyhood, which was thirty-five years ago. A lot has changed in the world of YA science fiction and fantasy since the early 1970s. I’d like to become familiarized with some of the best of the contemporary books before starting my own, but I hardly know where to start.

I would love some recommendations, either from parents of middle school readers or from grown-up readers who just happen to love YA fiction (I know there are plenty of you out there). I’m particularly interested in YA science fiction and fantasy that projects a sense of optimism and hopefulness. Just glancing through the YA shelves at Barnes and Noble or the lost and lamented Borders, I saw an awful lot of downbeat fiction, books focusing on family breakdown, child abuse, bullying at school, inappropriate sexual relationships, and other social pathologies. I don’t begrudge YA writers the freedom to explore such issues, nor do I think young readers need to be shielded from such explorations. But it’s not the type of YA book I want to write, and, honestly, it’s not the type I would recommend with enthusiasm to Levi. And Levi is a voracious reader, so I’ll need an increasingly long list of books to steer him towards.

Any recommendations would be enormously appreciated. I know there are a number of classic, older works that would fall within the guidelines of what I’m looking for. But I’m particularly interested in hearing about YA science fiction and fantasy books written within the last decade that concentrate on sense of wonder and excitement about what the future may bring.

Thanks in advance!

Addendum: Right after posting this request for recommendations, I stumbled upon this article on the Locus Online site which recommends a good many science fiction and fantasy books for young readers, although most of the books are aimed at readers younger than middle school age. Are any of you familiar with any of the books on this list? Levi simply adores the Captain Underpants series (he’s read them so many times, I’ll soon have to buy him fresh copies, because he is loving them to pieces).

Category: Book Love, Horror and Fantasy, Science Fiction | Tags:
| October 6, 2011
4 comments

A Tale of Two Bildungsromans

By pure happenstance, the last two books I read were both bildungsromans, novels of growing up, published within a quarter century of one another, with some marked similarities. Each was published to some acclaim, their authors being held in high regard by contemporary critics; yet the passage of time has proven far kinder to one book (and its author) than to the other. One of the books has never been out of print, is hailed as a masterpiece of twentieth century American literature, and continues to be widely read. The other has been reprinted only sporadically, most recently by a tiny university press, is noted (if at all) as a possible inspiration for a far more famous and influential media property, and its author is mostly forgotten, even in the genre of literature (speculative fiction) within which he published his most famous works. I approached the two novels with vastly different expectations. One, the one I had expected to love, was a partial disappointment, at times a taxing and tiresome read. The other, the one I had anticipated skimming mostly for historical and anthropological interest, turned out to be an unexpectedly moving and rewarding reading experience.

The two books are Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (1930). It is possible these particular two books have never been compared to one another before. I just performed a Google search; apart from my own blog post of earlier this week, I didn’t come across a single website or article that so much as mentions both books in the same context. I would guess most critics and literary reviewers would scoff at the notion of even mentioning the two books in the same breath. One is considered “serious literature” and the other “genre fiction” or “popular entertainment.” Augie March was awarded the National Book Award and is considered a masterpiece of one of America’s most highly regarded writers. Gladiator is remembered only by science fiction and superhero comic book buffs, and only by tiny minorities of those two communities. Yet I would propose, after having read the book, that Philip Wylie’s intentions in the areas of philosophical questioning and the exploration of how a character matures under duress were no less lofty than those of Saul Bellow twenty-three years later. Gladiator was not originally published as a serial in a pulp magazine or a dime novel; it was published by Alfred Knopf, and at the time of its publication, Philip Wylie was acquiring a reputation as an American H. G. Wells, a writer who combined serious social extrapolation with his fiction.

The similarities between the two novels’ protagonists and storylines are numerous. Both Augie March and Hugo Danner come from poor or lower middle class backgrounds in the Midwest or West (Augie from Chicago, Hugo from small town Colorado). Both characters are set apart from their peers by an innate peculiarity; for Hugo, it is his super-human strength and invulnerability, and for Augie, an unwillingness to apply himself to any particular goal, combined with a chameleon-like surface affability that causes more purposeful characters to continually pull Augie into their schemes. Both are bright and introspective, and both are given to warmth towards others. Both young men are powerfully attracted to college life, but neither succeeds at fitting into the college milieu. Both experience a long series of odd jobs and are faced with periods of hunger and physical deprivation, which alternate with episodes of improved fortune and relative luxury. Both join the Merchant Marine. Both Hugo and Augie are sucked by enthusiasm and events into war, Hugo into the First World War and Augie into the Second World War. Both are unsuccessful in love and experience a series of disappointing romances. Both occasionally run afoul of the law. Both come close to becoming involved with the Communist Party but ultimately avoid that fate. And both spend significant times of their young lives in rural Mexico.

That’s a long list of superficial similarities. Yet one book is universally considered “literature,” and the other is typically relegated to some stratum of “sub-literature.” Why? I’ve read them both, back to back, and I would not make that distinction between these two particular books. The literary critic D. G. Myers has wrestled with the notion of what constitutes literature, and this is what he has to say: “Literature is simply good writing—where ‘good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.” He is saying that ‘good,’ if it has no fixed definition, is a subjective determination of value that varies from reader to reader. So what is my definition of a ‘good’ book? I’ve been a voracious reader much of my life. I have read books which have delighted me and stayed with me, and I have abandoned other books thirty pages in because I decided they were not worth my expenditure of time. I can list a number of qualities or “effects” which, if a book possesses them or elicits enough of those effects in me, lead me to place that book on my list of “good books.” They are:

Does the book delight me? Delight may include (1) surprising me with unexpected turns of events (but not events which defy established logics of the book’s characters or world); (2) providing me with a sense of aesthetic pleasure through skillful and evocative use of language; (3) introducing me to intriguing new (to me) places, new periods of history, or new activities, or portraying places, times, or activities with which I’m already familiar in a way new and illuminating to me; (4) making me laugh; (5) providing me with a sense of satisfaction or gratifying completion by following a pattern or structure which becomes apparent to me once I have finished reading the book, allowing me a thrill of recognition of at least some of the author’s intent; or (6) provides me with a sense of companionship from having spent time with a protagonist who strikes me as believable, well fleshed-out, and possessing interesting thoughts, observations, and opinions.

Does the book sustain my interest all the way through? Or does it bore or fatigue me? Do I comfortably remain within the “soap bubble” of the book’s imagined world, or do I find myself easily distracted and pulled away from the story and the prose?

Does the book arouse my emotions? Do I feel a sense of empathy for the protagonist and other characters?

Do parts of the book linger with me after I’ve finished reading it? Do I find myself reflecting back on a character’s dilemma or experience? Do any images which the book induced in my imagination recur in my imagination after that first impression? Do I continue hearing a character’s distinctive voice? Do I seek out memories of the book and replay them in my mind, rolling their flavors again over my tongue, because they are pleasurable?

Do I have any desire to reread the book at some time in the future?

