Search Results for: book store tourism

Book Store Tourism

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I went to a conference in Baltimore earlier this week and managed to find an hour to visit a used bookstore.  I believe it is a moral duty of all bibliophiles to support home grown store.  There’s usually at least one within walking distance of my hotel, and Baltimore was no exception.  The Book Escape was housed in two buildings which were connected by a walkway through a lovely little brick courtyard.

The thought of all that shelf space at home emboldened me, along with the very reasonable prices, and I bought ten books!  You can see the list at LibraryThing. I am sorry I didn’t get a picture but the weather was dreary, and I struggled with my bags and umbrella through an early spring downpour.

I decided to start with McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.  It is, after all, the beginning of the 150th anniversary of the war. Here’s Ken Burns’ version:

The Civil War

Book Bingo Update Plus Some Bookstore Tourism

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I wrote about Book Bingo over at In Another Place related to gamifying reading.

I filled out my card and have been using it to drive my reading. It’s fun to explore different genres including fantasy (The Graveyard Book), science fiction (Ender’s Game) and alternative history (The Man in the High Castle). I took advantage of the analog AND digital library to find a couple books (The Graveyard Book and The Absolute True Diary of a Part-time Indian) and retired one that’s been around for awhile (Spartina).

I did take time off the bingo card to read The Emperor’s Tomb by Steve Berry, my first Overdrive checkout. The app connects to my Amazon account to get to my Kindle and lets me choose the length of the check out time. It’s interesting that not all of the books in the Cotton Malone series are available electronically. But the next one is already on the shelf at my local branch so I’ll head down there this week.

KramerbooksA conference in Washington, DC, got me to a new bookstore. Kramerbooks is in Dupont Circle and packs a lot of books in two pretty small rooms. Walk through the store to a bar and a lovely cafe. I might be willing to move to the city if I could live around the corner from a spot like this. I came away with a nice pile of interesting reads including Education: A Very Short Introduction by Gary Thomas, part of Oxford’s series of short introductions to lots of topics. I’m proud of myself that I only walked away with one. I’ve mostly stopped by fiction in analog since I read them so quickly. Instead, I added a few others to the library including A History of the World in Twelve Maps and On Dupont Circle, which tells the story of the Roosevelts and their progressive friends who shaped the beginning of the 20th century.

It’s harder to find time to read this time of year: the garden is calling. There’s weeding and culling and moving and mulching, and I like to do a couple hours a day, in smaller chunks of 45 minutes or so. After five years of working on these garden beds, adding perennials and shaping edges, they are coming together nicely, and I’m looking forward to seeing them move through the seasons. The biggest challenge now is dealing with some of the large chunks of daylilies and irises we have in various places. I have spots for them but the digging and hauling have deterred me so far.

 

Craving A Book…The Real Kind

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I am taking a break from A Song of Ice and Fire and dove back into the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. Just finished An Incomplete Revenge. Excellent…a solid, well told mystery with well developed characters and a bit of history and psychology woven throughout. I bought a two-book bundle from Amazon so I have the next one, Among the Mad, ready to go when I need a gardening break today.

Or…I might read something else. The last five books I’ve read have been on the Kindle. I mostly read them on my iPad but I am finding that increasingly distracting. I’ll read a chapter and then check Facebook or Twitter or try to beat that last level on My Kingdom for a Princess. At night, I read from the real Kindle, and I do like the way it syncs between devices. But I think I am mostly craving a real book, one with pages that feeds the tactile senses. One that doesn’t have other content loaded on it, calling to me.

I practiced bookstore tourism this week, stopping at Blue Whale Books in Charlottesville to browse and buy a few books. I fed my nature and books collections and was charmed by the discovery of Sixpence House: Lost In a Town of Books by Paul Collins. It describes Collins’ move to Hay-on-Wye, the bookstore town in Wales. I made the pilgrimage to Hay when I was in Wales and have often imagined what it would be like to live in a place where you could slip into a bookstore every day just to browse.  Maybe I’ll dig into what the Boston Globe called “the bookworm’s answer to A Year in Provence.” (I know I have read that book but it must have been pre-Library Thing as it’s not in my reading list.)

