Category Archives: Bookselling

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Reading

The Powerful Rings So Far, Libraries, and Freedom in Commitment

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Someone in our house picked up Amazon Prime, which means we’ve watched five episodes of The Rings of Power. If you remember what Lars said about not watching it, those reasons still stand. After the first two shows, I told the rest of my family it was not a Tolkien’s story, but a good fantasy that leaned heavily on Tolkien’s established world. It could have been independent of Middle Earth, but then it wouldn’t have gotten all of the hype, fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come out of the woodwork to comment, and it wouldn’t have disappointed viewers as badly as it has.

I can’t say I’m in the most disappointed camp yet, though I have my complaints. Straight out of the gate, the writers tell us there was a time without darkness, which I took to mean evil had yet to come into the world, but they follow those words with little Galadriel getting bullied over her toy boat. Then they say, you know why a boat floats and a rock sinks? It’s because a boat has hope and keeps it head up. If the dialogue had maintained that level of inanity for the whole first episode, I would have dropped it, but it improved. Not before arguing that Galadriel, who had bent her life on stamping out Sauron, was in danger of sustaining the evil by seeking it, because if evil isn’t out there, but you think it is, then you could become the very thing you seek.

Those were meta level reasons I said the story wasn’t Tolkienesque, but it still seemed okay as we moved along. Characters weren’t doing stupid things until maybe episode five. A wizard-like character who fell from the sky has not been explained–he’s interesting. The Sylvan elf is the only one fighting at this point and has gotten in some good Legolas moves. The Duran-Elrond storyline is good overall.

But with episode five, things have begun to turn sour. There’s a laughable fighting tutorial that suggests swordmen should fight with their feet, not with their arms. An actor with stage fighting experience has a couple videos in response to this part of the show, in which he explains how actors swing weapons to appear lethally aimed when they aren’t and what the camera must do to make a battle look real.

  1. Fight Scene Autopsy
  2. How Fights Tell a Story

I could say more, but many others have said many things about this show already. I should just move on with blogroll links.

Bookcases: “We’re so enamored of digital technology we often presume its superiority; worse, we sometimes forget its alternatives even qualify as technologies.” Joel Miller recommends a bookcase as the most underrated user interface we have.

Coffee: Artist Alyssa Ennis paints detailed architecture and landmarks of Northeast Ohio using pencils and coffee. Her dad sculpts wildlife models from wood.

Liberty: Peter Mommsen writes about our love of liberty, fear of commitment, and the freedom found in making good vows. “I soon discovered that being bound [by a vow] didn’t feel like a loss of liberty. On the contrary, once the step had been taken, paralyzing daydreams about other possible life paths disappeared . . .”

Libraries: The Palafoxiana Library in Puebla, Mexico is the oldest public library in the Americas. “On the first floor, there are more than 11,000 Bibles, religious documents and theological texts. The second level is dedicated to the relationship between God and people — chronicles of religious orders and the lives of saints — and the third contains books on physics, mathematics, botany, language, architecture, even carpentry.” (via Arts Journal)

Photo: Springfield Library, Springfield, Massachusetts. 1984. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Non-fiction

An Artist of the Brandywine School, a Best-of List, and Dreaming of October

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The Scythers by N. C. Wyeth (1908) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Artist and illustrator N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), trained by the famous Howard Pyle and painter of the Brandywine School, produced illustrations for many Scribner’s Classics editions such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans and The Yearling.

Best of: Ted Gioia offers his paid subscribers his reviews of the 50 best works of non-realist fiction (sci-fi, alt-history, fantasy, and more). Read the list for free (part one of five so far). The reviews are behind the paid wall.

Gothic Stories: Ray Bradbury released 27 stories in a collection called Dark Carnival. Eight year later, he had matured considerably as a writer and was able to republish a new, revised edition of 19 tales under the name October Country.

In this short span, he wrote his breakthrough story cycle, The Martian Chronicles, a book that signified a start to the genre’s inclusion in mainstream literature; published the celebrated science-fiction collection The Illustrated Man; followed up with the underrated collection of mixed fiction (fantasy and contemporary realist prose), The Golden Apples of the Sun; wrote his magnum opus, Fahrenheit 451; and began work on the screenplay for Moby-Dick for director John Huston.

