Our First Author Event- Jen Bryant

Tomorrow we're having Jen Bryant at the shop for a meet-the-author event. Jen's written seven children's books and won the Caldecott Medal for River of Words, her beautiful biography of William Carlos Williams. Her newest book, Kaleidoscope Eyes, is for young adults. Like all her young adult novels, it's written in verse:

We have hit a layer of shale

and some huge tree roots.

Before we dig any further, we bring

the metal detector with us

to the church, strap the battery pack

and headphones on Carolann,

and wait beside the hole. Tonight

the full moon glows like a piece of

pirate gold. We don't even need

our flashlights. And the sound coming

through the instrument is so loud,

we don't even need to ask her

what she hears.

Kaleidoscope Eyes is set in New Jersey in the 60s and besides touching on issues of that time-- like the Vietnam War-- it includes the discovery of an old map and the subsequent quest undertaken by three friends who find themselves involved with pirate legends.

Come by tomorrow to meet Jen-- she'll be in our shop from 11-2!

The Collector by John Fowles

I am close to finishing The Collector by John Fowles; I can barely pause to write this blog, I'm so engrossed in the story. Fowles is one of my favorite writers; not only does he have a Nabokovian flair for the twisted-but-slightly endearing antagonist, he weaves a gripping plot through eccentric and realistic characters. In fact, the story really unfolds from his characters: he creates, in this case, a seemingly asexual working-class recluse who collects butterflies and turns him loose on the world and the rest falls into place...

The back cover of a Laurel paperback edition reads:

THE POWER OF PASSION

THE POWER OF EVIL,

THE POWER OF THE MOST SPELLBINDING STORYTELLER OF OUR TIME, come together in this sensational, million-copy-selling triumph by John Fowles, author of A Maggot and The Magus.

The setting is a lonely cottage in the English countryside. The characters are a brutal, tormented man and the beautiful, aristocratic young woman he has taken captive. The story is the struggle of two wills, two wasy of being, two paths of desire-- a story that mounts to the most shattering climax in modern fiction!

Well, that's a bit dramatic. But it's a very good read and I suggest you pick up a copy... and we have a whole John Fowles collection available at Wellington Square Bookshop. So come down and get one!

Timbuktu by Paul Auster

I just had to post this image of the new cover when I saw it on the Book Design Review Blog (a great blog, by the way).

Timbuktu is a short novel following a homeless man, Willy G. Christmas, and his dog, Dr. Bones, who wonders about an afterlife his owner referred to as "Timbuktu." As usual, there are rogue written texts in Auster's book-- Christmas locks his manuscripts in a bus station locker where they remain after his death. We don't know what they say. But another author takes over-- Dr. Bones, the dog, whose story shouldn't even be available in written form. But here it is in Auster's unusual book. Christmas's writings might be more complex or more successful, and the story we get from Dr. Bones constantly refers back to the unavailable ideal manuscripts hidden in the Greyhound lockers. What remains is a humble and tragic novel.

Richard Matheson Readfest

So I was reading about all these new movies coming out based on books and one that caught my eye was the story of "The Box" which stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden. It's a box such that if you push a button, you become instantly wealthy, but you kill someone that you don't know. I thought it was a pretty interesting premise, and when I googled the author Richard Matheson, I found out he had written I Am Legend as well AND Stephen King called him his greatest influence. How could you go wrong? Hence, my Richard Matheson readfest began.

Button, Button: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson

There are a lot of stories in here. But let me tell you, some of them are dissapointing. "Button, Button" didn't live up to the hype - I guess because it was a short story, and I expected the ending to be better (it's got a pleasant twist but I was looking for something more). The story probably would've been better if it was a very short/somewhat short novella, which means I'm looking forward to seeing the movie still.

I expected more of a philosophical approach to the short story than it was (and I think that's partly because of the ending which was ba-dum-da-dum blah). There was room for elaboration and, in my humble opinion, some deeper and more profound dialogue. Norma, the wife, really annoyed me by the end - but I thought that she and her husband, Arthur, could've had some pretty good banter before it was all over!

There are some stories that are pretty good - I especially enjoyed "No Such Thing as a Vampire". But others, like "Pattern For Survival" and "Dying Room Only" were just weird... partly because they didn't have the kind of weirdness I expected from Matheson. I thought that "Button, Button" was actually one of the stronger short stories in this collection, even though a lot of the reviewers on Amazon strongly disagreed with this opinion. All in all, the stories in this collection are just average - the title story is good, and readers will enjoy this if they're looking for a quick read, but it didn't have that sparkle you expect from Matheson.



I Am Legend

I must confess, I watched the movie a long time ago (it was scary!) and didn't read the book beforehand. However, I still enjoyed this story immensely and it was much better than the movie. I Am Legend the movie changed the ending a lot and the story line a little. Adding in the dog and Will Smith was a good call but the movie's new ending - not so much.