On a side note: one of my favorite children’s authors died yesterday. I must have read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler 25 times when I was a kid in a small country village imagining life in New York City. I reread it when I started teaching middle school and was delighted all over again. E.L. Konigsburg had a wonderful sense of mystery, magic and wonder.

Finally, I Finished a Book!

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Since my post on April 6, I haven’t been able to really concentrate on a book.  I read Charlotte Figg Takes Over Paradise, which turned out to be Christian fiction, a genre I have not read before.   It was fine…not so preachy but more about trusting God and being in community. Feisty, quirky characters, each with a secret.

Then, I stalled out.  Some of it certainly has to do with the it being Spring…there is a TON of gardening to do.  I am tackling a huge flower garden space and trying to help my husband with the vegetable farming as well.  I did listen to The Camel Club, the first book in Baldacci’s series.  I also listened to Messenger of Truth on my recent trip to Baltimore.

Balitmore Book Shopping on 365 ProjectI visited The Book Escape, the book store on Federal Hill that I visited last year.  This year, I snapped a picture.  And found some interesting books, too:

  • Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
  • Lyra’s Oxford, Philip Pullman
  • Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, Neil Postman
  • The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Innocent Traitor, Alison Weir
It’s a great place to browse with treasures on every shelf.  And it’s that experience–browsing a bookstore–that digital editions cannot replace.  Scanning the shelves, taking in titles and authors, reaching up for a volume, skimming the book jacket, flipping through the pages.  Thinking about authors and series and then seeking them out.  No search function here and that’s a good thing since the pursuit may provide an interesting diversion.  The goal of bookstore browsing is not always to find the exact book but instead to find a book.  I had no intention of buying any of these books; instead, I found them, intrigued by titles or author names.  I’ve got rural writing on my mind and have been dabbling in Ivan Doig and Wendell Berry.  So, Stegner seemed a natural choice. And a serious one, compared to my more recent reading.
So, after nearly a month of just dabbling in books but not getting into anything, I picked up Baldacci’s Stone Cold last night and finished it about an hour ago.  My first full book in some time…and it didn’t last long enough to really answer the what next question?  It was a quick reading fix but still leaves me wondering where I want to head with my reading.  I have several of Ivan Doig’s books in both analog and digital format, ditto for Berry.  They would be a good fit with our current agricultural undertaking.
Or I could take the easy road and finish off the Camel Club series…

Dear NPR

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Dear nprcrowdsource@npr.org:

I am writing this blog post in response to your request on Facebook:

If you’re a book lover, you probably have shelves upon shelves of literary treasures. We want to know for an upcoming story: How do you organize all these? Do you keep fiction and literature separate? Do you go alphabetical? Or do you sort by size and appearance? What has to be in hard copy and what only lives on your Kindle? Where do you hide those guilty pleasure reads?

First, the book lover part: My husband and I actually bought an old house partially because it had a library where I could finally put out the bulk of my books. Many years ago, I rented an apartment for the same reason, and in those days, the collection was probably not even 1/4 of what it is now. My previous house was very small, and I had to find interesting places to put all the books I couldn’t resist buying. It led to a funny story about hiding books in the linen closet. They weren’t particularly guilty reads, but I had made a pledge I wasn’t buying any more books so when I broke the pledge almost immediately, I needed to keep them out of my husband’s sight. He found them when he went looking for toilet paper.