Did I feel less alone while reading the book? Did the book allow me to feel less a “separate self,” cut off from the inner lives of other people?

While in the midst of reading the book, was I eager to pick it up again?

Would I be eager to recommend the book to friends?

Those are my criteria, my personal, subjective criteria, for judging the “goodness” of a book. So, taking these criteria into account, how do Gladiator and The Adventures of Augie March stack up against one another? I judge that each book scores points in different categories, and each holds distinct advantages over the other.

Gladiator was better at holding my attention all the way through than Augie March was. Hugo Danner’s central dilemma is simply more interesting and compelling than Augie March’s is. Hugo is a man born with the strength and resistance to hurt and harm that many of us fantasize about, and he is a man who wishes only to do well and right in the world, but who is stymied again and again by the limitations of his own imagination and the emotional shortcomings of those around him. Yet he continues to struggle against what seems a punishing Fate, thus earning in the reader’s mind the appellation “gladiator.” Augie is a smart and talented young man who is unable to settle on any particular goal and who ends up allowing people around him to draw him into their own designs and schemes, to Augie’s frequent disappointment. As a reader, I kept wanting to reach into the book and shake Augie’s shoulders and tell him, “Decide all ready! Make up your mind! Settle on a goal and apply yourself!”

Augie March provided me with more instances of delight than Gladiator did, but also far more instances of boredom, frustration, and temptation to set the book aside and start something else. Augie’s world teems with individually fascinating, grotesque, or bizarre minor characters, but at times this becomes a suffocating avalanche of riches. Particularly in the book’s first sixty pages, when Augie is still a child, we are introduced to one thoroughly fleshed-out minor character after another, many of them Dickensian in their individuality and strangeness, and the cumulative effect, for me, at least, was a sense of, “Why should I care about all these obnoxious, argumentative, and sometimes loathsome people?” Some of them go on to play major roles in the novel. Some do not. But I nearly bailed out on the book after fifty pages, particularly since Augie, its protagonist, was so undefined at that point and so overshadowed by this mass of unsympathetic minor characters. On average, the minor characters in Gladiator are much more flat and ill-defined than the minor characters in Augie March. Not all of them, but some; Hugo’s friends at college are little more than stock characterizations, quickly sketched, for example, as are the Communist Party organizer and archeologist depicted near the novel’s end, but the women Hugo becomes romantically involved with have inner lives to which we are given access, as do his father and his closest friend in the French Foreign Legion. Hugo lives in a less rich, abundant world of humanity than Augie does, but the minor characters in Hugo’s world don’t threaten to derail the novel’s plot or choke the reader with their superabundance, either.

Saul Bellow


Now that I have a little distance from both books, I find myself feeling closer to Augie than to Hugo. Augie’s voice remains with me more than Hugo’s does. This may be due, in part, to having experienced Augie’s first-person narration of his story for nearly six hundred pages, as opposed to experiencing Hugo’s story in third-person narration throughout a book less than half as long. But in great part this is due to one of Saul Bellow’s greatest strengths as a writer, his ability to create a very distinctive and memorable voice for his protagonists. Augie lingers with me due to his voice, his affability, his eagerness for love and openness to new experiences, his generosity in refraining from harsh judgements of his family, friends, and lovers, even when they’ve earned harsh judgement, and his self-deprecating sense of humor. He is a man I wouldn’t mind knowing personally, a man I could see easily befriending. On the other hand, he can be very tiresome, too. Oftentimes in the novel he is like one of those inebriated friends you found yourself sitting next to at a party in college, going on, and on, and on about various pet theories and philosophical notions. At some point, you want to say, “Go home, Augie! Get yourself to bed and sleep it off! I just can’t listen anymore!”

What were the high points of The Adventures of Augie March for me? As a reader, I wouldn’t change a thing about the entire sequence that takes place in Mexico — the eagle training, the assorted expatriots, and Augie’s ill-fated romance. It captivated me and will likely stick with me as one of my brightest memories of reading. Nearly as memorable and good were the “fish out of water” scenes of Augie being taken under the wings of various wealthy benefactors, his adult interactions with his older brother, the scenes of him making a precarious living by stealing textbooks, and the scenes of him floating in a lifeboat with an overly garrulous fellow survivor after his freighter is torpedoed by a U-boat.

Philip Wylie


What about the high points of Gladiator? The sequence of scenes of Hugo fighting on the Western Front in France during the First World War are, in my mind, the heart of the book. At last, he finds himself in an environment where he doesn’t need to hide his strength, where he can push himself to the utmost of his abilities in pursuit of what he considers a noble goal, the victory of the Allied Powers. We readers all expect Hugo’s tremendous strength and ability to withstand machine gun fire to prove decisive. We’re rooting for him. But we are then confronted with the shocking irony that the war is too big, too destructive, too senseless for even Hugo to make more than a ripple in its ocean. As I stated in my earlier essay on Gladiator, “even a man who can kill a thousand enemies in a single night is overshadowed by a war in which a single battle could result in half a million casualties.” Hugo’s commanders, while appreciative of his prowess, are too shortsighted, too unimaginative, and too stuck in conventional lines of military thinking to use him for much more than scouting or preventing their own trenches from being overrun. After Hugo’s best friend is killed by a German artillery shell and Hugo loses control of himself, wading into the German trenches and killing thousands of soldiers with his bare hands, he finds himself unable to exploit the momentary hole he has made in the German lines because he has reached the limits of his stamina and must retreat to his own trenches in order to eat and sleep. By the time he finally decides to go AWOL and attempt a scheme to end the war on his own by stealing an airplane, flying into Germany, and personally killing the German political leadership in Berlin, the Armistice is announced. The war ends without his having made an appreciable difference in it. The super-man might as well never have been a soldier at all.

Also very good are the scenes of Hugo attempting to earn money for college as a sideshow strongman in the midway at Coney Island. Philip Wylie paints these scenes and the characters Hugo interacts with there with nearly as deft a touch and an eye for telling detail as Saul Bellow exhibits in his portrayal of Augie’s Chicago. Much less effective, however, are Gladiator‘s final sequences, from the death of Hugo’s father on. I got the impression that Wylie must’ve written the last parts of the book in a rush to make a deadline, because the scenes of Hugo in Washington, DC and in Mexico feel flat and lifeless, almost cartoonish. The Adventures of Augie March does not end on a particularly strong note, either. I came to the final page and felt as if Bellow had simply said, “Enough!”

Which book would I be more eager to reread or to recommend to a friend? If I could have a greatly pruned The Adventures of Augie March, sort of a Portable Augie March, I would happily dive into it again and would enthusiastically recommend it to my friends. As the book stands, however, I could only recommend it with qualifications, and if I were to pick it up again, I would skip hundreds of its pages and run to the book’s central pleasure, the scenes in Mexico. I could read Gladiator again, but with less pleasure than I would take from rereading the Mexico portions of Augie March. Gladiator is a more consistent read, overall, than Augie March is, and I would judge it to be a better structured book. But I would also judge the high points of Augie March to soar higher than the high points of Gladiator.