Anyway, I Am Legend has that special twist I really expected from Matheson. It's about a man named Robert Neville who, because he was bitten by a vampire bat (?), is immune to a germ that infects people and gives them vampire-like qualities. Furthermore, in shocking and disturbing news, the germ can also inhabit dead people to make them zombies. But it also infects living people, too - and Robert Neville's flaw is that he fails to see that the vampires are still inherently people on the inside.

Every day, Neville goes around building back up his house, then waiting out the storm of vampires who try and lure him out of his cave at night. And fairly, he's tired of living the way he is, and so he sets about finding a cure for vampirism. While walking in the daylight, he meets a woman who seems to be immune, just as he is, so he captures her for observation. And the story only gets better from there.

In conclusion, if you have a couple of hours to kill, skip the collection and go for I Am Legend.

Then, read "Button, Button" in November before the movie comes out. It'll take you 15 minutes.

The Rare Book Room Is Finished!

We have finally finished the rare book room! The chairs are plush, the shelves are dusted and settled in place, the mahogany tables are polished, AND the books are in order. I want to live in there; it's so cozy. I think the proprietor does as well, he fell asleep in there the other day. Once you close the french-style doors, it is relatively quiet.

We feature rare and collectible works-- some novels, some biographies, some children's books. A few notable pieces are:


A first printing, first edition of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

An illustrated, 1930s edition of 21 Delightful Ways of Committing Suicide by Jean Bruller

A signed, first edition/first printing of After Many A Summer by Aldous Huxley

A first edition, first British printing of Thackeray's Vanity Fair

A first edition, first British printing of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. This is interesting because, due to the controversial content, it did not get published in the United States until three years after it was published in the UK and France.


Anyway, come visit us and our rare book room or drop in to www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com and check out our inventory listed online.

In Search of Memory by Eric R. kandel

Just to show you I am not a complete idiot, I read this book for you. The idea is take a bunch of genetically engineered lab mice, splice them together with poignant memories of Nazi Vienna and then come up with the answer to where memory resides.

Nobel Laureate Kandel, intertwines the intellectual history of the powerful new science of the mind--a combination of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and molecular biology--with his own personal quest to understand memory.

From Vienna to Laboratory, Kandel searches for the biological basis of memory.

I wish I could remember what his conclusions are. Take my day, move it from my hippocampus to my pre-frontal cortex and what do you get? Some weird-ass dreams.

Memory in my opinion, and I think I speak for Roger Penrose, who is known for his periodic tiling of the plane (he did my bathrooms) and his friendships and falling-outs with Steven Hawking, resides in quantum effect. We can't find the basis for it because we are looking for it. And what are we looking for it with? Our memory in good measure. Look-break a vase and then try to fix it with the broken vase (poor analogy). Can't be done. We look inside of our consciousness to see what is there, but we are stymied by the fact that the tool we use is the tool we are looking for.

Anyway, he seems like a nice guy, and he DID win the Nobel Prize and his quest, as all noble quests, is remarkable and courageous. Maybe he's right after all. I just can't remember. (OK. Enough of that!)

You Don't Love me Yet by Johnathan Lethem

Drugs, sex Rock'n Roll, and even a masturbation boutique (called No Shame). What's not to love? Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude and The Wall of the Eye, The Wall of the Sky lampoons the alternative band scene in L.A.

With an emaciated lead singer who looks like the guy in The Dandy Warhols, an introspective geek of a lead guitarist who can only play sitting down, a bassist who falls in maniacal love with an overweight, shaggy haired diabolical genius (kinda like me) and a drummer who stiffens the band's resolve, this quintet of enigmatic folks, shoots to sudden almost-stardom and then falls precipitously into a pit that doesn't even exist. By the way, a good portion of the story is devoted to Matthew's (the singer) day job at the zoo, where he rescues a kangaroo from ennui and installs him in his bathtub where he (the kangaroo) defecates four times a day, each scatological batch the size and shape of a catcher's mitt.

Interested yet? I was. And I wasn't disappointed. Graphic sex is always fun, even without a Nona around and there are tons of cigarettes, loads of weed and an amazing amount of alcohol. So as I said earlier, what's not to like? Read it if you are not a Republican.

Minions of the Moon by William Gray Beyer

Published in 1950, the same year that Robert Heinlein wrote Sixth Column, which sold for $2.50, this early science fiction/fantasy tale, although 190 pages, can be read in about 20 minutes. Here's what it's about:

When Mark awoke after the experiment, he hardly expected his astounding discovery--he had been catapulted thousands of years into the future, where, incidentally he meets this incredible babe in hardly any clothes at all!!

This future world was like nothing one had ever predicted. Far from scientifically advanced, it was a semi-barbarous state in which the facts of science lay hidden in the cunning minds of a few. To meet the challenge of his new existence, Mark became a swashbuckling leader among the Neo-Vikings. And inspiring him in his valorous deeds was the beautiful, romantic Nona. (Did I mention that she was a semi-clothed Babe? And perhaps a nymphomaniac. She bedding Mark in just a few hours.)

Fortunately Mark had an important ally-- Omega, a Walter Brennan type, who used a lot of "you rascal" and "you young pup!" and whose home was the moon. Omega was a disembodied intellect, pure thought, he roamed the universe at will, as old and as wise as humanity itself. Kinda like me.

