where I've been recently

This is from my walk to work yesterday. I love San Francisco. I mean, just look at that sky.

sex and violence (for young people)

Why is sex so very, very scary? Why is it that, when a parent is considering which books (or movies, or television shows, etc.) they want to give their children, sex is a corrosive and dangerous bogeyman, but violence is a clean thrill? Violence is exciting, an adventure. It goes: bam!, zoooom, pow!, and makes the sound of pages being turned. Sex, on the other hand, is insidious. It will grow shadows in young people's eyes; leave burn marks on their imaginations.

There is something wrong with this.

There's something wrong when a mother tells me that her 14-year old son could not possibly read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother because the main character loses his virginity to a girl he's fallen in love with, but a minute later tells me how GREAT Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games is for him. Would you like to know what happens in The Hunger Games? Boys and girls fight to the death. They kill each other in an arena. It (and its sequel) is one of the most popular young adult books in the store.

Parents look uncomfortable when the word is mentioned. Say, "sex," and their eyes go sideways, for just a moment. Say, "murder" or "fight scenes" or "guns" or "slashing swords," and they might get a hopeful look on their faces and say, well maybe that will be exciting. Maybe they'll like it.

I shouldn't ignore my own complicity. I never recommend Melvin Burgess's Doing It, which is a novel of enormous heart and empathy, because it is drenched in sex. I feel no guilt in championing The Knife of Never Letting Go, which has moments of shocking and personal violence. I adore action movies, admire the elegant splatter of Tarantino and the absurd slaughter of Shoot 'Em Up. Lucky Number Slevin is one of my favourite movies, and a clever, stylish film that ends with two old men being suffocated in plastic bags and duct tape. And, yet, the sex scenes are what make me feel sheepish. If I'm watching it with someone, I can feel myself very carefully not turning in their direction.

The only excuse I can make for myself (and maybe for those parents too) is that, in my world, sex is more commonplace than violence. It's more real. It exists, with all its pleasure and pain and inevitable awkwardness, more often than stabbings and fights to the death. Think of it that way, and I'm lucky to live in a world where sex is sometimes more dangerous than violence.

Except that it shouldn't be.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 9

O best beloved bookstore customers,

If you are going to engage me in conversation about my choice of outfit or Glenn Gould's nimble fingers, it is much more efficient (if less entertaining) to use standard conversational gambits. Things like sentences may be boring, but unless you inform me that you have actually instigated a game of charades, or a performance-art-rebus combining mime and monosyllabic noises, then I may just look at you in confusion and disbelief.

You certainly astonished me, and you added a friendly bit of strange to an otherwise ordinary day.

It was nice of you to bring a translator though.

CUSTOMER:
(Fluttering hands from throat to waist.)
Ni, ni, ni.
(Moves one hand into a scallop, to indicate a wave.)
New. Old. New. Old. Young. Ma. Mi. Old. Young.

TRANSLATING COMPANION:
Oh, she means she remembers her mother wearing something like that when she was young. Fashions always come back, you know how it is. Up and down, like always.

CUSTOMER:
(Tapping ear.)
Mi, mi, mi, mi. Ha.

TRANSLATING COMPANION:
She plays piano herself, of course. She's a great musician. Beautiful voice, really beautiful.

CUSTOMER:
(Sighing. Tapping fingers in the air.)
Ooooohhhhh. Vue. Li-lah, li-lah, leeeee.

TRANSLATING COMPANION:
Ever since she was little. She knows all the music by heart. I bet she knows all the music you play here, even.

And so on, and so forth. I'm afraid I was so absorbed by the feeling that I had stepped into either a farce or an alternate world, that I have absolutely no memory of what books you ended up taking home. It was knocked out of my head by the way you said, "thank you," and "have a good evening," so that your translator almost translated for me before she realized she didn't have to.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 8

Best beloved bookstore customers,

While I love books, and love talking about books, and even love spirited and lively debate over books, it really is not necessary for you to call the bookstore and tell me -- for a lengthy and dreary ten minutes -- exactly why a particular book did not plant an undying love in your own reader's heart.

I don't need for you to tell me that you think the author is not "the right sort of person." Or for you to describe exactly how disappointed you are that the bookstore gave him the time and space for an author event. I don't need for you to describe your astonishment that such a person, with such differing views from your illustrious self, ever had a book published at all.