So, of these two bildungsromans which I read back to back, which one would I say is the better book? After a good deal of consideration, I’d have to pick The Adventures of Augie March. But Augie wins on points, not by a knockout. So as a fight official, my score card is vastly different, I would imagine, from those of most critics, who would declare that these two novels don’t even belong in the same weight class or the same ring and would declare a mismatch. I don’t agree. “Let ’em fight!” I say.

Addendum: Looks like I misinterpreted D. G. Myers’ remarks above. He wrote to let me know that, contrary to my statement, “(Myers) is saying that ‘good,’ if it has no fixed definition, is a subjective determination of value that varies from reader to reader,” he does in fact believe literary value is objective and extrinsic, as he explains in this blog post.

My apologies to Professor Myers for any misunderstanding.

Category: Book Love, Reviews and Such, Science Fiction |
| September 14, 2011
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Wonderful Article on the First Borders Store

Borders Books and Music Store #1, Ann Arbor, Michigan


In light of my earlier blogging on the death of Borders Books and Music, I wanted to point out a wonderfully researched and very poignant article about the closing of the very first Borders store, the original location in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The author, CNN entertainment writer Todd Leopold, goes above and beyond the usual “slice of life” type article, interviewing a number of Borders employees who began with the company back when it had only a single store and was still selling mostly used books. The article manages to be both heartbreaking in its illustration of what the loss of Borders means to some people and, in a way, uplifting to those of us who love books and the world that centers around them, by showing the depth of passion that at least a portion of the population feels for the written word and the culture surrounding it. Great article. I hope you’ll take the time to read it.

(Full disclosure: Dara and I were good friends with Todd Leopold’s mother June when we lived in New Orleans. I never met Todd myself, although Dara used to play with him when they both were kids. June should be very proud of her son for having written this article. Go ahead and kvell, June!)

My last-minute purchases at my local Borders during their final three days in business? I will admit to gorging somewhat (although the lure of 90% off makes it hard not to):

Flashback by Dan Simmons
Masked edited by Lou Anders
The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern
The Believers by Zoe Heller
Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer
Pied Piper by Neville Shute
The Breaking Wave by Neville Shute
Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories (The Lottery / The Haunting of Hill House / We Have Always Lived in the Castle) edited by Joyce Carol Oates for the Library of America
Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta
Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game (Everyman’s Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) by George MacDonald Fraser

I hope to get around to blogging on some of these books, once I’ve read them (if I can ever find the time to sit and read!).

There was an odd, stressful, and sad vibe in my local Borders on my final two visits there, to the location in Woodbridge, Virginia. Employees were disassembling the furniture while we customers stood in line with our armloads of books. Three or four rented U-Haul trucks were parked right outside the entrance, being slowly filled with bookshelves and display tables and lighting fixtures. Signs were posted next to the bathrooms stating that the bathrooms were closed; the sinks and toilets had been sold and removed. An employee who caught my three boys wandering through the vast, newly empty spaces of what had been the children’s section begged me to keep them close by me, as “the store is no longer a safe environment, not with everything being taken apart.” So I made them sit near my feet as I maneuvered around the other customers who, like me, were hurriedly scanning the remaining shelves of fiction. They sat on the carpet, played with toy cars, and joked with each other. On our first visit, a woman shot me a scathing look and told her husband, “Let’s get out of here! It’s hot as hell (the air conditioning had been turned off) and those are some of the most obnoxious children I’ve ever had the misfortune to be around.” On our last visit, the following day, another woman, a little younger than the first, told me as we stood in line that she thought my boys were adorable and she loved listening to their conversations with each other; when I told her what the first woman had said, she remarked, “She must’ve had some kind of problem not related to you and your kids at all.”

Maybe she was in mourning for her favorite store?

Whatever. Consider this my (very) modest addition to Todd Leopold’s outstanding article.

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| September 6, 2011
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Last Chance for Borders Bargains!


This is a Public Service Announcement from Fantastical Andrew Fox.com, the Website That Wants to Be Your Pal (TM).

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. {Strange whirring sound, followed by series of BLAAATs.}

This is a message from Fantastical Andrew Fox.com regarding a Book Buying Opportunity. Borders Books and Music has entered the final week of their liquidation sale (according to the emails they’ve been sending me daily; however, I strongly suspect they will have a Post-Liquidation Liquidation Sale, and maybe a Post-Post Liquidation, We Really Mean It Now Sale). All items in all remaining stores have been marked down by 60% to 80%. There are also some very nice deals on lightly used blonde wood bookshelves (three for $100; a real bargain if you have a large library and plenty of open wall space; if I had room, I’d pick up some of these myself).

Genre fiction (SF, fantasy, mystery, and romance) is marked down 60%. So are bargain books (marked down an additional 60% from their original bargain prices), graphic novels (lots and lots of manga was left in the store I went to, but not much from non-manga publishers), CDs, DVDs, and history. General (or “literary”) fiction is marked down 70%. Political analysis and philosophy are marked down 80%. Rather interesting commentary on the relative market values of those various categories of books (looks like nobody wants to read about President Obama, either pro or con).

In the store I visited (Woodbridge in Northern Virginia), ALL of the toys and children’s books were gone. The top mark-down for those items was 50% off. Good thing I stocked up for Hanukkah for the three boys a week and a half ago, while Borders still had some kids’ stuff left. However, there are still plenty of Young Adult books in stock, along with a good bit of manga.

Here’s what I treated myself to yesterday (plus a book on Blue Ridge Mountains birding for the missus):

Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of The 1960s / The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik (Library of America No. 173) — 60% off

The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction — 60% off

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul — 70% off

Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis — 70% off

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem — 70% off (really should have been labeled “science fiction,” but anything by Lethem is automatically [Capital] L Literature, so I got an additional 10% knocked off; thanks, snobs!)

Category: Book Love, Publishing | Tags: , ,
| August 15, 2011
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I Knew It, Chris Foss!


It’s always rather interesting (and satisfying) when one of one’s long-held suspicions is confirmed in print. Here’s an entertaining and very revealing interview with the dean of British SF paperback cover artists, Chris Foss. Chris, now 65, enjoyed a very evocative childhood for a future artist. Born in 1946, he grew up in Guernsey, on one of the Channel Islands which had been occupied by the the Germans during much of the war and where they had constructed a number of massive concrete fortifications. Those abandoned gun emplacements and forts served as his childhood playgrounds. His parents used a thousand pounds they received from the sale of a Picasso etching they’d bought for seven pounds in a draper’s shop to tour postwar Europe, spending a great deal of time in defeated Germany, where Chris enjoyed playing in abandoned Wehrmacht bunkers and visiting former Nazi monuments now crowded with tent cities of refugees. As a commercial artist, he split his efforts between erotica and science fiction (much like American SF authors Barry N. Malzberg, Robert Silverberg, and Norman Spinrad did in the 1960s and 1970s).

