Les bouquinistes

Are you a book lover? A bibliophile? Do you get no greater joy out of life than browsing a used bookstore? Do your knees get weak at the thought of a library book sale?

Have you been to Paris yet?

The Parisiens know books, appreciate books. You’ve probably seen the pictures of the book stalls that line the Seine, in their ubiquitous green carts. These are les bouquinistes, the legendary booksellers of Paris:

They are part of the Paris legend. 217 booksellers spread out their 900 stands along the capital’s 11 quays, which represent a three kilometer walk. The onlookers pass by their sides, rummage through the famous green boxes, buy a book here and there, a poster, a vintage print. But who are these men and women who brave the wind, the cold and the rain? Winter is here, but they are still at the task. Enter into the biggest outdoor bookstore.

The quote above is a translation of an audio piece from La Guinguette — a very good online French journal. I want to put a plug in for them, as they have great products, and the audio is free to listen to. (You can download it if you subscribe.)

This article is a great example. this is not French for the beginner, instead it is the French as it is spoken in the streets. Read this article in the English translation, but also play it, to get the ambient sound of the Paris streets as bouquinistes are interviewed at their stalls.

I can almost picture where each stall is, as it’s described in the article. On our honeymoon, we rented an apartment next to the Seine, on the rive gauche, with green stalls outside our door…

And the French are wonderfully book mad. Here’s a picture of me paying 2 euro for a book at a vending machine:

Another way to access books!

“Literary Soup” Literature

I’m in the middle of two books, and suddenly I feel like I’m reading one of those artsy-fartsy double features at your local, non-mainstream movie house. You know the ones, where there is a connection between the films, and it is your job as the audience to find it.

The most obscure one I ever came across was where the only link was an ice cream cone in each film. The most delightful was Robert LePage’s Le Confessional (1995) shown with Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953).

So, back to books.

I’m reading two books right now:

• the always erudite, sometimes terribly obscure Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005), and
• a first book by a young woman in the USA, Marisha Pessl’s Specialty Topics in Calamity Physics (Astute BookNook followers will recall that I blogged about the book’s amazing website here!)

While both books are utterly different in plot, character, setting, and genre they have in common a wonderful bookyness to them…they are both a literary soup of references that verge on the border of being overwhelming, but instead are almost inspiring in their bibliophilia.

Two different books, two utterly different characters, but both texts are littered with pop culture:

Eco, being a semiologist, does not really surprise us in this. His other books have been thick with historical references, illuminating his amazing well-readness. This time however, it is a plot point, as our protagonist is an older man suffering from amnesia who uses the books of his lifetime to rebuild his lifeline. The references this time are both classical and current, albeit the focus of the current is on Italian modern history and corresponding pop culture.

Pessl, a young woman writing her first novel, holds her own in general bookyness in comparison to the towering Eco. The character, Blue van der Meer, is not quite 18 but is an astoundingly well-read genius, being the daughter of a rather eccentric, nomadic, genius professor father. As she navigates the teen hell of a yet another new school, her every thought is a literary or pop culture reference, at times against her will. Despite how ponderous that sounds, it is a delightful read, and un-put-down-able once you really get rolling.

I need more books of this genre (is it a meta- or sub-genre?). Any suggestions?

The Ubiquitous Pencil

As you may know, I have a weakness for cultural histories — “See the history of the world through this odd angle!”

So, the other day, when I was browsing the local 2ndhand bookstore, I happened upon a brilliant addition to my library — The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroksi. ‘Tis a delightful romp through the history of such an amazingly simple, obvious thing (at least to us today), in the hopes that the mysteries of engineering become clearer:

“If we can capture the essence of engineers and engineering through the most elementary and least abstract of examples, then we can more easily get to the heart of the matter when confronted with something so large and unfamiliar that we can barely conceive of what it really looks like, let alone hold it in our hands and think about it.”

I have only just begun Chapter 5, Of Traditions and Transitions, the start of which should give you a more fanciful sample of Petroksi approachable academic, sometimes poetic style:

“The history of the pencil, when it has been written down at all, is full of erasures and revisions.”

