Like Fire

When Readerville closed up shop last June, right away I started thinking about putting together my own literary blog. It had been a great roller coaster ride -- staying on top of every shred of book and publishing news, scrolling through my endless feeds and waiting for that excellent click that happened when I came upon an item I knew I'd have something to say about. Writing every day was good for me, having the opportunity to follow my opinions where they led and whittle them down to something articulate. Mostly it was fun.

So I dug deep into my inner Andy Hardy and spent the summer tinkering in that virtual barn out back. And finally -- Hey Kids! -- I'm putting up my own show.
Like Fire is a collaborative effort with some fellow Readerville alumni which will hopefully go on to amuse and delight and inform all our friends and fans. Another litblog, yes, but hopefully full enough of content and opinion to have its own flavor. We also take submissions, so if you have something related to books or the industry, please send it along to likefire.mail@gmail.com.

I won't abandon Mappa Mundi, though, I promise. I'm way too fond of it -- and where else am I going to post all those pet photos?

Treasure

I had lunch with Pat, my one and only work friend, yesterday. This week marks three years I've been at the workplace, and that's all I'm going to say about that right now. If I've learned only one thing there -- and I have to wonder sometimes if this might not in fact be the case -- it's that you don't sit up front in Tom's during the first week of school unless you want to eat your sandwich with someone's mom and dad mugging on the other side of the window while their embarrassed kid takes pictures. It's like the most famous landmark in New York City for a week, and the folks are lined up three deep to get their photo snapped on the sidewalk.
Pat and I had a nice lunch as far in the back as we could get seats, and then dawdled along in the sun, looking at books for sale on the street. Right off I gravitated to a hardcover copy of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings -- I'd seen it on the guy's table before and thought it was something I'd like, but never picked it up. I find I'm a little more adventurous when I'm browsing with someone else, though, especially if we're trying to kill some time. So I opened it and there, on the flyleaf, was this:
"How much?" I asked.

"Four dollars," he said.

I had a pang of guilt. It didn't last long. In 25+ years of buying secondhand books, I've never found any buried treasure, not once. This felt like the universe patting me indulgently on the back of the hand -- "That's nice, dear" -- but right around now I could use a little babying from the powers that be.

I Googled the signature when I got back to the office and yes, it's hers. The book's not a first -- more like a tenth -- and while it might have netted the guy a bit more than $4 it wouldn't have made him rich. On the other hand, it made me very rich indeed. On a day that was hard in need of a ray of sunshine, a $4 copy of One Writer's Beginnings with Eudora Welty's handwriting in the front -- "Jackson, Missippi / March 23, 1984" -- was just fine.

Still Looking Up

I loved Readerville. Unapologetically, no irony, no reserve of cool to draw on. When I first joined almost exactly six years ago I had friends who read copiously and passed books around, I was adventurous about picking things I'd never heard of off the library shelves, and I had piles of those beautiful little Common Reader catalogs dogeared and marked up with Sharpies. But finding a place where a bunch of smart, snarky people wanted to talk books and pretty much just roll around in them, that was like coming home.

I met a lot of excellent people there, many of them face to face -- really good friends who will be friends for life. I met the man I love and live with on Readerville. And while I suppose it's remotely possible our paths might have crossed otherwise, the chances of a girl from the Bronx and a boy from Texas meeting up randomly, no matter how much they both love reading and old movies and cooking with cast iron, would have been awfully slim otherwise. When I first started posting there I was working a deadly boring office manager job, and as I realized how comfortable I was immersed in a bookish world it also occurred to me that I could possibly scrape a living out of it (this being in the days when you could). And when I got laid off five years ago I decided it was now or never and took the plunge, found a cool job at entry-level wages, nearly starved, but never looked back. And when Karen offered me the gig blogging for Readerville, I thought about it for five minutes and then jumped in. As much work as it turned out to be, dutifully plowing through RSS feeds every night after dinner and through many a lunch hour, I loved it -- loved figuring out what the hell I was doing, working on the craft of it, and finding myself in the middle of a whole litblogging community I hadn't known about. A year ago I would have laughed my head off at the phrase "litblogging community." Now I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to keep the momentum going, because I like doing this.

I'm sure most people read my last blog post on Readerville Friday and rolled their eyes, thinking I was being awfully drama queeny. But I knew that Readerville was closing up shop and I meant it as a bit of an elegy, and also as a reminder -- to myself as much as anyone -- that there's always a next thing, so long as you keep looking up.

I'm posting it again here. Sorry if you've read it - indulge me, OK? It's the best goodbye I could muster to a place that meant a lot to me. Thanks, Karen, and everyone else there who made it feel like my favorite local watering hole -- overindulgence, bar fights, fixed pool games, generous pours, kisses, and all.

Anyone who's spent time in Readerville's Judging A Book thread knows that for the past few years one of the most common book cover tropes has been shoes -- big and little shoes, shoes next to feet, you name it. Shoes have become a standard Readerville snowclone, especially when talking about book design -- for a while there orange was the new shoes, and antique labels, and hand-drawn type.

Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, back in 2005, was an early adapter. The first galley I got my hands on at this year's BEA was also his -- Await Your Reply, out in September from Ballantine. Looking at that expanse of clouds on the cover got me thinking, and then comparing galleys with fellow Book Expo visitors. So it's settled: This year, sky is the new shoes.

In the next six months alone we have Iain Banks' Transition, Kate Braestrup's Marriage, and Other Acts of Charity, Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, Amanda C. Gable's The Confederate General Rides North, Lauren Grodstein's A Friend of the Family, Ha Jin's A Good Fall, Naseem Rakha's The Crying Tree, and Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic. All of them feature low horizons or no horizons, with skies blue or gray, cloudy or clear. Some have birds, some have folks.







But the message maintains: Look up, not down! Publishing, the country, the entire world is unsure and in flux; things are changing, and not always as we wish they would. There is the temptation to stop in our tracks and look stubbornly down to see if in fact the earth isn't shifting under our feet. But we as readers know that books are microcosms of the world, whether in sympathy or as fantasy or fact, and their covers have advice to offer us all, right there out in front. Enough with the shoe-gazing, enough self-absorption. It's time to move past the personal to the universal, to expand our horizons outward, to see what these times want from us. Nearly 100 years ago E.M. Forster advised us to Only Connect, and it's time, again, to remember.

The world is changing. Look up, up and out.

More Seeds, and a Birthday

Columbia University Press had seeds too!

They're sunflowers, which is entirely appropriate because then I'll be able to watch the birds when they come to pick all the seeds out of the soil, which is inevitably what happens when I try to plant sunflowers. It could only more apropos if it were an anthology of bird and squirrel poetry.

At any rate, I'm done with BEA for this year, and I have to say I came away with a good feeling about things. Not the publishing industry, obviously -- I am not smoking anything that good (or anything at all, with this pain in the ass cough). But as far as my little place in the universe... understand, I haven't been at this long enough to really feel like I have a place. Rather than travel the whole traditional route of getting an internship at some publishing house or magazine straight out of college and working my way up, this was a midlife crisis career change, one of those if-you-don't-seize-this-moment-to-try-doing-something-you-love-you-will-always-regret-it decisions. A very good decision, and I think I've done fine. But the fact is that haven't been around that long, and I've come at the business from a weird, oblique angle.

In the past couple of days, though, I've had a few good encounters that made me feel like I do, in fact, have something of my own to bring to the table. I don't necessarily have one slottable skill -- and when there were so many jobs and divisions of labor in the publishing world, I think that was definitely out of my favor. But things are shifting so dramatically, nobody knows much more than anyone else as to what the scenery will look like when the dust settles. And I walked out of there today thinking that for all the times my mother said, "But you're so smart! You can do so many things!" and I said, "Mom, you don't understand this business, that's not enough" -- hey, maybe mom was on to something.

And don't tell me that mothers are always right. Tell my son.

Also, I got to hang out with Levi Stahl, of Ivebeenreadinglately, who is very charming and is almost my birthday twin. This is obviously a fine week to have been born in -- two of my best friends in the world, Leslie and Meridith, had a birthday yesterday, I have a dog run friend born on June 2nd and an ex-roommate on the 4th and wait... whose birthday could it be today?
Who might have gotten a new stuffed toy and a treat with dinner? And who also went for run with me this morning? Somebody's had a big day.

Well... we all have. Happy birthday, Dorrie.

Seeds

Absolutely my favorite BEA loot, bar none, was this wildflower seed packet from NYRB Classics.
Well OK, that and the signed ARC of Dan Chaon's newest.

Margarita gave me some cosmos seeds, and I have some poppies too... I'm thinking if Sunday's nice I'm going to make a little wildflower garden. That odd weedy platform to the right of my front steps might be just the spot, although it's a pain -- and kind of scary -- to constantly shuffle along that narrow ledge with soil and tools and what have you. Still, it's a spot in need of some aesthetic enhancement, and that's a good excuse.
BEA was both fun and tiring. I was tweeting it from my new Blackberry (@lisapeet1), with a definite learning curve involved. But I do like the medium, and tomorrow is another day. Today, I think, is over.

But, one day early for Caturday, I leave you with Francis and Alvy together again:
That Alvy is a tough little fat fur seal.

Bathroom Books

So yes, I know, there is a whole schism between people who keep bathroom books as a matter of course and people who wouldn't be caught dead with books in their bathroom, and I don't really care what anybody else does. Me, I was brought up with books -- or rather periodicals, the New Yorker and National Geographic and New York Review of Books -- in the bathroom, so as far as I'm concerned that's business as usual. No pun intended.

