Live Blogging at a Bookstore

Someday, I may feel the need to blog about my experience at a bookstore, but for the time being, I am enjoying Elizabeth Bastos's take on 2 hours at a bookstore:

Two Hours in a Suburban Bookstore Cafe

Literary Support of New York City

Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the Eastern Seaboard a few weeks ago, and changed many peoples' lives in a weekend. There has been huge support for the residents of these areas from across the globe, and an amazing website called Occupy Sandy Recovery keeps residents up to date with the recovery update. You can also donate to the relief effort and support in other ways. 

As this is a literary (and sometimes music) blog, I wanted to focus on two literary stories going on over the last few weeks. The first is from the amazing Chelsea bookstore Three Lives & Company, which survived the storm's worst, fortunately. I had the great opportunity to visit this bookstore a few years ago. Today, I received the monthly newsletter, which featured this inspiring recap of the last few weeks: 

Greeting from Three Lives & Company, 

It has been a tough time, a harrowing time, a heart-breaking time and it has been a time of beauty and grace. Sandy blew through and changed a great many lives. We are very fortunate to report the little bookshop made it through without any damage or flooding. We did lose power for the week and managed to make it to the shop for three of those days, opening the doors during the daylight hours to welcome neighbors as they went about their errands in a remarkably quiet West Village. As the temperatures fell through the week they showed up with ever more layers of clothing to ward off the cold and take a moment to use our working landline, swap information on locations to recharge a cellphone, or just to chat. Riding bikes across the Manhattan Bridge or making epic subway journeys from Queens the crew here made great efforts to make it to the shop and keep it chugging along, receiving boxes from the amazing folks at UPS, shelving books in the chilly near-dark, and remaining in great spirits.

Through it all our thoughts returned again and again to our neighbors in the far West Village and the folks in the Rockaways, Red Hook, Hoboken, Staten Island, along the Jersey Shore and the many places in between all affected by Sandy. Our concern and well wishes go out to them all. 

And, if we may borrow a sentiment expressed in a newsletter from the good people at Tekserve, as we slowly return to our regular concerns of our lives, when you head out to do your shopping please consider calling on the affected small businesses and restaurants that make our cities and neighborhoods so wonderfully unique and rich; whether cheese shop, bistro, espresso cafe, or clothing retailer, your support will be hugely appreciated by both business owner and employees alike.

The second story is about powerHouse Arena, the seaside bookstore that was not so fortunate. It was hit hard by the storm, and without flood insurance. The result is an incredible fundraising event on November 17th featuring dozens of the city's literary giants. Called Sandy Hates Books Hurricane Relief Fundraiser, the event is a 9 hour reading event featuring Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan among many, many others. It is an incredible event, and I sincerely hope that the bookstore is fully operational in a short time.

Tamas Dobozy Reviews Bookstores

Tamas Dobozy wrote a guest blog post at 49th Shelf today, expounding the virtues of the independent bookstore: "My favourite bookstores... were (or are) all places of secrets barely concealed, where I spent hours thumbing through the shelves amazed by what was out there, the life-affirming sense that no matter how many years I spent there would still always be something interesting to read, another novel or short story collection or book of poems I had to get to." To him, the interesting part was the books that weren't there, the books that didn't make the cut when it came to allocating shelf space. "What they do have room for, just barely, is the distillation of a certain taste in reading, a canon of novels and poems and plays and essays peculiar to whoever runs the store, whatever he or she thinks is a worthwhile continuum of titles and authors and subjects."

This isn't the same at big bookstores. They have much more room for many more titles, or, at least, many more copies of the big titles. And if they have a backlist, it's because there's a new book out by the same author; but the authors that inspired the writer du jour are nowhere to be found. He also takes a jab at big bookstores by singling out the poor university student making minimum wage trying to get through school by working 12 hours a week at a bookstore: "Whenever I asked one of the clerks or proprietors about something they never looked it up in a computer database but drew it from memory, cross-referencing writers as they took me around the store pulling this or that off the shelves." It is indeed a rare find these days if a bookstore clerk can get you those connections, finding those authors that even you haven't heard of yet. However, that's just not practical.

A favourite bookstore of mine in Ottawa had to close its doors earlier this year because the rent was just too steep. My experience was similar to Dobozy's in this store, as I would scour the fiction titles from Aravind to Zola just to see what kind of path it took me on; and it was different every time; as Dobozy explains, "it was less about the books than the experience of someone else’s mind moving through its personal library, making connections I’d never made before, drawing out aspects of writing and reading I’d never considered, educating me less about a reading list than on ways of sustaining and refining literary taste."

Read the entire blog post here, and also check out Dobozy's excellent new short story collection Siege 13. It's available wherever fine books are sold, large or small.

New York City!

Digging for Cloud Atlas reviews I came across this awesome site for an independent book store in Brooklyn called, simply, Word (as in, I presume, "Word to your mother"). Its website is quite good, featuring author events, top ten lists, book club news, and a blog. Incidentally, I discovered that Cloud Atlas was their bestselling book of 2008. This may have been due to the fact that it was a book club pick for March 2008, and the book club is so popular they have two meetings a month - fantastic! So if you're in Brooklyn any time soon, check this place out!

Book People

I like to think of myself as a book person, and we, collectively, are book people. But I found a blog from an Austin, TX bookstore called BookPeople. What a great name for a bookstore! Who wouldn't want to go in there? Everyone is a book person. Of course, there is a danger of being the wrong kind of book person, the one who likes an extremely narrow band of authors and shuns anyone on the outside. I guess, then, you don't want to go inside BookPeople. You'd have to study just to find the confidence to go in. On the other hand, we're all book snobs in one way or another, the trick is to find a way to suppress your judgement. Whenever I find myself looking for books for customers, it's a 50-50 chance I'll have to suppress that judgement. I know, I know, it's terrible. Is it so wrong for me to want people to read certain books? You know, Canadian titles, award winners, good writing, etc. On the other hand, it is always encouraging to see readers who love to read or people who are discovering the joys of a new author. I am honestly encouraged by people who love books, even if I might make fun of their choices at a later date. But never to the person's face. So I don't think of myself as the wrong kind of book person - just an avid fan of books and reading with a specific idea of what makes good literature. Anyhoo, now that you're all finished judging me, check out BookPeople.