Please remember: We are a bookstore. We mostly like you. We are not, however, your friends. Those ten minutes that you spent with the perforated plastic of your phone pressed to the folds of your ear are now irretrievably lost. They would have been so much better, so much more satisfying, if they had been shared with a friend. Over coffee maybe. Or tea. And in the forgiving company of someone who might actually say how your displeasure makes them feel.

With warmest regards,
Me

books and pizza

So, my amazing sister, Shannon, and I are hosting a bookclub for young people at the bookstore (this bookstore being Kepler's, a place that both infuriates and tickles me on a daily basis). Our very first meeting is on the 13th of October at 5:30 PM. Our very first book will be Coraline by the lovely Neil Gaiman. There will be pizza. (Why will there be pizza? Our cohorts at the bookstore thought that this would mollify any fears of conflict with suppertime. It's all quite incomprehensible to us, who have always thought that dinner is not really dinner unless it's dark outside.)

Normally, I would be slightly mortified to tack up a verbal brochure for the infuriating/amusing bookstore here, but so far I've only received one lonely RSVP for a pair of brothers with names that really should be in a Lemony Snicket book, and the 13th is less than ten days away. This makes me feel faintly blue. Coraline is one of my favourite books. This is my poorly veiled attempt to bring shadowy edges with button eyes to the imagination of young people who have hitherto not experienced the delightful shivers of encountering the Other Mother. My sister and I are very much against the force feeding of books, even good ones, to unwilling young minds, but very much in favor of leaving the books out to be discovered.

And then my sister goes and quotes Roald Dahl, ususally something Oompa Loompa-ish.

So, please, if you live in the area and know any young people who would like to read Coraline and discuss it over pizza with a pair of only slightly book-crazed sisters, the information is here. RSVPs go to my work email, which is: megan(at)keplers.com (yes, I have a work email. I find this just as bemusing as you.)

why yes, Virginia, there really is still censorship

At my bookstore, we have a display up in honor of Banned Books Week (which is this week, the 26th of September through the 3rd of October). Personally, I think it's a rather silly looking display because "flames" made out of sparkly mesh fabric just don't seem very threatening, or even interesting to look at. But such unfortunate decorations are important if they're meant to remind us about our glorious, magnificent, essential right of freedom of expression, and the First Amendment that protects it. It's especially important when people don't know that books are still banned, that censorship does still happen, that there are still people out there who will try to put boundaries on your choices of what to read, and how to think, and what to say.

A woman and her son were looking at some of the books on our sparkly, unconvincingly inflammable table, and the son said, "Oh! Mommy, look at these penguins. What does 'banned' mean?"

The woman said, "That means people didn't want other people to read them. They took them away. But, that happened a long time ago." Then she turned to me and said, "Right? These books were banned a long time ago, weren't they? That doesn't happen now."

It kind of broke my heart to tell her that, yes, actually it does still happen now. There were five hundred and thirteen challenges against books that were reported in 2008. And Tango Makes Three, which is a charming picture book about two male penguins who adopt a baby penguin, was the most challenged book of last year. And the year before that. And the year before that.

There is a fascinating map that shows where books have been banned and challenged between 2007 and 2009, with little bubbles that show the reasons.

There are also ALA piecharts that show what sort of people try to get books banned, and why. I find it shocking and unsettling that the majority of challenges come from parents.

When I was younger, I hated it when someone suggested that I shouldn't read something. I would see it on the shelf, and it always seemed more tantalizing, more thrilling and exciting, because it had been deemed not quite right for me. No one ever told me that I could not read a book. But imagine if they had. Imagine if they had taken the book away, taken other ones as well, one by one, and put them somewhere tidied away and safe where I couldn't find them, where I wouldn't even know that they had ever existed. What a way to shrink the world.

So, in honor of Banned Books Week, read a book that some people think you shouldn't. Read it, and enjoy it, and take enormous, delighted pleasure in the fact that you can.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 7

Best beloved bookstore customers,

Please do not ask me how to say thank you in "my language." Not even if you are a dapper elderly man who I assume is only trying to be charming in a rather misguided way. I think that you will be disappointed to discover that thank you in my language is mostly similar to thank you in yours, with maybe a few small variations along the lines of thanks, or even thanks so very much.

This would be because I speak English, like you, and nothing else, except for a small grab bag of forgotten French.