Theology: Dale Nelson reviews a preface to fantasy author George MacDonald’s theology. He favored Christmas over the cross. “Christ came to show us complete childlike trust in the Father.”

What’s in a name? “Six months and still your parents couldn’t name
the boy they wished a girl. They let a crowd
of tipsy cooers at their resort pluck
Edwin from a hat.”

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (V.ii)

Cleopatra: His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm
Crested the world. His voice was propertied
As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in ’t; an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above
The element they lived in. In his livery
Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands
were
As plates dropped from his pocket.

Dolabella: Cleopatra—
 
C: Think you there was, or might be, such a man
As this I dreamt of?

D: Gentle madam, no.

Bookselling

Masterful Book Blurbs Have a Long History

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I’ve had some rough days recently. I was sick most of last week with recurring fevers that held me down. I think the antibiotics are working me over, making me sleepy in the middle of the day or maybe only after I have coffee.

While sick I read most of Brian Jacque’s Redwall, which the kids all read years ago. Got to make sure I didn’t corrupt their minds back in the days of their impressionable youth. That question still crops up occasionally.

Today, we discerned that a burned fuse was preventing the Honda Accord from shifting out of park. Praise the Lord, it’s drivable again, but we need to replace it soon, and I’m rotten at buying cars. The descriptions are relatively similar and I want to believe them. I want to believe it’s a reliable car at a good price. Why shouldn’t it be?

Like a book blurb, they may say we have an “unparalleled epidemic of masterpieces,” and I want to believe them. But are any of them compelling enough to read?

“Some blurbs are so obscenely fulsome they give me a good laugh. Superlatives worthy only of the Deity pile up like cancer cells.”

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Reading

The Queen Overwhelmed, Author Regrets, and Other Sad Things

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No matter where they are in the world, when someone refers to the Queen, they almost always mean Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

This photo of the young queen hangs in Nottingham’s Council House (Lee Haywood/Flickr).

A photo from the coronation in June 1953 is in this BBC photo essay of her life.

C.S. Lewis watched Elizabeth’s coronation on TV and wrote this in a letter:

. . . the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. . . .

The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if he said, “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.”

C.S. Lewis on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (via Mindy Belz)

Celebrities: “But over time, it seemed, the fallen leaders managed to accrue immense social power without true proximity. They cultivated an image of spiritual importance while distancing themselves from embodied, in-person means of knowing and being known.” Gina Dalfonzo reviews Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church by Katelyn Beaty.

A Writer’s Regrets: A.N. Wilson, who has published over 40 novels and other books, has released a memoir. He “says that he cannot believe that the ‘young fogey’ of the 1970s and 1980s, dapper, elegantly suited, was him. He describes himself as thrustingly ambitious, full of himself and unfaithful not only to his wife but to his own better nature.”

Stolen Books: Joel Miller has a roundup of stolen book news, such as the Gospel manuscript that was taken during WWI and how Bibles were a common stolen good when he worked at a bookstore in California.

“Growing up, I often heard that the medieval church used to chain up Bibles so average people couldn’t read it. It’s a common myth. The reality is that illiteracy was the norm, average people had better things to do than read, and books were only chained to keep clerics, monks, and visiting scholars from stealing valuable property—or reading in the latrine.”

Religious History: “. . . the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong.”

Photo: 7-Up Building, Portland, Oregon. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Bookselling, Reading

When All Your Books Pose a Problem, the Problem Could Be You

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This month a high school English teacher quit her job in response to the enforcement of a new Oklahoma state law on teaching controversial subjects. School officials instructed their teachers to cover up or remove books from their classrooms whose “titles might ‘elicit challenges'” to the law. If a teacher could reasonably defend a book, it wouldn’t have to be covered up or removed.

Summer Boismier had 500 books in her classroom and covered up all of them with paper and the note “Books the State Doesn’t Want You to Read.” She printed a QR code for students to get easy access to the Brooklyn Public Library’s “Books Unbanned” program, which decries the challenges that have been made to teens reading books written by Black or LGB-etc. authors.

