The Hunger Games

Have you all read these books? HAVE YOU?!?! You must. The movie for the first book is coming out on March 23 so you have three good months to get the trilogy read, although you're probably only going to need about three days. I reread them over Christmas break, holding my breath in anticipation just like the first time.

Here's the trailer:

Pride & Humility

Can I just copy the entire chapter "The Great Sin" from Mere Christianity? If that book intimidates you in jumping in from Page 1 - and it does me, I've still never made it straight through from beginning to end - go and get a copy and just start with this chapter. Or at least read these excerpts and know there is much, much more. It gets me every time. "Thank goodness I'm not proud! Wait, dang it, I totally am." Thanks, Mr. Lewis.

'There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others... In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask ourself, 'How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?' The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride... [Pride] is competitive by its very nature... Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud.

[Pride] comes direct from hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices... [at this] the devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride... For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so incomparably more what God thinks. But the Proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says, 'Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment...? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals - or my artistic conscience - or the traditions of my family...'

The point is, [God] wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble - delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 'humble' nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all."

Water for Elephants

For those of you who care, I'm really sorry for stalling on my Oscar fashion blog. It's mostly written but finding and loading the pictures is very tedious. It's still coming, I promise!

In the meantime, look! I got you a treat! There's a new trailer for the Water for Elephants movie coming out in April. I read the book last summer and really enjoyed it. It was a lovely read and was just screaming for a film adaptation. I was a little hesitant about the casting at first, but the trailers are convincing and it looks sumptuously filmed. One of the best things about the book was the author's incredibly detailed and researched setting of a depression-era circus, so I'm happy to see that it looks as if they took the same care in detailing the movie.

Hurry and read the book and you can waddle (okay, fine, only I will be waddling) with my 8-months-pregnant self down to the theater on April 22 to check out the movie!

PS. Obviously the trailer gives you some idea of the plot (although nothing too important, I'd say), so if you don't want to know any of that before you read then skip the video.

Bye Bye Bookstores: A Prediction

Where do you go to buy music?

If you're under, I don't know, 35, your first instinct is probably to iTunes or Amazon. On the off occasion that you want an actual CD, you might still buy it off Amazon, or you might check Target or Wal-Mart. If it's a little more obscure and you're feeling hip, you might go to Grimey's, or your local equivalent of the indie hole-in-the-wall.

Know where you don't go? Tower Records. Or Virgin Records. Know why? They don't exist. Not anymore. Not in this country, anyway. The last Tower Records store closed in 2006, including the infamous one in West Hollywood. Virgin Records shut down their last remaining stores - including the huge flagship location in Times Square - in 2009. (Both chains still operate international franchises and as online retailers.)

Now, on to my next question.

Where do you go to buy books?

The answer to this question five years from now might be eerily similar to what you'd say about buying music today. I currently work in a chain book store, and everywhere I look, I see the sad parallels to what happened to music retail.

Here's why I think book stores are headed down that same road. I broke down my thoughts by equating the major players in music retail with their counterparts in book retail.

Kindle (and all its competitors, including the iPad) = iPod (and all its competitors)

The book industry pretended for too long, as did the record industry before it, that the digital revolution would never be enough to affect physical product sales. The record industry was wrong. So was the publishing industry. Amazon now sells more ebooks for its Kindle than it does paperbacks. "I still prefer holding a real book; I could never read off of a computer screen all day." Tell that to your CD collection, wherever it sits collecting dust. I can remember saying essentially the same thing when iPods were first introduced, scoffing at the idea that someone would want to buy something without having a physical item to show for it.

Amazon = iTunes

Low prices and no real competition worked for iTunes with mp3s, and it works for Amazon with eBooks. Funnily enough, now it is Apple who wants a share of what Amazon has cooking, hoping the iPad and iBooks can take a bite out of Amazon's monster ebook market share.

Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Sams = Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Sams

Amazon has the additional advantage of also selling physical product, for cheaper than you can find it in a store. If you do want it from a store, you're going to go to a big box retailer. You can pick your favorite, but from the perspective of the dying bookstore, they're all villains. Did you know big box retailers sell music and books for a loss? 50% off that just-released best-seller is merely a way to get you in the door. They'll gladly take the hit there, while you fill your cart with other stuff. $14 instead of $19, plus you can pick up toothpaste and new shoes? Who wouldn't take that deal?