My earliest exposure to Chris’s work came in 1980, when my family made the first of three successive summer holiday trips to different parts of Great Britain and Ireland. I was in the middle of my own, personal “Golden Age of Science Fiction” (my teen reading years) and had been devouring volume after volume of classic novels and anthologies. I was extremely interested to go into English, Scottish, and Irish bookstores and news merchants to see what their SF books looked like. I brought home a number of J. G. Ballard paperbacks and a nice Corgi edition of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience.

One thing I immediately noticed was that all of the covers I saw on display, for several dozen SF titles, appeared to have been painted by the same artist. They all featured vaguely organic-looking spaceships of gigantic scope or equally massive plantetary surface exploration vehicles. Many of the books were classic works written by American SF authors, many of which had nothing at all to do with space travel or other planets (A. E. Van Vogt’s Slan is one example I remember). Yet every single one (Slan included) was illustrated with a honking huge spaceship on the cover. I recall thinking to myself, “Either the artist was completely unfamiliar with most of these books when he illustrated them, or British publishers think the only way to sell science fiction is with a really cool looking spaceship.”

Ah, here’s the money quote from that article on Chris Foss in The Independent:

“(Foss) found himself in huge demand around the time of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the moon landings, when the world suddenly went crazy for science fiction. He was so busy that he became famous for not reading the books he illustrated and for creating covers which had literally no bearing on the contents of the book. But the publishers were happy and the commissions kept coming.”

I knew it, Chris Foss! Still love your work, in any case.

Category: Book Love, Science Fiction, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| July 25, 2011
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More on Borders Books

Just a quickie post. I took the boys over to one of our two local Borders Books yesterday to check out their liquidation sale. In the last few years, Borders developed a really nice selection of educational and semi-educational toys, and my kids were always finding various items they would beg me for. Since these were generally items costing over $15, I’d tell them, “Wait for Hanukkah or your birthday.” So yesterday we went to see what sort of discounts Borders was offering in the Children’s section, so that I could possibly stock up for those upcoming holidays and birthdays (as Borders will no longer be in existence come this fall).

Currently the markdown in the Children’s section is 10%. Not enough to make me jump, especially not when the store had gotten me used to receiving 40% off coupons in my email inbox every couple of weeks or so. More interestingly, the majority of the books in the store were marked either 10% off or 20% off. Following Act One of the Borders bankruptcy, when they closed 400 of their stores earlier this year, their new online policy was to offer all paperbacks at 20% off list and all hardbacks at 30% off list. So their initial “Going Out of Business Liquidation Sale” prices were a good bit higher than what they’d been hawking on their own website very recently.

Yet the store was packed. The crowds were tearing the place apart; stock was scattered all over the floor, particularly in the Children’s section. The line at the cash registers was easy thirty people deep. I found a Solomon Burke CD from Rhino Records I was interested in, but I took one look at the line and put it back where I found it.

Never underestimate the psychological pull of those magical words, “Going Out of Business Liquidation Sale.” If only Borders would have figured some way to pull this sort of stunt every month at their stores, they’d still be a going concern.

Category: Book Love, Publishing | Tags:
| July 23, 2011
6 comments

Buying Books in the 1970s, pt. 3

a great find from Starship Enterprises

Here’s the third part of my mini-memoir of buying books as a kid in the 1970s in North Miami and North Miami Beach (to go to part one, click here, and to go to part two, click here). Thus far, we’ve taken little memory trips to Burdine’s Department Store, an unnamed cigar shop, Worldwide News and Books, the Arts and Sciences Bookshop, and one of the two binary stars my young reading life orbited around, A&M Comics and Books (fondly remembered as Arnold’s). Today, we’ll visit Starship Enterprises and the other binary star, the Walden’s Books (not WaldenBooks–the corporate bigwigs hadn’t renamed the chain yet) at the 163rd Street Shopping Center.

Starship Enterprises: This was a comic book store located on the opposite side of 163rd Street from Worldwide News and Books and a block or two east, closer to the railroad tracks. There’s still a comics shop in the same location — Villains Comics and Games, which replaced Starship Enterprises (or possibly yet another comic shop) in 1984. Starship Enterprises was the diametric opposite of Arnold’s. Whereas Arnold shoved his new comics into old wire racks at the front of his store and let other comics fade in the sun that streamed in through his bay window, the owner of Starship Enterprises (a neatnik hippy with a carefully coiffed ponytail) arranged his new comics in a handbuilt, honeycomb-like wooden shrine that took up most of one wall of the long, narrow store. Whereas Arnold’s was stuffed to overflowing with stuff, Starship Enterprises always seemed to have perilously little in stock, apart from their selection of new comics. But what little they did had was carefully selected, artfully arranged, and displayed like an exhibit in a fine handicrafts museum.

I never felt all that comfortable being in Starship Enterprises. I usually felt as though I were trespassing in a private club. However, if you were looking for something in particular, it was much, much easier to find it there than it would be at Arnold’s. When I was eleven and going through a several weeks long infatuation with Jack Kirby’s rendition of the Inhuman’s Medusa (oh, that long red hair; oh, that skintight purple jumpsuit…), I went looking for my back issues of Marvel’s Greatest Comics at Starship Enterprises, not in the various boxes lying all over the floor at Arnold’s.

The store had a tiny selection of used paperbacks, but what they had was choice. Unlike Arnold, who didn’t seem to care what sort of condition the books he bought were in, the small selection of books at Starship Enterprises was invariably mint and handsomely vintage. They always had a nice batch of old Ballantine paperbacks on hand. My best finds were several editions of Frederik Pohl’s pioneering original science fiction anthologies of the 1950s, Star Science Fiction. Still have ’em.

a thing of beauty

The Walden’s Books at the 163rd Street Shopping Center: If Arnold’s was my main source of used books, this was my primary source of new books. It was where I’d drag my parents every Hanukkah and every birthday to point out the presents I wanted. It also happened to be the place I fell in love for the first time.

Walden’s Books was a terrific source for inexpensive illustrated books of all kinds. My local store’s sale tables (the 163rd Street Shopping Center was only a twelve block bike ride from my house, even closer than Arnold’s) were piled high with publishers’ close-outs on all sorts of subjects beloved by young boys: battleships, submarines, airplanes, tanks, World War 2, the Civil War, dinosaurs, dragons, astrology, muscle cars, trains, horror movies… and science fiction. Oh, they carried some wonderful illustrated tomes on science fiction.

another thing of beauty

I already mentioned buying The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction at Walden’s, which quickly became my SF bible. They also carried both of David Kyle’s gorgeous volumes on the artwork, writers, and themes of the prior hundred years’ worth of science fiction, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction and The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams. Both books were chock full of reproductions of lurid pulp covers, particularly from the Gernsback magazines, Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Air Wonder Stories. Even more fascinating to me were the illustrations from the popular magazines of an even earlier time, the Victorian and Edwarian decades, with their super-battleships, flying battleships, and bizarre, pre-Wright Brothers winged contraptions of all sorts.