What books does this program recommend?

“As part of the initiative, the library will also make a selection of frequently challenged books available with no holds or wait times for all BPL cardholders. The books include: Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Tomboy by Liz Prince, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison.”

Is this what Boismier had on her shelves? Were school officials fine with this library before Oklahoma HB1775 was passed?

Looking at the language of the law, these books would not be a problem unless they were required reading. They certainly weren’t banned. Moreover, if the principal and school board allowed such books in the classroom, they were definitely not banned.

What the law forbids is a teacher or course instructing students in such ideas as racial inferiority, discrimination, and inherent oppression. It attempts to prevent students from believing they should discriminate against their peers on the basis of race or sex and that due to their category in society they are inherently oppressed or oppressors.

The intent of this law is completely lost on some librarians and teachers who seem to think their discriminatory judgment cannot be challenged by anyone. A challenge to one book is seen as a challenge to all books.

With my limited knowledge of the books named above, I’m going to suggest Toni Morrison’s novel is the most valuable and least objectionable. Her writing and themes are marvelous, but you can see in this report out of St. Louis reasons The Bluest Eye would be challenged for teenagers. I’m confident some of what’s referred to here is difficult to read and would be better read by those college-aged and older.

It’d be safe to bet The Bluest Eye was in Boismier’s lending library, but was every other book of the “Books Unbanned” type? No Moby Dick or Paradise Lost? No Great Expectations? Was there a collection of poems by Gwendolyn Brooks? (She talks about her most famous poem and objections to it in a recording from the Academy of American Poets.)

All of the books in that classroom couldn’t have been problematic according to the school’s interpretation of the law. The real problem is how they got into the school in the first place.

Bookselling, Uncategorized

See me in Brainerd!

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If you’re anywhere around Brainerd Minnesota on Saturday, you have the awesome opportunity to see me at the Crow Wing Viking Festival, demonstrating the ancient Viking craft of selling paperback books. And, oh yes, there’ll be some other Vikings around, doing actual Viking stuff.

It’s held at the fairgrounds. You can learn all about it at the festival web site, linked above. We did it there last year too, and it was great fun. I recall we were all champing at the bit to go back in time again, after a long two long years of Plague and Penance.

This looks to be an interesting summer for me. I may be going as far as Montana next month, and I’m scheduled to participate in an alumni author’s forum at one of my several alma maters, in Iowa, for Homecoming. I’ll keep you informed.

I’ll have a post tomorrow, in spite of being out of town — if I can figure out how to set this contraption to “post later.”

If not, you’ll see the next post right away.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Poetry, Publishing

Writing as Reality TV, Old Tech, and the 2022 Bestsellers

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Writers everywhere say their craft is much like a reality show–their every action watched and analyzed, applauded and jeered. Looking awesome while writing or typing have been the notable skills of great authors such as Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, and Willy Makeit. The first reality star author, Dante Alighieri, is supposed to have said, if he were any more verbosely handsome, he’d be king.

Big Brother is after American authors in Kwame Alexander’s proposed show America’s Next Great Author. He’s putting together a pilot and calling for contestants who will pitch novel ideas to the judges. Six contestants will be selected for a month-long reality show retreat during which they will write the novel they pitched. And that’s not all.

“Throughout the retreat, they’ll also participate in storytelling challenges and work with mentors to develop their stories,” Publishers Weekly reports. Show co-creator David Sterry said “the challenges will ‘show off a writer’s ability to use words, think fast, be creative,’ but also help them to learn to market and promote their books ‘because writers are called upon to do so many different tasks now in modern publishing that have nothing to do with writing your book.’”

And will they have anything like their book or their sanity when they finish? (Via Prufrock)

Surely they took this idea from Monty Python’s Novel Writing sketch, featuring the athletic writing talents of Thomas Hardy.

Old Tech: Frank Adams’s Writing Tables, 16th-century English writing technology via 𝕊onja Drimmer on Twitter – “It’s especially famous for two things: its erasable pages and the survival of its original stylus.”