Accurate, and cute.

To my delight, he’s written more, including an upcoming book (due in October of this year), entitled, simply enough: The Toothpick How can one resist!?!

It’s on the wishlist.

An anti-wish list

It’s hard to believe, but yes, there are books I don’t want. True crime, boat repair, anything by Ann Coulter…

Here’s a list of the World’s Oddest Book Titles. Most of them I don’t want, but some would be interesting conversation pieces:

HISTORY: Learn about events that have shaped our world.
The Social History of the Machine Gun; 1975
Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun; 1995.
1587. A Year of No Importance; n.d.
Highlights in the History of Concrete; 1998

I like history, but I think I’ll pass on these.

My other cousin’s a chimp!

Did you know that we (not le gorille) are the chimp’s closest cousin on the hominid family tree? It’s a fascinating idea…and one of the questions that Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee is based on: If we are so similar, DNA-wise, what constituted the changes that created us — innovative, artistic, destructive humans?

So far it’s fascinating, somewhat eye-opening, and worth reading. And worth discussing — it’s the latest book for the BookTalk.org crew. We’re getting into it, and while still early in the quarter, some insightful comments have already been made (unfortunately, not necessarily by me!).

Read along with us!

Biographers’ Dilemma

Just this morning, lying abed, cozy under my covers, two cats in attendance, a cup of coffee brought to me by my love, I finished reading Truly Wilde by Joan Schenkar. The scene was apt, as luxuriating in bed was one of Dolly Wilde’s greatest pleasures, as Schenkar illustrates by quoting Wilde’s letters.

But what a biography! Dolly Wilde was, by all (surviving) accounts, a very vivid woman who lived in the shadow of a truly (in)famous uncle, and died in a swirl of her own infamy. Could this woman’s life have been treated to the traditional biographical form? Being a playwright, Schenkar draws on her narrative proclivities to describe the virtually indescribable…a character who left only clues to her history, whose conversational style people remember, but not her bon mots…

Schenkar describes her version of the biographic genre:

“In finding ways to tell her story, I allowed Dolly’s own passionate interests to guide me: her feel for inventive imagery turned me to the vivid enlargements that metaphor permits; her contempt for time gave me the intense concentration that thematic — rather than chronologic — treatment enables; her unalloyed romanticism lead me to the ‘recreations’ that make up the next chapter of this book, etc., etc. From time to time, I have used different styles of writing in different settings to suggest Dolly’s own changing — and very elusive — states of being.”

And it is effective. Dolly is now haunting my thoughts. Her social circle, I see now, has reached its tendrils out to me many times, in my reading about salons, in my interest in authors of her time. Virtually everyone involved in Dolly’s life is someone who was someone, or was connected to someone. For a quick overview, look at this loving tribute site to Natalie Clifford Barney & her women-centered literary and social salon of the early 1900s.

I will leave you with Joan Schenkar’s final words of her acknowledgements:

“And I thank everyone who has ever saved a scrap of handwriting, an old love letter, or a fragment of photograph from the half-forgotten life of an unusual woman in the hope that it might be important; in the hope that she might be important.”

With that in mind, the future of biography is both more overwhelming, and bleaker, in light of the changes in technology. Passwords to blog & email accounts lost, forgotten, or not able to be found in the event of death. Hard drives erased, backups corrupted.

Or worse, having to sift through all of the random tripe we spew every day, because it is so easy, electronically.

“Merry Bookmas!”

Luckily, I’ve married into a bookish family, and my man is bookish, and his friends are…and my mother has been trained to give me a book gift certificate every year.

Books and consumables are the best presents (consumables…you know — wine, cheese, cookies, jam…).

This year was a nice mess of books:

I found The Art of Blacksmithing by Alex Bealer for Metro. He’s always talking about how he’d like to learn more about it, etc. Well, now he can.