As an adult, I got to meet David Kyle at a convention after he presented a slide show taken from his two books. I told him how much the first book had meant to me (I received the first one from my mother as a twelfth birthday present; but the second book I didn’t get around to buying until after talking with David, when I found it on eBay). He told me they had been works of love, and his one regret had been that their cover color schemes and fonts had been so similar to each other that many potential buyers ended up mistaking the second book for the first and never picking up Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams. I may have made the same mistake myself as a young man. One of my favorite features of David’s first book was its division of various decades in the development of science fiction into “ages”: the Iron Age, the Steel Age, the Silver Age, the Golden Age, the Plastic Age, etc. His fun dedications page gave shout-outs to many of my favorite fictional characters, including Lessa from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight.

I fell in love with two Anne M’s at that Walden’s Books. The first was Anne McCaffrey. I bought the first five Dragonriders of Pern books there, including The White Dragon in hardback, a splurge. I formed an Anne McCaffrey fan club and sent letters to her in Ireland (she always answered me, and this in the days before email). The second Anne M was named Annie Marsh. She was a sales clerk at the bookstore. I thought she looked like a young Jane Seymour. I was smitten from the first moment I talked with her. Twelve years old, I acted like a big-shot, know-it-all science fiction fan that first afternoon; I tried horning in on recommendations Annie was attempting to give to some teenaged customers in the science fiction and fantasy section, showing her and them how smart and well-read I was.

Annie was a regal nineteen, seven years older than I was. Within a day or two of meeting her, she was all I could think about. I found excuses to make trips to Walden’s Books every opportunity I could. Sometimes she’d let me sit in the stock room and office in the back with her and talk, or I’d just watch her work. When I couldn’t think of an excuse to go inside the store, or if I’d seen her too recently and it might weird her out to go see her again, so soon, I’d pedal my bike to the mall and park myself in a corner near the edge of the store’s display window, where I could watch the sales counter. I’d wait for her to come out of the office and help someone at the counter. I’d just look at her, drink in the sight of her, pray she didn’t spot me standing outside, and estimate the next time it would be kind of socially acceptable to talk with her again.

I carried a torch for Annie all through junior high school, from the time I was twelve to the time I was fourteen. Then she told me she would have to quit her job at the store because she would be attending college out of town. Either she gave me her home phone number or I looked it up, because I remember talking with her parents at least a couple of times after she stopped working at Walden’s Books. The last time I spoke with them, they told me she was engaged to be married. I’d known all along that I didn’t have a chance with her, of course. But my heart still broke, very painfully.

Strange to think she’s fifty-three now, possibly a grandmother.

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 21, 2011
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The Future of Bookstores

Octavia Books in New Orleans

The death of Borders Books (and let’s not forget the associated death of subsidiary WaldenBooks, once a huge force in book retailing) has many people prognosticating about the future of physical bookstores. As a writer, a reader, and a lifelong aficionado of bookstores, I’d like to jump into the conversation.

An old, if somewhat inaccurate, adage tells us that the Chinese word for “crisis” is made up of two characters, one representing “danger” and the other “opportunity.” The “danger” part of the dissolution of Borders is clear enough. Nearly 11,000 people employed by Borders Books and WaldenBooks will lose their jobs. An unknown number of publishing employees whose sole or primary responsibility has been to take care of the Borders account will also lose their jobs. For writers and their readers, the danger is that the loss of so much retail shelf space is going to slash the numbers of titles which are green-lit by publishers, as explained in an article from National Public Radio called “Bye Bye Borders: What the Chain’s Closing Means for Bookstores, Authors, and You“:

“Kathleen Schmidt, a book publicist, provided this perfectly concise explanation on Twitter: ‘Here is how the Borders closing will impact publishers: Say you have a bestselling author and you usually do a 1st printing of 100K books. Out of that 1st print of 100K, B&N/Amazon would take a large quantity, then Target, maybe Costco/BJs/Walmart, then Borders, then indies. If you’re an author with a 1st print of 30K (a lot), you prob don’t have price clubs or Target. You have B&N, Amazon, Borders, and indies. Now, take Borders OUT of that 1st print equation. Also consider that B&N is conservative with numbers these days. That 30K turns into 15K.'”

For the major publishers, 15K of anticipated sales is the borderline between green-lighting a trade paperback novel and rejecting the author’s manuscript. The likeliest outcome of the disappearance of all those shelves at Borders is that fewer projects will get past the Profits and Loss Departments of the Big Six publishing houses. Some of the slack may be taken up by smaller, independent publishing firms, but they will be affected by the loss of retail shelf space, too. Their “go/no go” borderline may be 3K sales, rather than 15K sales, but they are still faced with the same arithmetic. The departure of Borders will hasten the exodus of many lower-selling writers from traditional print to e-book originals and print-on-demand.

Any shift away from printed books to e-books would seem to be certain to hurt the surviving physical bookstores (although many independent bookstores now make it possible for their customers to order Google Books through them). Independent booksellers have experienced a modest resurgence in recent years; after fifteen years of steady decline, the American Booksellers Association, the trade group of independent bookstores, reported a 7% increase in the number of member stores in the past year. However, some independent bookstores which have managed to survive thus far in the shadows of Borders may actually be swamped by the wake of Borders’ sinking:

“‘What troubles me,’ says Susan Novotny, owner of Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany and Market Block Books in Troy, N.Y., ‘is having them [Borders] in a constant state of giving away books.’ She worries about ‘a hang-over effect’ from customers who are booked out.”

So there we have the “danger” part of “crisis.” What about the “opportunity” part?

I believe physical bookstores provide a vital element of what sociologist refer to as “the third space.” The first space is the home, the second is the workplace, and the third space is, like the classic French cafe or the English pub or (in the 1950s and 1960s) the American bowling alley, the place where people go to spend their leisure time among other people. One thing that the expansion of Borders (and Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million) did over the past twenty-five years was to give a taste of bookstores-as-third-space to millions of people who previously had no bookstores to call their own. Prior to the mid-1980s, hundreds of metropolitan areas, either small cities or the suburbs and exurbs of big cities, had no access to a local bookstore of any type (aside from maybe a used paperback exchange kind of place). But the megastores gave the residents of those areas their own local bookstore, a place to hang out that didn’t involve alcohol, a place to meet friends for coffee or sit in the cafe area and peruse a magazine or a new book. For many people, their local Borders or Barnes and Nobles came to serve as a kind of community center, or that special kind of place where you can go to be alone, but among other people. Many independent bookstores offer these same amenities and may even do them better, but the megastores planted themselves in many places where no independent bookstores had gone. When 400 Borders stores close down, that is going to leave a void in a lot of people’s lives, a void that can’t be readily filled by bars or restaurants. The Borders store closing in Scranton, Pennsylvania is the last bookstore in the entire city; the smaller chain bookstores located in malls closed in the mid-2000s, along with two independents.  Bookstore regulars in Scranton fear they will have nowhere else to go.