Indie Bookstores = Indie Record Stores

Maybe you're a buy-local advocate. Maybe the thought of shopping at the Evil Empire turns your socially-conscious stomach. That's okay. There will still be indie bookstores. There just won't be as many of them. And they will struggle to stay in business. And they'll most-likely cater to a particular niche of reader. And they won't always have what you're looking for. But the ones that breed loyalty and maintain a cult-following will still be around, as a haven for old souls. Which leads me to...

Real Books = Vinyl (and, for now, still CDs)

Music freaks still love their vinyl. They like the way it sounds. They like the way it feels. They like that it is cool to have a record player. And real books? They'll become the LPs of book lovers. Or, for now, at least the CDs of book lovers and people who roll old-school. Plenty of people with iPods still buy the occasional CD, and plenty of vinyl-enthusiasts also have iPods. There's room for overlap. Books aren't going to disappear or stop being printed. But the ebook revolution has officially arrived. And it's not going to disappear, either.

Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million = Virgin Records, Tower Records

So we come to this. Will bookstores, like the one you might go to if you needed a book today, go the way of the record store? Every argument to the contrary is an echo of the now-defunct reasons people gave 10 years ago for why record store chains wouldn't go under. It's starting already. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble closed stores in the past year, no doubt with more to come, and rumors of bankruptcy swirl around one or the other ever week.

Bigger and brighter and more economic and industry-savvy minds than mind have been looking at this issue for a while. What do you think? Where do you buy your books and your music? Have you joined the ebook revolution?

Shopping in a Bookstore: Lesson #2

Last time we learned how to put the books back. Or more specifically, to not put them back at all unless you are doing it right. Today I'd like to cover a new topic: How to Ask For Help.

Let me begin by saying that I totally understand when people want to look for something themselves. Browse away. It's fun to find things for your own. We get it. You are not obligated to accept our help.

But we will offer to help you. We offer out of politeness, and also because we know more than you.

Oh, I'm sorry, that might have sounded mean. But let me clarify.

I don't mean, of course, that we are smarter than you. Okay, we're definitely smarter than a percentage of people who shop in our store, but when I say we know more than you, I mean we know the store better than you, and our inventory better than you.

So if you don't ask for our help, or you don't accept our help, don't get mad at us when you can't find something. Definitely don't make ridiculous accusations. "Did you all get rid of your travel section or something?" "I guess you guys don't carry graphic novels." "Do you not have music anymore?"

Wrong. False. Stop being ridiculous. All you have to say, and this really shouldn't come as a surprise, is, "Hi, I'm looking for _______." We will spring into eager action to retrieve what you need.

Which leads me to another point. If you want to browse the cooking section, please ask us, "Can you point me to the cooking section?" But if what you want is Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, then please. JUST SAY THAT. If you want something specific, just ask for that thing. Otherwise something like this is bound to happen:

LADY: Hi, can you point me to your travel section?
ME: Sure, I'll walk you over there. Anywhere specific?
LADY: I'll just look around, thanks.
ME: Okay, my name is Amy if you need more help.
(Five minutes later, she re-approches the info desk.)
LADY: Why don't you have any books about Kenya?
ME: I could literally slap you.

That last line ever only happens in my head, of course. But can you understand the frustration? Some version of this conversation happens almost every day I'm at work. If this lady would have just said, "Could you please show me books about traveling to Kenya?" then she'd be happy and I wouldn't feel like slapping anyone. That's a win-win.

The other good reason to ask us for help is because we know things you couldn't possibly know. We know which school books we do and don't have, and we can retrieve them in 4.6 seconds flat. You could too, if twelve people had asked you for To Kill A Mockingbird in the past two hours. We know the title and author of that book you heard about on NPR yesterday morning, and we know that our store is sold out but that the Cool Springs store still has copies. We can call them and have one held for you. We know that $30 hardcover you're about to buy is coming out in paperback for half the price next week. We may even know the title of "that one book about some brothers and I think there's a bird on the cover." I once found a book for a lady and all she knew was that the word "Rose" was somewhere in the title.

