Tuesday, September 10, 2002
I visited Arundel Books (www.arundelbooks.com) on 1st Ave. in Seattle. A fun store with floor to ceiling bookshelves, lots and lots of books, and a great fiction wall. Found a lit crit book on important French novels and some catalogues from a few book arts shows.
Lately I'm reading more literary criticism and thinking about what books I should be getting behind and supporting at the bookstore. Here's a fun rant about the state of lit. crit. from the Seattle Weekly. (Here's the Dale Peck column on Rick Moody mentioned.
The Seattle Weekly piece connects Literature, with a capital L, to bookselling, or the making of money from selling books. I'll admit that I sometimes feel a strange internal pull when I think about how I like to live (simplified lifestyle, less consumerism) versus my chosen profession (encouraging people to spend their cash on ideas printed on paper). But the only time I feel guilty about selling books is when I see smart, honest people drop a hundred bucks on brand new personal finance books. I haven't figured that one out yet. But I digress.
What are the requirements that make a book a backlist bestseller for ten, twenty, a hundred years? This is a question to work on for the next few years. First response: either a character or a plot that symbolizes a truth or emotion of the culture. Holden in Catcher in the Rye becomes a symbol for teen rebellion. There, it's a start. Second response: a book that summarizes a time period in a way that allows future generations to empathize with how it must have felt to live during the era. Catch-22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, possibly Generation X. (Yikes, I'm really giving away my reading tastes here.)
Of course, the ultimate end to this line of thinking may well be that booksellers should not try to be critics. That we should focus on having enough copies of the new Clancy or Lovely Bones on the hardcover fiction table to make it through its fifteen minutes of fame, then clear the space for the next Big Book that we'll all need to read fifty pages of and develop a standard response to "Did you read it?". Do booksellers have a role to play in criticism? Or do our ties to the cash register negate us from participating?
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Lately I'm reading more literary criticism and thinking about what books I should be getting behind and supporting at the bookstore. Here's a fun rant about the state of lit. crit. from the Seattle Weekly. (Here's the Dale Peck column on Rick Moody mentioned.
The Seattle Weekly piece connects Literature, with a capital L, to bookselling, or the making of money from selling books. I'll admit that I sometimes feel a strange internal pull when I think about how I like to live (simplified lifestyle, less consumerism) versus my chosen profession (encouraging people to spend their cash on ideas printed on paper). But the only time I feel guilty about selling books is when I see smart, honest people drop a hundred bucks on brand new personal finance books. I haven't figured that one out yet. But I digress.
What are the requirements that make a book a backlist bestseller for ten, twenty, a hundred years? This is a question to work on for the next few years. First response: either a character or a plot that symbolizes a truth or emotion of the culture. Holden in Catcher in the Rye becomes a symbol for teen rebellion. There, it's a start. Second response: a book that summarizes a time period in a way that allows future generations to empathize with how it must have felt to live during the era. Catch-22, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, possibly Generation X. (Yikes, I'm really giving away my reading tastes here.)
Of course, the ultimate end to this line of thinking may well be that booksellers should not try to be critics. That we should focus on having enough copies of the new Clancy or Lovely Bones on the hardcover fiction table to make it through its fifteen minutes of fame, then clear the space for the next Big Book that we'll all need to read fifty pages of and develop a standard response to "Did you read it?". Do booksellers have a role to play in criticism? Or do our ties to the cash register negate us from participating?