Where enough demand exists, entrepreneurs find ways to meet those demands. Joseph Robertson is bullish on the future of independent bookstores. His recent article, “Borders Closure is Green Light for Bookstore Innovation,” lists four innovations which may help new (or newly revitalized) independent bookstores to thrive in many markets:

“The true cafe/bookstore: A more balanced relationship between the bookstore and cafe sections of a retail space, with high quality coffee, with events and music, gatherings and opportunities to sit down with authors, and a bookstore that echoes this quality with content.

“The information oasis: Bookstores can reposition themselves as trusted sources of information, stocking quality publications, some new to newcomers, and unique titles with real depth and scope, understood by intelligent, engaged buyers and salespeople. Mainstream media may be an echo-chamber, but bookstores can be places where the individual is free to think for herself.

“The genius bar: One of the reasons Apple’s stores are popular with Mac lovers is that they provide information and knowledge that is useful; customers can learn from staff. Bookstores could make sure to be a source of guidance to the reading public, taking back that role from distributors and advertisers and being more pro-active about deciding what they stock.

“The cyber-paper crossover: Barnes and Noble, BN.com and the Nook, have made for an impressive collaboration. Small bookstores can take Borders’ market share, collectively, if they learn the lesson Borders missed: assist your readers in all media, and they will stand by you. Wifi is useful, but dedicated new-fangle web access, whatever that looks like, could help bricks-and-mortar independents sell print books.”

I would add a few suggestions to Robertson’s list:

The child-friendly bookstore: Borders was actually fairly strong in this regard with their designated children’s play and reading area and their Saturday afternoon story hours and activities for children. We parents are always looking for good indoor activities for our kids, perfect for those times when you just have to get them out of the house but inclement weather prevents you from taking them to a park or a playground. My local Borders stores were always very welcoming to my kids, and on days when they catered to children, crowds in the stores were healthy. I think one way in which Borders got themselves into trouble was their selection of locations. A good number of their stores were in areas which commanded extremely high rents. The stores may have succeeded in attracting a steady flow of customers, browsers, and folks who brought their kids for events, but their overhead was so stratospherically high that they suffered losses year after year. Corporate leaders were seeking status locations, locations which would allow them to build the Borders brand as upscale and somewhat exclusive, but the items their stores sold weren’t high margin enough to pay the rents. Independent bookstores typically don’t have owners who are slaves to prestige. Owners of non-corporate bookstores are often cannier about their locations than their corporate counterparts and are free to select locations in underutilized, lower-status retail areas which, although commanding much lower rents, may have unique advantages particular to a given neighborhood (nearness of restaurants or other centers of social activity; located in an area being gentrified by artists; etc.), advantages not so visible to an owner who doesn’t live in the community.

The rebirth of the newsstand: Mitchell Kaplan, owner of the local Books and Books chain of stores in South Florida, is pioneering this idea. He started with his original store in Coral Gables, a traditional full-service independent bookstore, but several of his other locations are very different. His notion was to replicate the magazines and cafe sections of Borders or Barnes and Noble but in a smaller, more intimate size, appropriate for tight spots in areas with high levels of foot traffic, such as South Beach or the Bal Harbour Shops. The wide variety of magazines gives Kaplan’s spinoffs a leg up on Starbucks or other corporate coffee houses and makes his locations much more of a destination for couples out on a date or individuals looking to spend a pleasant hour or two. A carefully and intelligently curated small selection of books would also add to the allure of a newsstand/coffee bar. Books were once widely available at newsstands. I think they should be again.

The center for writer-reader interaction and reader-reader interaction: My favorite independent bookstore in New Orleans, Octavia Books, is very good at this. Owner Tom Lowenberg swam against the tide and opened his store a little more than a decade ago, when hundreds of independent bookstores were dying off each year. He has built an extremely loyal customer base by making Octavia Books a headquarters for readers’ encounters with writers and readers’ encounters with each other. In addition to hosting five or six author events each week, Tom also makes his store available to a wide variety of reading groups, providing them complimentary refreshments and a familiar, friendly face.

Bookstores of the future may need to become more like microbreweries, focusing on their uniqueness, their sense of their region and neighborhood, and their owners’ personalities. More and more books may be consumed in the form of pixels, rather than ink on paper. But I believe physical bookstores will continue to exist and thrive as a vital and beloved “third space.”

Category: Book Love, Publishing | Tags: , ,
| July 20, 2011
71 comments

Buying Books in the 1970s, pt. 2

the book that launched my search for a thousand other books

This is the second part of my mini-memoir of buying books as a kid in the 1970s in North Miami and North Miami Beach (to go to part one, click here). With the immanent closure of 400 Borders Books stores, which will change the book buying habits of tens of thousands of readers around the country, I felt like a little memory journey to the bookstores and newsstands of my childhood might be in order.

In yesterday’s post, I described the motley collection of places I bought some of my earliest science fiction books and books about science fiction — a Burdine’s Department Store, a cigar shop, a newsstand, and an independent bookstore. In today’s post, I’ll talk about a place where I went hog wild, where I spent the bulk of my weekly allowance, and where I blew goodly chunks of my bar mitvah gift money. What follows are the places where I went from being a reader of science fiction to a science fiction fan — as in fanatic.

A&M Comics and Books: If there was a geographical center to my childhood (apart from my bedroom), this was it. I probably made more trips to A&M, or Arnold’s, as I called it (that’s what the A stood for, the owner’s first name; the M stood for the name of his wife, I believe) than I did to all my other bookstores and comic shops combined. The place opened in 1974, when I was nine, at the corner of South Dixie Highway and 12th Avenue, about a thirteen block bike ride from my house. It’s still in business (although relocated to Bird Road in Miami and now run by a guy named Jorge, who hired on with Arnold around the time I graduated high school in 1982) and claims to be the second oldest continuously operating comic book store in America. Arnold, a retiree from New Jersey, was the owner-operator, a crusty, irritable, Sam Moskowitz-kind of guy who decided to run a comics shop and used bookstore as a second career. The comics were displayed on freestanding wire racks at the front of the store. The other four-fifths of the place were taken up by a barely organized menage of used books, a good portion of them science fiction paperbacks. Arnold wasn’t into neat, nor was he into mint; his stock was stacked haphazardly on shelves, the tops of chairs, in boxes, on stools, and on the floor, and many of his books were on the ratty side. On the other hand, he made up for those possible foibles with quantity. Arnold always had a lot of books, and he bought more all the time. Finding something good within that huge mess was a good part of the fun. You could never search for something specific; you had to stumble across your treasure. And you generally did.