We can be especially helpful when you don't know what you want or what you need. I wish more people understood this. My bookstore is not McDonalds. Or Wal-Mart. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those places. But no one is working at Borders because they lack the skills to work anywhere else. Almost everyone is college educated (more than one of my colleagues has or is working towards an advanced degree), and we are all avid (sometimes rabid) readers. Our staff covers a broad spectrum of interests and specialties. You like history and politics, you see Andy. You want high-brow lit? Evan's read books you wish you were smart enough to have even heard of. Luanne can tell you the author and title of just about every genre novel in the store. I can pick out a book your 6th grade son who hates reading won't be able to put down. The list goes on.

So if you want to browse, browse. You are welcome to stay in our store for hours at a time. Curl up in a chair and read a whole book for all we care. Don't break the spine, of course, because then we can't sell it. And don't leave a mess, because this isn't your living room. And don't steal things, because that is wrong.

But if you need something specific, you're always better off asking. And if you just want some suggestions, we're pretty good at those. We like reading. We want you to like it too.

Shopping in a Bookstore: Lesson #1

I understand there are a lot of perfectly nice folks out there who like visiting and shopping in bookstores but wonder to themselves, "Am I doing this right? What IS the proper way to shop in a bookstore?"

Good news: I have all the answers to all the questions people didn't even know they were asking.

Bad news: Some of these lessons will be difficult to learn. But I'm confident that with time and effort, anyone can become an efficient and effective book shopper loved by bookstore employees everywhere!

Let's start with a big one. My number one cardinal rule of book browsing.

Do. Not. Put. The. Books. Back. Incorrectly.

This is basically the worst thing you can do. Okay, so maybe shoving 10 DVDs in your coat and making a break for the door is worse. And I suppose if you dumped your coffee all over an entire stack of books that would also be worse. But by far the most common offender is the person who puts the book back in the wrong place. Let me explain why this drives us booksellers CRA-zy.

If you come in looking for a book, I am going to look it up in the computer, see what it says we have and where, and then we'll go look for it together. Let's pretend that the computer says yes, we have one copy of Secrets of the Ultimate Husband Hunter (this is an actual title someone asked me for) by Nancy Nichols. Then we're going to head over to Self-Improvement (a treasure trove of ridiculously titled tomes) and make a beeline for the "N"s.


Now this may come as a surprise to some, but in the bookstore, we use something called "alphabetizing" to keep the books in order. What is alphabetizing? Well, it's just a handy little system in which the books are lined up according to the author's last name. So you and I are walking over to the shelf with the "N" authors, headed to get you some help with that wild sport of Husband Hunting, but upon arrival, we find no Nichols between Neighbors and Nim. Little do you know, and little do I know, that last week somebody else picked up that book, carried it around a bit, and then slid it back onto a shelf... in Fantasy. Which is perhaps a good place for a person who looks at the act of entering a relationship as "husband hunting" but that is an argument for another time and place. What matters is, that until someone is organizing the fantasy shelves and realizes that the Ultimate Husband Hunter is in the wrong place, nobody is finding and nobody is buying that book. So now the person who randomly tossed the book back on a shelve has made it so you can't get your book and we can't make a sale. You are frustrated at me for saying it looked like we had a copy (which it did) and I am frustrated because I can't find something our system says we should have (which we do).

What about people who put it back in the general area they found it? If Nancy Nichols, for example, gets put on the shelve right above or below, chances are that in looking in the "N" section we'll probably run across it. Plus we know that happens so we're in the habit of looking in the area before we call it quits. This is the least offensive, but still annoying, way that people put things back wrong.

Bumping it up several notches on the no-no scale is setting the wrong book in front of a face-out. I can hear you protesting: "What kind of crazy bookseller lingo are you using now, Amy?!" It's like this. Despite the old adage "not to judge a book by its cover," we all do it. Covers of books are prettier than spines, and people like looking at them. A "face-out" is when we take all the copies of a certain book on a shelf, and face them cover-out. This is nice to look at, helps us keep large quantities of certain books without taking up as much space, and fills out the full shelf. Example:



So now let's say there isn't one but four copies of Ultimate Husband Hunter and they are faced-out where they are supposed to be on the shelve but someone set another book down, faced out, right in front of them. If it is a random, not even remotely in the section book, we usually figure that one out pretty quickly. But let's say it is another self-help book, or even worse, another "N" author self-help book. You can see how we might easily be fooled by this face-out fake-out. And you can imagine how infuriating it is to realize later that the book you were looking for was right there the whole time.