Even in my new house, there are still a few books stored in the cupboards below the open shelves, and the collection has spilled over to other rooms. Almost every room in my house has at least a few books that live in it.

booksYou seem particularly interested in organization. I’m currently working on scanning my books into a database and have been thinking a lot about how I organize. For now, my books are loosely organized by genre. I have several major collections: children’s books, education, nature and history, and they are housed together in groups but not in any other order. I also have a huge collection of fiction and literature, but they are in no particular order and tend to be sprinkled throughout the shelves as I don’t have any more open areas so I just shelve them where I can. Probably my favorite shelving pair is the Kama Sutra sitting next to the Bible, something I didn’t plan but that a friend pointed out.

Some books were placed where they are because of the height of the shelves. The house came with books from the previous owner, a doctor whose children were not book people. He had a huge collection of dime store paperbacks that fit perfectly in the top shelves. They are put together by author since I had to move all of them and took the time to put them together as I placed them on the shelves.

At this point, with books spilling over everywhere, I try to limit my purchases in general. I buy first editions and hard covers in the  nature and history categories since they are my major areas of collecting. I will buy hard cover first editions of other kinds of books. I also buy analog books when I’m supporting independent book stores, part of something I call book store tourism. I make it a point to seek out local stores when I travel and usually have room for a couple in my suitcase. Kindle and Nook purchases and library checkouts are for books that I’m going to read quickly, in a day or two. But, I will break that rule if the books are used and cheap. I don’t mind reading ebooks, but there are times when I just crave a real book.

As for guilty pleasures, earlier this year I announced that I wasn’t going to feel guilty about reading anything ever again. I’ve read my share of the classics, tackled some tough nonfiction, so I don’t have to justify my reading habits to anyone. My books are on the shelves for me, and I’m old enough that I just don’t care about what other people think. If you’re ever near by Bottle Tree Farm, feel free to stop by and browse.

A Day Without a To Do List

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128/365 for 2010 Strawberries!A breezy sunny Saturday with no plans. In the words of Annie Dillard, I’ve really “spent” the morning, wandering through the woods with the dogs, then touring the yard, picking a nice big basket of strawberries, and taking some photos. The strawberry photo is my flickr photo for today.

Other chores are done…the sheets are on the line and, with the brisk breeze, are probably already dry. I’ve cleaned up the kitchen and the bedroom. Doggies are all settled into morning naps after their breakfast and walk. I’m relaxing in the my favorite chair with a latte. The house takes on the air of a monastery this time of year as we close the windows and drop rattan shades over them to keep out the sun. We don’t have central air conditioning and hate to run the window units too much so we capture the cool air of the night time and then trap it inside during the day.

I’m planning afternoon reading…I’m about half way through two books: Wendell Berry’s Life Is a Miracle, which I’ve already blogged about a bit, and Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth by Charles Beauclerk.  It’s an extended argument for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, being the real Shakespeare, otherwise known as the Oxfordian theory.

The book came from the Barnes and Noble in Denver which was tantalizing visible from my hotel room window.  I made it in and out once without buying anything except a latter but the second time was not so lucky.  I never made it past the first table of new nonfiction.  Besides the Beauclerk, I bought The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music by Richard Williams and My Empire of Dirt: How One Many Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm by Manny Howard. I bought the latter because I was reminded of our own suburban farm: from my chair in the front room, I can see my own front yard, which is where the strawberries are growing.  There are raspberries, onions, garlic, and more and we’ve eliminated enough grass that I should be able to maintain it with the John Deere push mower this summer.

Capital Hill BooksMy regret here is that I couldn’t wait until I got to the local bookstores in Denver to start buying.  I did buy The Landscape of Home at Capitol Hill Books, a wonderful used bookstore across the street from the capitol with its shining gold dome.  It’s part of a series about the west and includes essays by Stewart Udall  and others about life in the Rockies. Tattered Cover The series was begun by what the book calls the “legendary” Tattered Cover Bookstore, but by the time I got there on Monday, I knew if I bought one more book, I would have to mail them home.  I did get a latte and relax on a comfortable sofa in the store and am already planning to head there first when I get back to Denver in late June.  Bookstore tourism at its best.