I Am Not in Louisiana or Florida

The pictures on the wall do not really curve like a tropical horizon!

I am in and around Northport, Michigan, commuting between home and my bookstore in the village. Others are in warmer places.

Robert Gray, who writes for the trade newsletter, “Shelf Awareness,” is in New Orleans. Matt Norcross of McLean and Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Michigan, is there, too, and so is best-selling author and novice bookseller Ann Patchett. The occasion for the gathering in the Big Easy is the Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association. “Could we have gone?” David asked on Thursday evening, as temperatures dropped into single digits and the wind howled fiercely around our old northern Michigan farmhouse. Yes, if money were no object, we could have gone, but that’s always a mighty big “if” in our lives.

Only one coloring book left!

Today’s mail brought a postcard announcing the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg, March 9-11. More than 115 book dealers will participate. We attended this fair a few years ago when we were in Florida for the winter. Both of us had secret misgivings about going to “the Coliseum,” picturing an enormous football stadium and many square miles of parking lot, but we had agreed to meet friends, and so we hit the road for the Tampa Bay area. What a lovely surprise! The Coliseum is an old, Spanish-style dance hall, with beautiful dark woodwork inside, and strings of lights added a festive note. It is beautiful and small enough in scale that it fits perfectly into the surrounding residential neighborhood. We even found a close parking space on the street with shade! (I don’t remember if Sarah went with us, but traveling with a dog makes one very conscious of the importance of shady parking spaces.) The books at the fair were wonderful, too, so we had a great time and were very glad to have gone. –But not this year.

Here at home for the winter, though, the days pass quickly, as David noted when we huddled under the covers for our nightly movie, after he pried himself away from Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and I put aside Carol Gilligan’s Joining the Resistance, our respective after-dinner reading. Weeks pass quickly, too. With the bookstore closed Sunday through Tuesday and loyal Bruce at the desk on Wednesday, my only regular days are Thursday through Saturday, and that’s a short week. Not that I don’t do any bookselling work on the other days, but the hours are more flexible, and my leash is longer, too.

The table by the door is focused on nature this month.

Last week was an unusual whirlwind in the winter life of bookseller and artist: We had a dinner out with friends on Friday and the opening of a big area art show in Traverse City on Saturday, and I had a breakfast gathering of friends on Saturday morning, one of my book clubs on Sunday evening, the media launch of the 2012 season of the National Writers Season for Tuesday lunch, and another book club meeting (Dante) on Wednesday evening. During any given week, there are books to read and blog posts and book reviews to write, not to mention getting outside with my healthy, young, born-to-run little dog.

Then there are my bookstore days. They may be short (only four hours long, 11-3), but somehow I keep busy and the hours fly. Making, taking, and returning phone calls takes time, as does rearranging furniture, making up book orders, visiting with friends who drop in, and reading book catalogs and reviews--all of which has to wait until after the snow is cleared from the sidewalk.

Paperback beach books to leatherbound treasures--

All images in this post are from my bookstore, and all, as you may have noticed, are of books because I want to remind my readers that buying a book from an independent bookstore is never just “buying a book.” Whenever you “shop local,” whenever you make purchases in your local community businesses, you are participating in a community and doing your part to keep that community alive. We are all connected, in more ways than are obvious at first glance.

Very new to very old, we cover all the bases.

I remind myself of how many people remain Up North all winter (or most of the winter), and I don’t mind at all clearing the snow from the sidewalk in front of my bookstore. This is my little place in the frozen north, and I’m happy to be here.

Was this an advertisement? At least it wasn't spam e-mail or a telephone robo-call.

My World Travels on Thanksgiving Day

Some years back, David and I decided not to travel for holidays in November and December. The weather is too dicey, for one thing, and besides, there are too many people on the roads, all hurrying to their destinations. Better, we agreed, to visit our families at other times of year and stay in our own home for winter holidays. But my trusty armchair has wings! Under a warm comforter, I am a world traveler!