But you want to be helpful! But you want to do the right thing! Here's the truth. I would rather put your book away for you than not be able to find it because you, even with the best of intentions, put it away wrong. So unless you really and truly know where your book goes, just bring it to someone who works there. Leave it on the info desk. Bring it up to the register and say you don't want it.

One exception to the don't-put-it-back-yourself rule: If you get a large stack of books from the same very small, very specialized section, put them back yourself. I'm serious. Do not pull out fifteen books on birdwatching and then leave them in a pile by the chairs in religion. You probably picked up every birdwatching book we have and you totally know where they go. Put them back or at least have the courtesy to bring them to the info desk and look apologetic about it. Did you pull out six books on Oracle SQL Programming? If you're smart enough to know what the heck that is, you're smart enough to put those books back where you found them. Leaving giant stacks of books by, in, and near the browsing chairs is super annoying. But we're veering into lesson two, to be continued at another time.

I hope you've enjoyed lesson one of shopping in a bookstore! Stay tuned for upcoming lessons, including:

• how to ask for help
• why we can't find "that one book about that guy" without more information
• my children's section is not a drop-off zone,
• why are books so expensive,
• why you can't return without a receipt
• stealing is a no-no,
• and so much more!

Maniacs and Red Ferns: Books That Rocked Your Childhood

Working in the bookstore continues to keep books on my brain! As I've spent more and more time in the kids section, I've been thinking about the books that meant the most to me as a child. I don't just mean children's picture books, of which I have a long and varied list of favorites. I'm thinking more of those books that I encountered as an older child, the first and best loved volumes that pierced my child-sized heart and stretched my child-sized imagination. Two in particular come to mind for me.


The first time I remember understanding my mom as person beyond "my mom" was when she read aloud to my sister and I the entirety of Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows. I have the most vivid memory of sitting next to my sister in the bench seat of our minivan, with my mom turned slightly in her front passenger seat, reading to us. She came to the last few pages of the book and I watched, transfixed with simultaneous wonder and horror, as she began to cry. She kept reading through her tears, her voice cracking and her nose sniffling. We cried too, for the death and sadness and love and loyalty of Old Dan and Little Ann, and for our mother, a real woman who could be moved to tears by the wonderful power of the written word. Billy's first encounters with faith and death were mine, too. I have loved that book ever since.


If I could force all my customers at Borders to leave our "independent reader" section holding one book, it would most likely be Maniac Magee. Author Jerry Spinelli is one of those rare types that just seems to "get" kids, and wow did he ever get me with this one. This book broke my heart in the first pages and kept right on breaking it til the end. Family, home, love, hatred, fear, innocence... all the shattering and magnificent and surreal parts of growing up. Maniac was the first literary character I loved and, despite his magic, or maybe because of it, the most real.

The most powerful children's books are never patronizing. The fears and joys of youth are celebrated and explored and revealed in their pages, and the authors who write these books understand and respect the essence of childhood. That is why the best of these works are timeless. Reading them at 20, at 40, at 80 is as wonderful, even if in a different way, as reading them at 10.

What was the book (or, if you're like me, books plural) that rocked your childhood and why? Do share in the comments!

Covering a Classic

Hi people! I know, it's been too long, I suck at blogging on a regular basis, etc. etc. While we were apart, here's what happened to me. I got a part time job at my local Borders here in Brentwood. I will be the Children's Book Specialist, which is basically the job title I would have made up for myself in a fantasy world, so how fortuitous that it turned out to be real!

For these first few days I've just been learning the basics. Days one through three, I spent almost all my time at the register. Having never worked retail before, it was a whole new world for me! A little nerve wracking when something out of the ordinary comes up, but I'm getting the hang of it. The past two days I've spent shelving (or as I apparently pronounce it, "shelfing"), which means taking all the new books that come in and putting them in order where they belong on the shelves. It's a bit of a puzzle, as each shelf has to be full, but books with several copies have to be facing out, and all the books have to stay in order, but also make room for all the new product. So there is lots of scooting stuff around and squeezing things to fit.

The primary function of this task is apparently to taunt me with book after book that I am inspired to add to my must-read list. I was having a hard enough time keeping up with the books I knew about; now I discover there is a whole world of books I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW EXISTED that I also want to read!

One other thing I've come to realize is that the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" is kind of ridiculous when actually referring to books. Probably half the books I come across that I pick up suck me in first by having an awesome or interesting cover. Ah, you got me again, marketing! (Shakes fist.)