So, merci bien! And, if it will make you happy, I suppose I could throw in an arigato or two.

street date

I really like it when books come in ever so plain cardboard boxes with big strips of tape that forbid you from opening them until the precise, approved moment. It seems like something special. Maybe dangerous. Definitely exciting.

I even like it when it's a book that I have no intention of ever reading. At least it's an occasion.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 6

Please, best beloved customers, please do not ask if we know the difference between abridged and unabridged. Just don't.

And seeing the movie version of something does not make someone unfit to read the book. Eyeballs can be used in different ways, you know, and watching a movie does not instantly negate your brain.

And referring to people who see movie adaptations of books as "those sort of people" is not, actually, a helpful thing to say. "Those sort of people"? What does that even mean? People who like movies? People who like stories? I don't think it means what you think it means, or even what you want it to mean. Do you only imbibe your fiction in unadulterated prose? Have you never seen "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "The English Patient" or "Fight Club" or "The Graduate"? You poor, poor thing.

confessions of a bookstore rat: awkward encounters

A guy came up to me tonight, holding Elizabeth Bear's novel, Dust. "Are you a science fiction reader then?" I asked. He stared at me for a little while, and then he said, "Yes." And, because I was feeling relatively friendly, I said, "Oh, what kind of science fiction do you like to read?" (I like to establish that I won't make a fool of myself by leaping blind into a conversation at the deep, unfamiliar end of the spectrum where real science fiction fans reside and where I feel like an imposter.)

The guy was a nice-looking, ordinary-seeming guy, but after considering the question for a little while, he told me that "it's hard to put into words." Then he wandered off while I was still trying to decide what to add to, "oh."

A little while later, when I had forgotten about him and the limping scrap of failed of conversation, he returned with his (I assume) girlfriend who was buying Cormac McCarthy's The Road. We were talking about McCarthy when, suddenly, he said, "Dark ones."

There are times when I fall off the edge of a conversation. Falling through nonsense, Alice-in-Wonderland-style, without anything in sight to grab onto. My eyebrows tend to make funny shapes when this happens.

"Dark ones, where people die."

Eyebrows. Eyebrows. Eyebrows. It was very quiet.

Eventually, the girlfriend said, "Uhm. I think he's answering your question. That one, from before. That one about science fiction?"

***

Five minutes before the store closed, a small man hurried up to me and said he needed a book. And that was it. He didn't blink very much, just looked at me and waited.

"A book?" I said. It's at times like this that you notice the thickly populated shelves looming at the corners of your eyes. "What kind of book?"

"Just a book. I need a book."

"Fiction?"

"Yes, fiction works." He waited, and I felt like he wanted me to produce The Book--the perfect and longed for without knowing you longed for it, but if you read it, it would complete your happiness--(that Book) by waving my hands and tugging it from a silk handkerchief.

When there are thousands of books in easy reach, it helps to plead for the winnowing power of specifics. "Mystery? Suspense? Funny? Sad?"

He shrugged, actually shrugged, and said: "Funny is good. I like suspense. Not too sad. Anything. I only have five minutes."

It was an opportunity to change someone's life, or at least their night, by picking that one perfect book that would explode in their head and make them fall madly in love with all the glittering, luscious shrapnel.

In the face of that crippling possibility, I turned away and picked up the most ridiculous book I could see. It was called My Goat Ate Its Own Legs. It has a violently yellow cover with two halves of a red goat.

He bought it.

***
My favourite quote of the day, from an interview with the fantastic Lev Grossman on Flavorwire:

"I do think people in cities need fantasy more. I have a pet theory about this, which is that the modern fantasy tradition started out as a response to the mass urbanization of the early 20th century. Cars replaced horses. Electric light replaced gaslight. Everything, at least in cities, abruptly became crap. A longing for something that was not crap sprang up, and expressed itself in the form of fantasy. I think that longing is still very much alive."

Fantasy as a longing for things not crap. Awesome.

on the good and bad of being a bookstore rat

When I was little, I read a book about Degas and the Paris Opera Ballet. The only thing about it that I remember (aside from the reproductions of pastels, which I found boring... I've always preferred Degas when he plunges things into shadows or sketchy charcoal rather than his diaphanous, light-filled ballerinas.) is that they call the students of the ballet school "les petits rats." I don't remember why they call them that, but assume that it's because the little dancer children sometimes resemble rats scuttling down corridors.