When a bookseller deals in used books as well as new, the surprises from day to day are endless, and so I found myself on yesterday’s cozy holiday at home reading Kim Sunée’s Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home. The trail took me first from Seoul, Korea, to New Orleans, U.S.A. Then, after Kim left her adopted parents’ Louisiana home, I traveled with her to Florida and Sweden, Italy and North Africa. But we spent most of our time in France, in Paris and in Provence. Can you believe that she had, for a while, a little bookstore on the Île St. Louis that sold nothing but poetry? No, it did not make a profit. I knew you would ask!

Part of the reason I often find it difficult to recommend books to other people is that tastes and interests are so diverse. I have no problem telling someone what books I love and why. Whether that other person will love a particular book, however, is something I cannot predict with certainty, and I bring this up because the copy of Trail of Crumbs that I have been devouring so avidly came into my hands with a note in the back from a previous reader. That note read, “An okay memoir—not sure I would have finished it if I had not heard Kim speak at TC library—felt ending was abrupt—Recipes are full of fats and small servings.” Would not have read the whole book if she hadn’t heard the author speak? Really??? There, you see, is the danger of recommending a book to someone else, because if that someone else hadn’t heard the author speak and had the same reaction to the book as the writer of this note--! Well, you see the difficulty. I, however, had none.

Any book that begins in France grabs my attention, but when the author flashed back to her childhood abandonment at three years old, in an outdoor food market in Korea, I accompanied her not only willingly but eagerly. When a young American couple adopted Kim and another Korean orphan girl and took them back to New Orleans, that part of the story mesmerized me, also. Childhood is never as simple from the inside as adults looking at it from the outside want to believe. Two little girls who didn’t look like anyone else in their school, taunted by other children, suffered painful confusion, although in Kim’s case the suffering was at least partially counterbalanced by her relationship with “Poppy,” her adopted mother’s father, who welcomed her into his kitchen and taught her to love cooking. In fact, on almost every page of this book, long before the Paris chapters, I was ever so slightly distracted by wondering who among my friends and family members would most enjoy this story.

Well, yes, some of the recipes are full of fats. The cream of chestnut soup, for example, contains a quarter-cup of heavy cream and only serves four (“Small servings”), but that’s only two tablespoons of cream per person, and is that so bad? (My Thanksgiving contribution to a large dinner party last year, cream of chestnut soup was not on our table this year, but maybe it will be for Christmas.) I have a few short chapters to go in this book so cannot yet say anything about the ending and whether or not it strikes me as “abrupt.” I’ll report on that another time.

Did you know that this year was the 100th anniversary of birth of gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt? That this year is the 70th anniversary of the release of “The Wizard of Oz,” featuring one of the most beautifully poignant popular songs ever written, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”? We enjoyed these programs and more on NPR. Public radio, as I first remember noticing in 1991, seems to offer exceptionally good programming on holidays. Thanks to NPR, we traveled to the Land of Oz! Then came bedtime and the moment to turn to Mark Twain, reading aloud and sharing several exciting chapters of Life on the Mississippi, which took me once again to New Orleans, where I’d been earlier in the day.

David worked outdoors during the day on storm windows and barn door props while I mixed up cookie dough in my cozy kitchen. Later Sarah and I braved grey skies and drizzle for a walk and romp involving (on her part) lots of running and stick retrieval. No car motors were started, no planes or trains boarded by our pack on Thanksgiving Day, and we were indoors more than out most of the day, but don’t be misled by “facts.” We got in plenty of holiday travel, in our own way.

Now there is a tree to decorate at Dog Ears Books in Northport, and tonight there will be cookies to bake for tomorrow’s Open House. Story Hour will be from 2:30-3:30. Will I be the reader or someone else? What will be read? I’ll just say now, Don’t arrive late and miss the beginning of the story or the chance to sample a cookie before settling in for the reading! Do you enjoy being read to? All ages are welcome--and who knows where we might go together?