For example, today I shelved these really gorgeous new editions of three classics. Penguin commissioned artist Ruben Toledo to illustrate these covers, and I wanted to buy them just for prettiness sake. Take a look:




I love the Wuthering Heights one especially, with the caricatures of haughty Heathcliff and crazy Cathy, and the fabulous way the really intricate branches are drawn into the defined shapes of the trees. What a great way to hook readers into picking up these classics.

What's a book cover you are especially crazy about or have a vivid memory of? Share in the comments!

Unexpected

I recently checked out Salinger's Franny & Zooey from the library. I always loved The Catcher in the Rye, and its protagonist Holden is one of my favorite characters in literature. Since Salinger only published a handful of works before withdrawing into his famously reclusive life, I figured I should give one of his other books a try.

It was a quick little read, and is technically composed of two novellas which were initially published separately, nearly two years apart, in The New Yorker. The stories concern a couple particular members of the Glass family, in this case Franny, the youngest, and Zooey, her older brother and the youngest son.

I expected and found rambling characters like Holden, struggling with becoming adults, struggling with making sense of life and more immediately, their own thoughts and actions, all described in the frank and coarse language that put The Cather in the Rye on banned book lists.

What I didn't expect was one character's sudden but impassioned discourse on the person of Jesus Christ, and what it means to pray to and follow Him.

This is but one example of why I truly believe that God's power to reveal Himself is not limited only to the work of those who intend to do so. Salinger is not, at least by all accounts at the time he was being published, a Christian. But something of the truth of God was in these pages as I read them, as Zooey struggled to explain to his sister why she ought to think carefully about who she was praying to and how. Here are a few of the quotes that leveled me.

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to have been... The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody... would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament... Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew - knew - that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too ****** stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?

To try and understand the whole person of Christ, as he was, not to cringe away from or try and ignore the difficult parts about who he was and what he taught... what a sobering, convicting challenge. The Jesus who sacrificed himself and loved and healed was also the Jesus who threw tables in the temple, who told me to take up my own cross if I want to follow him, who taught things that are radical and absolute, things utterly at odds with the easy life offered by this world. I have to follow, to love, to obey the whole Jesus. Though more difficult to understand, he's infinitely better and more worthy than any other version I might construct.

Time & Time-Travel

So far one of my favorite things about being unemployed has been all the time I seem to have! Time to sleep, time to eat, time to exercise, time to craft and scrap and be a friend. Time to clean and organize, that's been a big blessing! But apparently one thing I haven't had time to do is blog! I feel like I haven't been here in forever... my apologies, dear readers. All six or seven of you!

I'm working on something exciting, which is my own scrapping venture. I hope to have some of my stuff ready and in an online store at Etsy.com soon. If you need something to do while you wait, I suggest going to Etsy.com and just browsing, because oh. my. gosh. It's amazing and you could spend weeks there and still find adorable things to see!

Speaking of time, something else I'm excited about is the trailer for The Time Traveler's Wife, which I just found online today. I knew the movie was coming out, and I love Rachel McAdams and knew I'd want to see it, so I got the book and read it a couple months ago. The premise is (and I'm not really giving anything away here, you find out this part on the first page) that Claire and Henry are in love... and Henry inexplicably can time travel. It isn't something he can control; he just slips back and forth without warning. The story is about their relationship and how they survive their extraordinary circumstances. It was a good read, very inventive with lovely prose. I think the movie, at least from this trailer, looks like it will be faithful to the novel, and I can't wait to see it when it comes out in August!

Oooh Pt. 2

A few days ago I blogged about seeing the poster for the Where the Wild Things Are movie coming out this fall. And today, this:



I'm even more encouraged that this could be a really special movie!

To view the high-quality version, click here.

Thanks Rachel for the heads up!

Oooh.

When I first heard they were making a live-action version of the beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are I thought "Why?" and "How?" Then today while browsing the interwebs I saw this:


I think I love it. The monster looks, somehow, as if it just walked off the pages of the book. The muted color scheme is so perfect and again, reminds me of the book's illustrations. Think of the contrast to advertising for other kids' movies! I also looooooove the typeface and simplicity of the tagline. If the poster is a portend of things to come in the film, this might be one of the movies I'm really looking forward to this fall.