Which is sometimes how I feel when I'm at the bookstore. (and the fact that I got started on that rat thing is just evidence of how dance entrenches itself in your brain if you let it, ready to spring into action at the most barely tangible suggestion.) I scuttle back and forth between the shelves, ferrying books to their respective sections, climbing ladders into corners, sometimes (but less frequently than you might imagine) answering questions for customers ready to admit that they can't find what they want, and rarely, but most happily, doing my best to produce the book that will satisfy someone's heart's desire.

A friend of mine recently asked how working at a bookstore affects me as a writer and a dancer, and I have to say that it's really not much different from any other not-too-ornerous part time job. There are very nice things about it. Being around people who believe in books, listening to authors talk about books, being forced to look at books on subjects and in flavours that you would never glance at otherwise. There are not so very nice things about it as well. Extricating yourself from awkward conversations, getting scolded by customers for your failure to remember every book mentioned on NPR in the last six months, interpreting the usual lapses in organization and communication, waiting, waiting, waiting.

It's interesting to be surrounded by books, and particularly interesting to see the ones that are new, or suddenly remembered, or strange but inexplicably popular. I've had a more varied reading diet since working at the bookstore, mad veering from Ogden Nash to Ian McEwan to men who play out their mid-life crisis in stamp collecting. But you also have the usual mix of fun and unpleasantness that comes with helping people spend their money. It's retail (though admirable, worthwhile retail), and I can't say that it contributes to either the dancing or the writing (except that I stay up too late too often and am often tired), unless you count the experiences that always come along with interacting with other people.

Though I think the scuttling has improved. I may soon develop a stoop and misshapen pockets from trying to squish too many bits of paper into them, and then I'll really feel like I belong in The Wind in the Willows.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 5

If you see a girl standing at the register, please know that this is not an invitation for you to approach her with conversation that insults both the event that the store is hosting and the girl herself.

Please do not imagine that you should say things like:

"These women, they are telling lies. Lies. I am a perceptive kind of guy, real perceptive, you know? And I can tell you that these women are lying. I can tell when people are the sincere sort and when they're liars. You're too young to know this sort of thing. You just don't know. How old are you? Huh. When I was your age, I was travelling India. You should travel. You don't know anything about the world, you just got your eye closed and they need to be opened. You may think you've got them open, but you can't see anything."

And then, when the girl, rather tight-lipped, says that, actually, she has travelled, please don't say:

"Well, you're only talking the western world. That's not going to help. Your eyes are still closed. You don't know anything still. You don't know anything about Asia."

And then, when the girl points out the (rather obvious) fact that she is, in fact, Asian don't then say:

"Well, it's not like you know anything about it. There's that culture and that history and that language, and you're just ignorant of it all. You need to learn something about the world."

And then, when the girl tells you that she really can't stay there and talk to you any longer, and that you might have your opinions, but she really doesn't agree with them or want to hear them anymore, please do not say:

"God bless you. You'll learn."

So much rage. Also, disbelief.

Many thanks.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 4

Please do not say that you are looking for a book called "Metamorphosis or something" and send me dashing happily off to Kafka and then to Ovid, full of delight that oh here is a request I don't even have to look up on the computer how lovely, only to have you say, sometime later, that it's actually a business book you're looking for.

The quickest way to find a book: ISBN number. Saying that you read about it in the NY Times a few months back, that it had the word "red" in the title, and that it may have had something to do with murder is not quick. It can be fun. It can be a treasure hunt. It may turn up all kinds of excellent books you and I would never have glanced at otherwise. But it's not quick. Just so you know.

Your children have good taste. I don't care whether they're clutching piles of Rainbow Fairies books or hanging onto D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. They're reading, figuring things out, standing at the shallow edge of a crazy, wonderful ocean and deciding that they want to get wet. There are so many incredible books for kids and I would love to offer up my own favourites, but please, please don't say "no, you can't read this." It will only make them want to read it more anyway.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 3

If you ask me what sort of book you should read and then say that you like Laurie Halse Anderson, A Million Tiny Pieces, and stories about people experiencing difficult things, please, please don't then say that you're afraid my suggestions will creep you out and give you nightmares. I still feel guilty about handing you a copy of The Lovely Bones. If I had known you were prone to nightmares, I would have given you something else. More sunshine and less gruesome.

I did not love The Lovely Bones or Special Topics In Calamity Physics or In Cold Blood, but I will still recommend them to you if I think you'll like them more than I did. Just please don't tell me that they give you nightmares.