I can’t recall whether my father found Arnold’s first or whether I did. In either case, we soon fell into the habit of stopping by there on Sundays so I could spend my allowance. As a nine year-old, I received one dollar a week allowance. That year, Marvel comics (unless they were Annuals) retailed for twenty cents. Thus, I could theoretically buy five comics a week, assuming I could scrape up four extra pennies for tax. Usually my father would spot me the extra four cents, saying it was an advance on next week’s allowance. But he always forgot by the time the next week rolled around. So five comics a week it was, and what a treat. Marvel had started publishing lots of books with horror heroes, like Tomb of Dracula, Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night (I had a subscription to that one), and Ghost Rider. I bought them all, plus my favorite superhero books, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Iron Man, and Marvel Triple Action (the early adventures of the Avengers, reprinted). Every week, my father would ask me the same question: “Andy, are you sure you want to spend your entire allowance on comic books?” And every week, I’d reply with a polite version of, “Hell, yeah!”

At first, I never ventured beyond the comics racks, especially not when my father was with me (he wanted me to make my selections fast so we could get out of the dusty, overly warm, and poorly ventilated store). But I soon started visiting Arnold’s on my own, either on Saturdays or after school, riding my bike down 12th Avenue. On those more leisurely visits, I began exploring the other four-fifths of the place. And I quickly discovered that some of those old paperbacks were really cool. So I gradually transitioned from spending my entire weekly allowance on comics to spending most of it on comics and some on books, to splitting it fifty-fifty, and then to spending the majority of it on used paperbacks. The turning point came shortly after my bar mitzvah, when I used some of my Walden’s gift certificates for a copy of the new reference book, The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Brian Ash. (That I bought at the Walden’s Books in the 163rd Street Shopping Center, a store I’ll have to save for tomorrow’s installment.) This was the book that forever changed me from being a casual reader of science fiction to a determined, driven, systematic reader of science fiction. The book that made me a fan.

The Visual Encyclopedia, quite simply, blew my mind. It was the Internet before there was an Internet. It featured an illustrated chronology of all the seminal stories and books in science fiction, chapters on enduring themes in the literature, and highly detailed archival articles on subjects like the Hugo Awards and fandom and the history of the magazines. It had a fabulous index that let you track mentions of your favorite writers or books from themed chapter to themed chapter. I spent hours and hours pouring through that book. I could read the chapters and articles dozens of times, getting something different out of them each time. Of course, I began compiling my dream reading list, drawn from forty-five years’ worth of magazines and novels and anthologies.

I found a good portion of my dream reading list on the shelves or in the piles at Arnold’s. Every visit became a treasure hunt. I found A. E. van Vogt, Robert Silverberg, Edmund Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Ursula K. Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Barry N. Malzberg, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and Anne McCaffrey. I stumbled on names and books I’d never heard of, which I’d then look up in the Visual Encyclopedia as soon as I’d pedaled home. So long as the Encyclopedia gave its seal of approval, I went back the next day or the day after and bought the book.

I became more than just a regular at Arnold’s. I was virtually a resident. Arnold and I developed a sort of love-hate relationship, or at least he developed one with me. I’m sure he didn’t mind that I was spending a good bit of money in his store, but he never seemed to enjoy my company. Maybe he didn’t enjoy anybody’s company. I don’t remember any of our conversations, but I’m sure at least some went like this:

Arnold: Don’t you have any other place you need to be?
Me: Not really. . .
Arnold: I mean, don’t you have after-school activities, or something?
Me: I ride my bike over here. It’s exercise.
Arnold: Don’t you have any friends?
Me: I see them at school.
Arnold: How come you’re always in here?
Me: I like it in here.
Arnold: Don’t you have any other place you need to be?

That place imprinted itself on me. If I could print out a map of my mind, it would look a lot like the interior of Arnold’s. I still don’t feel entirely comfortable in a home unless I have some clutter around me. Preferably clutter with books mixed in.

Arnold, you old, balding curmudgeon, rest in peace in that Big Used Bookstore in the Sky.

Yipes! I’ve already posted almost 1400 words, just on A&M Comics and Books. Looks like I won’t get around to Starship Enterprises and Walden’s Books and my first, unrequited love in this post. I’ll save them for part three (which can be found by clicking here).

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , , , ,
| July 19, 2011
One comment

Buying Books in the 1970s

a fondly remembered early purchase from Burdine's Department Store

I’ve been thinking a lot about changes in the world of books. My recent post, “The Death of Science Fiction, 1960 and Today,” talks about the current turmoil in the publishing and bookselling industry (i.e.: the liquidation of Borders), the transmogrification of the distribution system for books, and how the ebook original currently has much the same profile as the paperback original did back in 1960, when Earl Kemp published his memorable monograph, Who Killed Science Fiction?

All the cogitating has me looking back wistfully at my earliest book buying experiences, when I was just a young ‘un. My formative reading years, my own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction, pretty much extended from 1971, when I was seven, to 1982, the year I graduated high school. These were years when the paperback original was the undisputed king of science fiction prose formats, but well before the book superstores, the Barnes and Nobles and Borders and Books-a-Millions, had proliferated. I grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, not then a hot spot for independent bookstores (although there were a few around, particularly in more bohemian neighborhoods like Coconut Grove).

So where did I buy my books? (I bought many, many of them.) I’d like to take a little journey down Memory Lane, if only to educate my three young boys on their father’s early years.

(Me: Yeah, boys, when your daddy was a kid, I used to buy my paperback books at an itty-bitty newsstand that was twenty-five miles from my house, and I had to walk uphill through driving snow both ways–

Asher: But Daddy, didn’t you grow up in Miami?

Me: Uh, yeah. . . well, when I was a kid, I used to buy my paperback books at an itty-bitty newsstand twenty-five miles from my house, and I had to walk through hurricane-force WINDS both ways. . .)

Burdine’s Department Store: Burdine’s was one of four anchoring department stores at the 163rd Street Shopping Center in North Miami Beach (the other three were Richard’s, Jordan Marsh, and J.C. Penny). Burdine’s was the fanciest of the four, sort of our local Macy’s; it had a nice restaurant on the top floor, a linen-napkin kinda place, where my Grandmother Irene used to take me for special lunches. Back in them old days of the 1970s, upscale department stores had many more departments than just men’s clothing, women’s clothing, children’s clothing, home furnishings, and electronics. Some, like Burdine’s, had a books department. I don’t remember their department carrying any hardback books; or, if they did, it was only very few. What they did have was five or six rows of long, long metal racks of mass market paperbacks (referred to as pocket books, back then). They carried quite a few science fiction paperbacks, UFO and occult-related paperbacks, and true crime books.