Metro’s sister found him John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise.  An odd book of satirical essays and the like…perfect.  The same sister sent me the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I put a lot of browsing time to use in my local 2ndhand bookstore…made my husband a list of books that were there, that he could pick up for me. And he took me up on it, and bought me the rather unusual Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece by Joan Schenkar. I’ll have to blog on this book individually one day, soon.

Metro also got me two more books — I feel spoiled! The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls was one. New York Times bestseller, winner of various awards…I think that’s the next book I’m reading. He also bought me Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t be Made in the Blink of an Eye by Michael R. LeGault. The interesting thing about this book is that LeGault wrote it in reaction to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink…Blink essentially glorifies the decisions we make subconsciously, in the moment, while I believe LeGault’s point is that we need to put more thought into our decisions. I’ll let you know more when I’ve read LeGault’s book (I’ve already read Gladwell’s).

Funny thing, is that our friends sent us some books too…one is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, and appropriately enough, Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels — from Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe by Anthony Arthur. His sequel will have to include Gladwell & LeGault.

The final book on the list is Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This one is also from the same friends…and again, a good call. We bought this for Metro’s mother last Christmas, so it’s been on our radar for awhile.

So, leave me a comment to tell me what books you got for Christmas!!

An important day in publishing history

From the Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1913 that the very first crossword puzzle appeared in a newspaper. It was the invention of a journalist named Arthur Wynne, who worked for the New York World. In 1924, two men named Richard Simon and Lincoln Schuster decided to set up a publishing house, and as they were casting about for ideas of what to publish, they decided to try a book of crossword puzzles. That book sold half a million copies in less than a year. The book’s success launched a worldwide crossword puzzle craze and helped put Simon and Schuster on the publishing map.

Where would we be without puzzles in the newspaper? And not just crosswords…hands up if you’re a Sudoku fan. Cryptograms? Logic puzzles?

It is rather mind-boggling to think about what that day in 1913 started.

Plus, it was a good year — my dad was born that year.

Free…no charge

Humans! We all seem to want something for nothing. Maybe because we’re programmed to expect our water and air to be free, and we’re still hardwired for the whole hunting and gathering days (not that that was really free…it was a lot of risky work for both tasks).

Anyway, very often, a person finding this blog is searching for a free online version of a book. Sometimes it’s a book that is out of copyright, and truly free. And sometime, it’s a book that people should know better about — some relatively new publication.

Hell, I’m guilty of it as well. I once had a copy of the 1996 essay by David R. Counts & Dorothy Ayers Counts on RVing — which they’ve since expanded into a book, Over the Next Hill: An Ethnography of RVing Seniors in North America. I went searching for the article online, hoping to find that someone had posted it for free…

No luck. Oh, it was out there, but at a cost.

I do some marketing on the side — and this is one thing that I recommend for anyone with a business website: Have something of real value on your website for free. People will come for the free stuff, and keep coming back for more. Good examples: Baen’ free books, and the Altoids mint flash game, which is pretty cool.

A study of omnivores…

BookTalk.org, a wonderful on-line book club, needs an influx of new blood.

• Are you a discerning reader?
• Do you enjoy intellectual discussion?
• Do you write in full sentences with decent spelling? [Alternate question: Are you annoyed by the proliferation of 'text speak' on the Internet?]
• When you disagree with someone, are you prone to engaging that person in calm discussion?

Then BookTalk.org is great for you! Flames, ad hominem attacks, and irrelevance are discouraged, while intelligence, inclusiveness, and freethinking flourish. (Silliness is acceptable, but in it’s rightful place.) Tell ‘em I sent ya!
And you’re just in time for the next book discussion! This time it is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. [Buy it here, to support BookTalk.org]

I’m looking forward to this one, as it reminds me a little of Margaret Visser’s The Rituals of Dinner and Much Depends on Dinner, where she investigates the cultural history of manners and various foodstuffs.

Pollan, from what I understand of his book, is investigating how our omnivore status has changed over the centuries as agricultural & social concerns mutated. I’m involved with an upcoming conference on the topic of Food Security, and I believe that this will be a useful book to have in my repertoire.