Updates first (anxiety is never in short supply, so it can wait its turn):
Marilynne Robinson has just been awarded the Orange Prize for Home.
Iain Pears’ Stone’s Fall is finally out in the bookstores of my town, but not yet on library shelves. I bought a copy but it, like the vast majority of my personal library, is stacked up on a nearby box (of books) near my desk in the position that means “to be read just before it tips and starts an avalanche.”
Anxieties and unnerving signs at the book stores–I’ll give you five.
1. The shelves and display tables toward the front of my local Borders have been spaced farther apart and there are fewer of them. This has happened at least once before, but it was a few years ago. Meaning: they are carrying less stock and trying not to look like it.
2. The family-run independent Morningside Bookshop in New York City is closing. People from around the neighborhood raised about $68,000 to help them pay their back rent to Columbia University so they could stay in business, but it wasn’t enough. The owners are understandably bitter about the situation–the husband even adapted a version of a familiar Holocaust memorial prayer on the bookstore’s web site, to the effect that independent neighborhood bookstores have been getting squeezed out for years in Manhattan, and he wishes he had stood up and spoken up earlier for them, because now there’s no one left to stand up for him.
3. At my local independent bookstore, the science section is shrinking. The mysticism and religion section is growing. Actual histories and original literature are not being presented for direct reading so much as catalogued by listmakers. Catalogs and lists are popular. And easy to skim. Or not.
4. Likewise, the science exhibitions I’m seeing these days at local museums are emphasizing the “beauty” or the “art” of science, not the science itself. Digests upon digests.
5. Moby Dick in Half the Time–??? Pride and Prejudice in Half the Time–????!!! RRRRRRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!! I think the guy who came up with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is on the right track here. I know I would probably want to go zombie if I could just figure out which clerk ordered these titles. I don’t care if they were just thrown in with the bargain remainders on the middle free-for-all table. I want brains!