And really, the main reason to have books in the bathroom is for guests. I mean, I appreciate them now and then, especially for toothbrushing purposes -- bless my Sonicare, which beeps when it's time to switch and enables that much more close reading for two minutes twice a day -- but it's not usually necessary. I tend to carry whatever I'm reading from room to room, like a blankie, or keep upstairs and downstairs reading matter, so it's not often that I'm caught without.

But when people come over, you want to have a little something there for them. Figure that unless they're spending the night, the only time they have that's private and out from under your scrutiny is in the bathroom, with the door closed. That's their chance to bust loose and really have a look around. And let's face it, the best way to siphon their attention away from your medicine cabinet or the dust bunnies behind the toilet is to provide them with some good reading matter and an easy way to make snap judgments about your erudition, or lack thereof.

I'll even go so far as to break this down into Upstairs Bathroom Reading and Downstairs Bathroom Reading. The books upstairs are mainly for overnight guests, and tend to be a little meatier -- stuff people can spirit into the guest room and read before bed. The far and away most popular item has been Vice Do's and Don'ts: Ten Years of Vice Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques, a birthday present from my then-teenage son who knows me better than I know myself.
Also popular are Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio (although I could be fooling myself about that one)
and a wonderful $3 book called Manhattan Kaleidoscope: A Genial, Rambling Account of the New York Scene 1870-1945.
Now the downstairs bathroom books operate under a whole different premise, which is that its occupants are here for the day or evening and will only spend minutes at a time there, so the reading matter needs to be light and accessible in snippets. A quick check of the downstairs bathroom gives us:
National Lampoon's Big Book of Sex Love

What Wendell Wants: Or, How to Tell If You're Obsessed with Your Dog
Writing New York: A Literary Anthology
Strange Red Cow and Other Curious Classified Ads From the Past They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases
Stonehenge
Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (OK, that one's neither light nor accessible in snippets. I'm not quite sure how it got there.)

And my very favorite:
Voltaire's Alphabet of Wit, which I got for a buck on Seventh Avenue and 28th Street in 2005. This one is beyond marvelous:

HAPPINESS: Can one man be happier than another? It is clear that a man who has the gout and stone, who has lost his money, his good name, his wife and family, and who is about to be hanged after having been mangled, is less happy than a young, vigorous sultan, or La Fontaine's cobbler. But how are we to determine which is the happier of two men equally healthy, prosperous, and placed in society? Their temperaments must decide it. The most moderate, the least worrisome, the most keenly perceptive is the most happy; but unfortunately the most keenly perceptive is often the least moderate. It is not our position, but our disposition, which renders us happy. Our disposition depends on the functioning of our organs, over which we have no control.

So hey, y'all come on over and read for a bit. Drinks are on the house, and all the toilet paper and hand soap you can use. Don't even bother looking in the medicine cabinet -- all the prescription bottles are for the animals.

Aleatory

a·le·a·to·ry (l--tôr, -tr) adj.1. Dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain outcome.

OK, now I've even run out of pretty springtime photographs and I'm still feeling cotton-headed, so I'm going to call in one of my Get Out of Blogathon Jail Free markers. It's an old meme that recently resurrected on one of my favorite bookish blogs, pages turned. I'm not even going to go as far as the bookshelf -- our kitchen table tends to end up being kind of a staging area for books recently purchased, recently read, and recently pulled off the shelf for one reason or another, so I'm just going to pick what's physically closest:

1. Take five (random!) books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

One fine evening the no less fine office manager Ivan Dmitrich Cherviakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, watching The Bells of Corneville through opera glasses. Sometimes -- an idle but anguishing sport of the mind -- he told himself he was the victim of some practical joke on the scale of the universe of which everybody and everything, from the stars and the Manger to the pipe-cleaners, tooth-soap and bootlaces fringing his existence, were linked in furtive enjoyment. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However --" and I think to myself: this is death. I went back to the low-pitchd tent in the shelter of a dune, lay down beside Sergeant Hamano and closed my eyes. Sammy slung in the bag and stepped inside then the door slammed shut and that was him, out of sight.How weird is it that the first two sentences have a manager in them? Totally random, I swear. [Just reread this and realized that's not true -- one is "manager" and one is "Manger." I'd better go home and check that one out.] The story from the Love Stories collection that the last sentence on page 50 comes from is Elizabeth Bowen's "Dead Mabelle."

OK, that's all for tonight. Someone else post some.

And all right, one cat photo because I never tire of how cute these little bastards are.

I Look Like a Farmer Baby, But I'm a Lover

I was reading this cheerful post from the Chronicle Books Blog about sorting through boxes of used books (and wishing for the millionth time I worked at Chronicle Books, even though it would involve living on the wrong coast), and that got me to thinking about the books I've bought for their cover alone (although mostly they also looked like good reads, at least the ones in English). So since nothing of note happened today that I could possibly write about (it rained, I walked around the reservoir, I went to work, I had dinner, it was Monday all day), here are some of my favorite pretty faces, none of which ran me more than a few bucks: