QUOTABLE
Words are my only evidence that I have a shadow in this world. Only with a commitment to notebook and pen, early mornings in cold leather-backed chairs or empty dining room tables - and opening my senses - am I able to coax them out.
Confined to an orderly existence, nothing about books arranged on shelves shows how provocative the ideas inside them can be. So I keep mine on-the-go because I see them for the motion and fluidity of the material they contain, not as energy trapped in squiggles on margined pages. (more…)
Loud books end up the same place as the quiet ones do, on the back bookshelves, their spines showing and their glorious covers pressed front to back. William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, the book he wrote on a wandering soul, wandering the country, sits softly in the book stacks. The dust jacket has been torn away and the mauve shell beneath it is as plain as the 100 year-old books with gold-flecked lettering. This book, from the looks of it, is passive and old fashioned, some rustic words pressed together in plain type, but the thoughts it contains about the nation at that time and the direction the culture had taken were ear-piercing. (more…)
Faded ink on an old register receipt describes the time and place where I made a book purchase nearly a decade ago. The Barnes & Noble sales slip has been a makeshift bookmark for nine years and its been pressed between the pages so long that it has outlived the store from which it came.
The storefront that once displayed New York Times bestsellers is now filled with mannequins in bridal gowns. But at 10:34 p.m., March 1, 1999, I stood in line at 5121 NW Roanridge Road and bought a book that I wouldn’t read and that wouldn’t deepen my dedication to writing until 2007. (more…)
Grocery store bookshelves are the latest battleground for the presidential election here in middle America. Among the trashy romance novels, Louis L’Amour westerns and military combat serials are politically tinged biographies bearing the images of Barack Obama and John McCain.
Side by side, they’ve been placed at eye level on the highest shelf, the Price Chopper management conscious not to show any favoritism for either candidate that might cause lost business. Fittingly, on the left Obama sits with his fingers intertwined and, on the right, McCain is standing proudly before a background draped with an American flag. (more…)
Some argue that the best opening line in literature is Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But for me, it’s Peter Pan’s beginning, “All chidren, except one, grow up.”
Maybe it resonates to me because I so often stand in the children’s section of the wholesale bookstore at the mall, rediscovering memories of possibility and the fascination of experiencing things anew.
For children, the selection of picture books at the discount store is always quality. The shelves are filled with overstocks and titles with all the popular characters that just didn’t sell enough. And, there are more worthy titles. Tonight, I found an EB White collection of three stories for $5.99.
For adults, the picking is more sporadic. You might make several trips and turn up nothing, then the next visit unexpectedly find the book that’s been on your list for months but the price or your mood for that piece had never been timed right.
I got lucky and for less that six bucks found a hardback copy of On the Road. So with a bag full of books and deep thoughts still fresh from standing among the bookstacks and reading famous works, we head out to the play area in the mall’s middle.
No one could blame us for feeling intellectually elite (for a time) simply because of the way we spent the last hour broadening our horizons. Everyone else around us was pursuing a better pair of pants or maybe a new Hollister shirt.
The mall is not located in a working class area not far from where we live. Late October into early November is the drop in temperature that leads to cold and flu season. We are driven inside every autumn to pursue warmer interests.
The trips are a good way to rediscover childhood, but a better one is reading to the children as they lie in bed after bath time. They fall asleep with fresh imaginations and images in their minds of flying fairies and pirates. They do grow up, though, and they go to work and maybe watch their own children so they can be young again.
All that happens so fast, as quickly as pages turning.
TITLE: Siddhartha
AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
TITLE: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 19441990
AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
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