It was Omega who first revealed the presence of "the dangerous brains", the terrible force for evil which lurked in the world and threatened mankind with enslavement. And it was Mark who led the battle against them. They weren't that smart really but a lot smarter than George Bush.

This science fiction novel is a thrilling and swift adventure of the rebirth of civilization.

For enjoyable reading it is exceptional. And it has a semi-clothed babe named Nona who likes to have lots of sex with Mark. She is really spunky and feisty and probably a real pistol in bed. Probably real flexible as well. But I digress.

So if you are interested in 59 year old science fiction Neo-Viking books, this is for you, especially because of the extremely semi-unclothed Nona. Ah Nona.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

Ok. This one is really really strange. First Rivka is writing this novel about her father Tzvi Gal-Chen, at least in part. He flits in and out of the book like a firefly and it is clear that Rivka loves and admires him, although he is fictionalized quite convincingly.

So any way, Dr. Leo Liebenstein arrives home one day to find that his wife has disappeared, leaving behind a woman who looks, talks and behaves exactly like her. Certain that Rema is still alive he commences a quixotic quest for her leading him to Patagonia among other venues. His Sancho Panza is one of his psychiatric patients, Harvey.

In any event, we all fail to see clearly the world around us, or in this case, the woman we love, but the journey to discover, or re-discover true meaning, qualitative or quantitative is always the most important thing.

This comic and picaresque novel is well worth reading and has chapter titles such as: 1. A method for Calculating Temperature, Pressure and Vertical Velocities from Doppler Radar Observations.

Just so you know, Rivka Galchen received her MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues, She recently completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. The recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, Galchen lives in New York City.

All of this is depressing to me since she is 25 years younger than me!!

Apropos of nothing: As Yeats says in his Song of Wandering Aengus:

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,	5
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,	10
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran	15
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;	20
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

The Puttermesser Papers is really strange. Not the strangest book I have ever read, don't get me wrong. It just comes at you all at once, and all at once means a tyrannical Golem, a tyrannical Russia emigre, a flaccid lover, an idyllic Paradisaical New York City, hoisted on its own petard or its catenary, which is a more painful thing to be hoisted upon, I would suspect. Then while catching, or trying to, my breath, the flighty, tragic, amazing and completely unhealthy life of Puttermesser comes to a ...., but dear reader, I have told too much, or too little. This book won the National Book Award (actually it was just a finalist). Read it if you like being stung by a small bee, while reading your own obituary.

Affinity by Sarah Waters

I chose Affinity to read on the plane during my vacation because so far, when I read Sarah Waters, the whole world falls away and I can't stop reading! Before this, I read The Little Stranger and Fingersmith, and I thought both of them were totally fun and almost pitch-perfect Victorian novels that include things that actual Victorian novels don't touch.

In Affinity, a wealthy young woman, Margaret Prior, begins volunteering at a women's prison as a "lady visitor." She's there, ostensibly, to provide an example to the criminals and to give them the chance to speak to someone: they aren't allowed to talk to each other and spend most of their days in silence. Margaret's motives and past are unclear from the start. What she doesn't tell us about herself emerges when she develops a fascination with one prisoner, a medium convicted of false spiritualism.

I was a little disappointed by Affinity-- in a lot of ways, it seemed like a version of Fingersmith written before the actual finished object, as though Waters was testing out ideas. This, plus awkwardly-included Foucaultian theory and a very lagging middle part narrated by an increasingly wimpy protagonist (same thing happened in the Little Stranger!), would have ruined the book for me, but the last 75 pages or so had amazing momentum.

Staff Picks This Week: Jolie

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Narrated by two closet intellectuals - Renee, the 50-year old widowed concierge who tries to keep up the appearance of a concierge while secretly enjoying Tolstoy and fine cuisine - and Paloma, the precocious 12-year-old who's decided life's not worth living for insightful and hilarious reasons. They are finally brought together by M. Ozu, who recognises their talent and potential as no others do. Both narrators despise and mourn the class-concious inhabitants of the building and offer their takes on life. Despite the two narrators though, the book's spotlight is inevitably by Renee, who - after reading the book - really makes you turn around and look at people twice.

Barbery is a great writer, and as a professor of philosophy, she incorporates some really interesting stories and thoughts into her books. The staff all really loved this book, as did I - and I'm really looking forward to reading Barbery's newest, Gourmet Rhapsody.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Enzo the dog is the narrator of this story. He's picked out as a puppy by his loving owner, race car driver Denny Swift. This completely loveable dog likes watching the TV and Denny's old racing videos, and travels with Denny throughout his life through marriage, children, love and loss. Anyone with a dog can appreciate the loyalty Enzo shows, as well as his occasional hilarious outbursts of anger at not having opposable thumbs - lashing out in one chapter, for example, at monkeys, who are too stupid to have been given the joy of having thumbs. By the end of the book, I felt I had really gotten to know Enzo, and I never wanted the book to end. This is a great read.