However, if you feel moved to read me the first page of your favourite book, please do (and, as long as there are no sparkling vampires involved, I mean that). It's a surprising thing to have so much affection for a book that you will read it aloud to a stranger just in case they like it too. It's refreshing.

With thanks,
Me

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 2

Telling me how you fear that you might die before George RR Martin finishes his next book is of no interest to me whatsoever. There isn't anything I can do about it, and since I haven't read any of them, I don't know what you're talking about when you start making long and involved references to characters in the book.

Trying to debate the organization of the store on etymological terms will only irritate me. Trying to describe your own plan for how books should be shelved, which distinctions of genre and subject you would make, is something that you should take up with someone else. No, we don't have a biography section.

Also, lamenting the fact that we don't carry obscure mathematical and philosophical texts is mostly tiresome. Once again, I usually don't know what you're talking about. I am, indeed, ignorant. Please inquire at the nearest university.

Thank you,
Me

it's the little things

I am really easily amused. These are little things that have made me snort or giggle or laugh very loudly when I should be seriously contemplating the nature of Literature.

OK, so you probably can't see that. I don't really know how to use the camera on my cell phone. Let me translate the blur: "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn-- Albert Camus." This is on a rectangular slip of paper, fortune cookie style, taped up in the back of one of the fiction shelves. How jolly. Did someone feel unsatisfied by The Emperor of Ocean Park?

Peter Carey, who I have excessive admiration for, blurbed this writing book. Once again, let me translate my inability to focus on the foreground: "Read it because it will teach you everything you need to know about writing good fiction, whether your characters are having sex or having breakfast. -- Peter Carey, author of the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda" How could that not make you laugh?

This is actually in Bell's Books, which is one of my favorite bookstores (there is an upstairs crammed with odd history books, and books bound in leather with embossed titles, and a large globe... and it smells like time). But I quite liked the idea of a shelf of intelligence.

In other news, the magnificent Heather returned from L.A. this week. To celebrate, we went to see Night At the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. It's amazing. We loved it. No, really, the jokes are hilarious (Hank Azaria as an evil, power famished, Egyptian pharoah with a lisp; Ben Stiller's flashlight martial art; Ivan the Terrible, but really the Awesome; Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan having an epic sword fight with the shoes of Al Capone...) and the visuals are like leaping headfirst into a metaphorical candy store. I adore museums and the idea of one coming to life is just skin-burstingly delightful. There's a scene where Ben Stiller and Amy Adams crash into Eisenstaedt's V-J Day in Times Square, and the weird twisting sensation of seeing that world in motion was impressive. It's sheer fun and it made me progressively happier.

bruising powers of brevity, or, why you should read short stories

One of the most frustrating things about working at a bookstore is when you are telling someone about a book you love, one of those that you adore either madly and immoderately or sensibly and intelligently, and they listen to you politely before saying:

"Well, that sounds interesting. But it's really not my kind of thing."

And you're a little bit crushed, convinced that if only they tasted it, they would fall for it too; but it's perfectly fine for them to decline. They know themselves better than I do. They've been reading for years, and by now they know the general flavor of what works. I should leave them alone.

But.

There is something that I wish I could insist on. Everyone should read short stories! Look! I'll read you one myself, if you just stand here long enough. So many people tell me that they don't read short stories. They don't like them. They only want to read novels, the kind you can press your face into for several hours and emerge, glutted on the visions of someone else's life. Short stories seem pretty, they say, but what's the point of them?

The point of them is their shortness. They work with compression and omission, by leaving things out and taking shortcuts to the inside of your head where, once they get there, they unfold themselves, like a giant piece of origami undone. They bruise you with their hard edges, explode, amuse, devastate, and baffle. You can do things in a short story that would be exhausting if sustained for a novel. There's more space on the inside than you would suspect, more room for guessing, a looseness left for the reader to explore.

(Mr. Steven Millhauser has something to say on the subject, an interesting--and maybe faintly grumpy?--essay in the NY Times.)

I think the trick is that you have to figure out what kind of short stories you want to read. I used to avoid them because I thought they were all brief bits of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and that bored me (schools should use more imagination when selecting short fiction). What was the point of reading about something that I could see better by walking outside?

