Mark Oppenheimer
Kindle a book, light my fire
I was in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, and I went into Bridge Street Books, located nowhere near Bridge Street, from what I could tell. It was on Pennsylvania Ave., off M Street, the main thoroughfare of Georgetown. The proprietor, who sat to the left, immediately upon the entrance, sitting between a two-sided counter, a wall of books, and the front window facing the street, was not particularly friendly (that seems to be a species of booksellers, deeply in love with books but not much for customers—it seems a unique form of vocational torture). When I asked him what was upstairs, for I had noticed a staircase, he said, “More books.” When I asked him what particular sections were kept upstairs, he impatiently ran off a list for me (“fiction, psychology, sports” — something like that), but clearly wasn’t keen to do it. I had hoped he might enjoy telling me about the vast selection in his store; he clearly hoped I’d have the decency to leave him be and go look for myself.
When I did go look, I discovered that his was one of the best-curated selections of any bookstore I’d ever seen. Put another way: he’s a splendid buyer. There were a dozen books I’d seen reviewed over the past six months but had never seen in a store; there were even more books, including some by famous or prestigious authors, that I had not seen reviewed, but which he had ordered from publishers’ catalogues. He (or his buyer) quite simply had a terrific eye. The store was very, very well stocked, with reasonable quantity but unmatched quality.
It wasn’t just that he had good taste, but also variegated and eccentric taste. This clearly was not a scholarly bookstore, although there were many fine books from scholarly presses. Nor did it suffer from the book-clubby quality of so many independent bookstores, the proprietors of which seem to buy books, primarily “literary fiction,” with the predictable tastes of local book-clubbers in mind. (This tic results in shelf after shelf of Barbara Kingsolver.) And he was not a snob: there was no shortage of beach reads or what in Washington might be called Metro reads.
I ended up buying from his Architecture section a book I had never seen before, even as my current interests mean that I always look in a store’s Architecture section. It’s called Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness, and it’s by an Australian critic named Elizabeth Farrelly. I’m nearly done with the book now, and while in some ways it is familiar—her impatience with suburban sprawl will be familiar to readers of Philip Langdon, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Bill McKibben, David Owen, and many others—she has a deeply philosophical bent; her references range from Milan Kundera (on kitsch) to Richard Sennett (on the modern tension between our interior and exterior selves) to Aristotle, happiness psychologist Martin Seligman, and weirdo supremo Alvin Toffler. She misspells Nietzsche, but we all do sometimes; less forgivable is her misspelling of Lemony Snicket. The book is spellbinding, and I am grateful that I went browsing in a store that had it.
In other news, my friend Jonathan now has a Kindle; he is the first of my friends whose literary flame has been Kindled. He loves it, so far. From the public domain he has downloaded Hume and Freud; from the private domain, Gladwell and Michael Lewis. Jonathan said it even came with a little beach tent to keep sand out. Party on, my dear friend, party on.
Comments
5 Responses to “Kindle a book, light my fire”
Comment
I’m curious: when you made your purchase from the taciturn bookseller, did you pay his collection any of the compliments you wrote here?
As to Kindle: my step-daughter-in-law has one and was displaying its wonders to me recently. My cavils: 1) it’s not backlit, so you need to shine light on it as though it were a book (I like reading on screens these days); 2) you can’t scan quickly whole pages but only the bit that the screen shows you; 3) you can’t flip pages, and, what’s worse, you can’t eye the number of pages ahead in a chapter: it only gives you a number indicating percentage read and your location; 4) you can’t mark it up with all the obscure little pen squiggles that I’ve developed into a entire system for marking my progress and attention for future readings.
What I did like: you can make notes that, rather than scrawled in cramped margins (though that’s fun in itself) are integrated as actual footnotes. This would be fun in a household where the Kindle was shared; it would be possible to leave each other notes in the text: ‘this is where I fell asleep’; ‘cool sentence, huh?’ and so forth.
Does anyone else share my concern that, if they bought a Kindle, they would almost immediately drop it in a puddle, or out a window, or just onto something hard enough to break it? I would almost definitely break the thing—or just lose it somewhere—within a week, which is also the reason I don’t own an iPod (and I love iPods) or even a cheaper version of same. Some people are just not meant for small, portable, immensely useful and/or entertaining devices.
The mantra that got me (and at least one other bookseller friend of mine) through very long and difficult days working alone in a bookstore was, “People suck.” Working in a bookstore can be a lot of fun. But it can also be tooth-pullingly awful. I read your description of your encounter in the DC bookstore and nodded my head empathetically…
…I mean, with empathy for the bookseller….
I urge friends and loved ones to watch Black Books… or at least the following clip, from YouTube… one of the best depictions of life as a bookseller, ever… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZUUM2rUX2U
Brian,
I’m with you 100% on the lost small objects front — as in, umbrellas, pens, etc. But I’ve had the same cellphone for five years and though I mislay it, I’ve never really lost it or left it behind in Whereabouts Unknown. Ditto the iPod, which I have dropped, but which I keep in a protective leather case. The Kindle also had a book jacket-like cover of fabric. I’m not advocating getting a Kindle, but I vote you start with an iPod and see if you manage to hang on to it.