I spent many pleasant interludes reading the back covers of paperbacks there while my mother or grandmother shopped in other departments. I remember as a ten year-old being pleasantly mystified by the cover illustrations and back cover descriptions on the Carlos Castaneda books, The Teachings of Don Juan, etc. These were labeled Non-fiction. Were the stories true? Were sorcerers real? My favorite Burdine’s purchase was the collection Science Fiction Terror Tales, edited by Groff Conklin, which I probably begged my dad to buy for me in 1970 or 1971 (it was published in 1969). The story I gravitated to most strongly was “Nightmare Brother” by Alan E. Nourse (reprinted from the February, 1953 issue of Astounding). But what really hooked me was the cover illustration: an injured hand clawing the book’s cover, a hand with a single, staring eyeball protruding from its back and trailing broken cyborg wires. Hard to top that when you’re seven years old.

Some Cigar Shop on Biscayne Boulevard: I can’t recall the name of this place. It was located on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami, in the same shopping strip as the very popular Pumperniks Delicatessen (a favorite of the great Robert Sheckley’s, whenever he was in the area). The cigar shop was small and narrow. When you walked in, the right side of the store was taken up with glass counters and cabinets displaying a multitude of colorful cigar boxes. The left side of the store was given over to wall racks of paperback books. My father used to take me in there. The one book I remember him buying for me there was a significant one — my first collection of Ray Bradbury stories, A Medicine for Melancholy. I needed a book to take with me on the bus going from North Miami Beach down U.S. 1 to Sea Camp in the upper Keys. I was in fifth grade; this was my first sleep-away camp experience (and I got stung by jellyfish). I picked the book because the montage of images on its cover featured a little Brontosaurus. Reading the book on the bus trip led me to fall in love with Ray Bradbury, who became my “entry drug” to SF and fantasy short fiction.

hot stuff for an 11 year-old; and an enduring classic

Worldwide News and Books: This place was a treasure trove. It was a huge newsstand in a modest strip of shops on 163rd Street in North Miami Beach, near N.E. 16th Avenue, within reasonable bicycling distance from my house. Aside from newspapers from all over the nation and many other countries, they also carried a gigantic stock of paperbacks, with an excellent selection of science fiction. I first encountered a new type of book there, trade paperbacks. At the time, I didn’t know that’s what they were called; I thought of them as “big paperbacks.” Some of the most exciting and enticing trade paperbacks I mooned over included Michael Ashley’s History of the Science Fiction Magazines series (volume one covered 1926-1935 and volume two covered 1936-1945; he’s now up to 1970) and Charles Platt’s marvelous and eye-opening SF:Rediscovery series, which introduced me to many classic works I otherwise would have overlooked. Foremost among these was Robert Silverberg’s magisterial Nightwings. I may have first picked it up because of the very pretty and very naked winged lady on the cover (I believe I was eleven at the time and so may be excused for my prurient interest). But I reread it again and again because it was a masterpiece of imagination and characterization. It remains one of my favorite novels (and I still have my original copy, lovely pastel boobies and all).

The Arts and Sciences Bookstore: This was a stuffy place. Both stuffy because its aisles were narrow, dim, dusty, and claustrophobia-inducing, and because it took its name very seriously. One of north Dade County’s only independent, full service bookstores, it was located on 125th Street, a modest storefront in the middle of North Miami’s original shopping district. I recall that most of their stock was scholarly; they didn’t have much popular fiction. I think popular fiction may have given the owner hives. What they did have, however, was literary criticism, and their stock occasionally included the odd volume on science fiction. I’m pretty sure I bought my copy of James Gunn’s Alternate Worlds: the Illustrated History of Science Fiction here. I’m positive I found my treasured copy of The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, edited by Clifton’s biggest fan, Barry N. Malzberg (along with Martin H. Greenberg), here.

More to come tomorrow, including A&M Comics and Books, Starship Enterprises, the Walden’s Books at the 163rd Street Shopping Center, and my first, unrequited love!

continue to part two

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , , , ,
| July 19, 2011
4 comments

Oh, hell, Borders is Going Under

I really hated reading this today. Borders Books has been unable to find a buyer and so will go into liquidation. Over 11,000 people will lose their jobs, including some good acquaintances at the two Borders stores near me, wonderful people who have always been sweet and kind to me and my kids on our visits.

I’ve always been a champion of independent bookstores. I recognize that the rise of Borders (perhaps less so than the rise of Barnes and Noble) put many of those independent bookstores out of business. But I still find this very sad. A big-box corporate bookstore is still a bookstore. Many smaller towns and outlying suburbs had no bookstores at all until Borders moved in. And it has always been a pleasant place to hang out. I much prefer Seattle’s Best Coffee to Starbuck’s, so I enjoyed sipping coffee at my local Borders (or stores I would find out on the road) a lot more than grabbing a cup of “Char-bucks” at a Barnes and Noble.

I suppose this is part of Creative Destruction, the churn and storm un drang that are part of the workings of a capitalist economy. Borders killed off a lot of independent bookstores by offering more stock of more books at lower prices than most independents could match. Now Borders is being killed off by cannier competitors who are taking better advantage of new technologies than Borders seemed to be able to do. Someday, Amazon and Apple may be slain by younger, nimbler competitors in their turn.

But losing a bookstore, any bookstore, is always sad. And the country is about to lose four hundred of them.

I’ll be posting later today and tomorrow about the potpourri of places I used to buy books as a kid in North Miami Beach in the 1970s. A heck of a lot has changed in the book selling business since then. And a heck of a lot continues to change.

Category: Book Love, Publishing | Tags: , ,
| July 14, 2011
2 comments

George Alec Effinger’s Thousand Deaths


I’ve posted the Afterword I wrote for the third Golden Gryphon Press collection of George Alec Effinger’s short fiction, A Thousand Deaths. The essay is a reflection on how George’s favorite of his novels, The Wolves of Memory (included in the collection), ended up being a foretelling of the grinding events of the final decade of his sadly shortened life.

Marty Halpern, the last editor George worked with prior to George’s death in April, 2002, was the driving force behind bringing the best of George’s short fiction back into print. Marty (who also happens to be the best editor I’ve ever worked with — he edited The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 for me at Tachyon Publications) posted a terrific three part essay on his blog, More Red Ink, describing his role in the publication of the three GAE collections at Golden Gryphon. Here’s Part One, regarding Budayeen Nights; Part Two, regarding George Alec Effinger Live! from Planet Earth; and Part Three, regarding A Thousand Deaths. All three Golden Gryphon collections featured gorgeous wrap-around covers by my favorite artist, John Picacio.

By the way, Marty is available for freelance work, either line editing or book doctoring. The man has the eyes of an eagle and is persnickety in all the best ways. If you need an editor, I couldn’t recommend a better one.

Several years before I wrote the Afterword for A Thousand Deaths, I wrote a rambling and much more personal version of my friendship with George Alec Effinger and how I did what I could to help him during the last few years of his life. I published the piece on my first website from 2003-2006 (after which said website went defunct). That piece, “Remembering George Alec Effinger,” can be found here, courtesy of the Internet Way-Back Machine.

Category: Big Easy, Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: , , ,
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