Bestsellers: Among the bestselling books of 2022, Colleen Hoover is making a killing. Publishers Weekly has the list. Hoover’s novel It Ends with Us is #1 and three other novels are on the list too.

National Poet: The Library of Congress has appointed the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón. (via Literary Saloon)

Photo: World’s largest buffalo, Jamestown, North Dakota. 1990. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Bookselling, Publishing

Russia Published War Novels Telegraphing Their Invasion

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Sergej Sumlenny, a political scientist focused on Eastern Europe and living in Berlin, posted a Twitter thread on the preparations Russian books made in advance of the Ukrainian war.

“One of the first indicators of Russia preparing for a full-scale turn to dictatorship and a global war,” Sumlenny says, “was the mass production of books about cool sides of Stalin and Stalinism and about upcoming war against the West.”

The secret police control the publishing industry, he says, so it wasn’t the free market bringing a surge of books with titles like “Be proud, not sorry! Truth about Stalin Age,” “Stalinist’s Handbook”, and “Stalin’s Repressions: A Great Lie” in 2010 and following. Bookstores followed the theme with vintage war paraphernalia.

Continue reading Russia Published War Novels Telegraphing Their Invasion →
Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Music, Reading

Read Good Books for Your Soul, and Walk While You Read

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It’s Holy Saturday, so let’s begin with a few words about Christ.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
    and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
    stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
    and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
    and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
    he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
    he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
    make many to be accounted righteous,
    and he shall bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:8-11 ESV)

As for other subjects:

Read good books: Reading thoughtfully, like having a good conversation with an author, may be the very thing you need to reset your soul and rebel against the spirit of the age. “Christians who immerse themselves in creative writing are good stewards of their time — not wasteful — because writing, reading, and ruminating on words can glorify our Maker.”

Read and walk too: Some people have taken to walking while reading; some of them really can’t see where they’re going.

Quotation Research: Who said, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell“?

Said Tolkien to Lewis: Listen, friend, I’ve based a character on you.

Booksellers New Friend? Once considered the embodiment of everything that was wrong in bookselling, Barnes & Noble is succeeding and many indie booksellers are rooting for it. (via ArtsJournal)

Isaac Watts’s “Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed” set to a common Irish folk melody
Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

War, Words, and the Best Book in Scandinavia

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Ukraine is still under siege. NATO allies are sending ammunition, weapons, and food to Ukraine, but they will not close Ukrainian airspace to Russian aircraft. That would mean acknowledging World War III. I understand the hesitation, but I don’t understand, given everything Putin has said and done, how this isn’t a world war already.

Putin will not stop until Ukraine falls, and Ukraine must not fall. The only way out of this apart from NATO taking an active role in the conflict is either Ukrainian surrender or an uprising of the Russian people. The latter may happen anyway.

In Ukraine, civilians are being targeted despite a ceasefire agreed upon by both sides.

Mindy Belz has this piece on the Christianity of Ukrainians and how Putin is seen as a Christian despite his brutal oppression of them.

In related research, the Cato Institute has released its fourth annual Arms Sales Risk Index. “Selling weapons to governments that treat their citizens poorly increases the power of the state at the expense of its citizens, allowing them to respond to unrest and political challenges with violence.”

But I don’t want to talk about this here. What else do we have?

Word games: Based on under 200,000 tweets of game results, U.S. players rank 18th in the world of Wordle. Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are the top three. Among U.S. players, those in St. Paul, Minn. are #1.

Have you played Wordle? It’s fun, and you don’t have to stay with only one version of it. There’s Dordle, a two-up Wordle, and Quordle, a four-up version. Worldle is a geography version that tells you how far away in what direction is the correct answer. Heardle revives Name That Tune with six guess for sixteen seconds of music. I’ve enjoyed both Wordle and Quordle for a few weeks now.

Shout Down: Ilya Shapiro couldn’t address a college class because the students wouldn’t have it.

Best books in Scandinavia? The list of this year’s potential winners of the Nordic Council Literature Prize has been announced.

Amazon closing bookstores. Apparently, people buy food in physical stores, but books not so much.

Photo: Merced Theater, marquee detail, Merced, California. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.