And then I discovered genre stories (I say "genre" and I mean mystery, fantasy, science fiction, anything where the strange and not quite possible actually happens). Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Kelly Link and Italo Calvino... Steven Millhauser, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, Etgar Keret, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, Raold Dahl (have you ever read his short stories? brilliant!), Ted Chiang, M. R. James, Kurt Vonnegut ("Harrison Bergeron" is the first short story that I couldn't stop thinking about for days and days after I read it), Avram Davidson... These stories smacked me in the head. They got up my nose and under my skin. They haunted, excited, and thrilled me; and I loved them.

And because I'm so in love with them, I want everyone else to love them to. Or, at least to give them the chance to introduce themselves.

Read short stories. Bruise your head.

joining the jolly ones

Sometimes, I think I make it sound like working at the bookstore is a never-ending succession of strange interactions with odd and frustrating people. Which it isn't.

Yesterday, for instance, this tall, faded man who receded behind his spectacles bought a Terry Pratchett book (Feet of Clay, to be precise). I employed my usual Enthusiastic Small Talk (reserved for books I actually like), and asked him whether he had read many of Pratchett's novels. He said he hadn't. And then he looked embarrassed and said that he started reading them because he once passed a bookstore that was hosting an event for Terry Pratchett and he saw crowds and crowds of people who all looked jolly, excited, and brazenly happy. He wanted to join them, so he bought a book.

This was almost as satisfying as the time a woman told me that she had heard Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" read on NPR and that it was haunting her. She said this very emphatically and repeatedly, with slightly different phrasing, and I was beginning to feel sorry for her when she looked me in the eye and said, "But where can I find MORE?"

On the other hand, we're hosting Rick Riordan on Saturday and I keep imagining that I'll be crushed flat beneath a tsunami of young people clutching their copies of The Last Olympian.

helpful hints for bookstore customers, part 1

Gracious visitors to our humble bookstore,

Please do remember that there is a small area around each of us booksellers into which only our familiars and beloveds should intrude. It's our envelope of privacy, our small and comforting sanctum, and though we appreciate the enthusiasm that causes you to lean forward and place your face closer and closer to ours, until we can smell your perfume, your supper, your drink, your smoke of choice, the proximity shakes us. We will swallow our words and forget your questions, and we will back away, trying to get enough air to breathe.

Many thanks.

the perilous towers of unread books

These are some of the ARCs that are patiently waiting for someone to rescue them from the back room of the bookstore and give them a chance to be read. Some of them turn out to be unsuspected treasures. My most recent favourites are The Ramen King And I by Andy Raskin (which comes out in May) and The Error World by Simon Garfield (which is out now).

***
A customer asked me a question yesterday that I found both odd and troubling, in that I had to think more about what it meant to me and my attitudes towards literature than the question itself. She (and, yes, it was a woman, which may be important) asked me where the section for "women's literature" was. At first, I thought she meant books about women, women's health maybe, or feminism in general, but she meant books--fiction, to be specific--by women authors.

I've never seen a bookstore where the books of men and the books of women are separated out and tidied away in their own sections, and I can't quite see a point in doing so. But this woman (who seemed intelligent, polite, and independent) acted like the question was perfectly normal and reasonable. Did she only want to browse books by women? Did she want to read about women? Did she, perhaps, feel that she'd been reading too many books by men and wanted to see the range and possibility in shelves that only included the work of women? I don't know, and the part that made me pause once I registered it is, I didn't actually care. My first thought was, well, that would be a stupid way to organize books.

I never make a point to read books by women authors. I don't avoid them either. But out of the three books that I've read this month so far, all of them are by men. I like to choose my reading based on what looks shiny, appealing, or delightful, but every now and then I feel guilty and wonder whether choices in reading, when multiplied many times over, add up to some sort of statement, even if it's one of inattention or indifference.

(I've just counted the books in my reading now pile and there are seven by men and two by women.)

***
I'm finding this interesting. The Booktrust in the UK has Patrick Ness doing a sort of online residency where he blogs about the process of writing and publishing a book (his most recent is The Knife of Never Letting Go). He's funny and direct and says interesting things, particularly about how stories eat up ideas. I'm also predisposed to like any organization that describes the location of their building like this:
We live in a lovely Victorian building between Wandsworth and Clapham Junction, wedged between a Huguenot cemetery and a traffic island.

***
Also, the lovely and absurdly talented Toni Lum is dancing in NY this weekend with Danceworks Chicago as part of the Ballet Builders 2009 program. Toni is a joy to watch, always, and if anyone happens to be in NY, you should go see her.