Borders is BANKRUPT?!

I wrote about book stores going out of style all the way back in August in this post, but I never thought it would really truly happen! I love a good book store: wandering the aisles, looking at the cute stationary, getting a coffee and reading in the wonderful quiet. Yet just this morning I happened to notice that on the train to work, there were more people reading e-readers than real books. I had my paperback, but the lady to my left had an iPad, and the lady to my right had a Nook. Then I get to my desk and BAM in my email inbox is the letter below from the CEO of Borders explaining how they filed for bankruptcy yesterday. All I can say is NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I hoped this day would never come. And if a large corporation like Borders is struggling, I can't imagine the impact all this e-reading is having on smaller, local merchants.I feel like Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail. Go buy a book, and save a literary tradition!

Are book stores going out of style?

I am a lover of the written word. I do not own a kindle. I do not listen to audio books. I still subscribe to about 10 different magazines.

There is nothing that compares to me to the scent of a new book, and the feel of the pages between my fingers as I eagerly flip the page. And I just love the way they look all stacked on my bookshelves. I've been known to buy on Amazon. I do love their freakishly accurate suggested purchases, but I prefer to stop into a bookstore, wander between the stacks and look for new friends that I hadn't thought to buy.

Yet, the last few times I have gone to a bookstore to pick up my monthly read for book club, or just a book I've been itching to read, they haven't had it. Barnes and Noble didn't carry Just Kids by Patti Smith. Borders was all out of Swan Song by Robert McCammon, and there was not a volume On the Road in sight. That just seems like a sin. Where has all the inventory gone? Am I just hunting for unpopular books, or has buying books in person simply started to go out of style?

Romance novels vs. "Serious" Lit

I have a weakness for Nora Roberts books. Cringe all you like. It’s probably linked to my obsession with bad reality tv, is it a little smutty? Then I like it. I was traveling this weekend, and managed to read all of the magazines I had brought with me. There happened to by a Nora Roberts novel, Tears of the Moon laying around. So, I picked it up and brought it with me. I had read her book The Reef one summer, and was totally sucked into the story immediately. It made me want to run off on a boat trip, start treasure hunting and live permanently in the Caribbean.

I figured the book would at the very least give me some entertainment on what turned out to be an absurdly long bus ride back to the city from Upstate NY (I hate you summer Sunday night traffic!). And I was right. I’m already 183 pages in since last night, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It has me itching to run off to Ireland and marry a pub owner. Yet, on the subway to work this morning I found myself a little ashamed to be pulling it out of my bag with it’s flowery purple and green cover, and title, it just screams romance novel.

It got me to thinking, why is romance such a scorned literary genre? According to Wikepedia, romance novels are the most popular genre, and made up 55% of all novel sales a few years back. Yet romance is condemned as silly, trivial, and even dirty lit. But the truth is in the numbers, it’s popular.

In academia, however, it is not taken seriously. I can vouch for the fact that in all of the courses I took leading to the completion of my major in English, I was never assigned a single piece of literature that even closely resembled a romance novel. Shakespeare’s romances, and some scandalous poetry were the closest we came. Madame Bovary edged toward the arena of detailing women’s love affairs, but was quite frankly too brutally boring to make it through.

As a case in point, a professor at Fordham University, my alma matter was secretly a romance writer for many years before she felt confident enough to reveal her true identity to her colleagues. Her real professor name is Mary Bly, her NY Times best selling pen name is Eloisa James.

Her writing is extremely popular, has been translated into 9 languages, and topped best seller lists. Yet she only “came out” as a romance writer in 2005 for fear that academia would not take her seriously if they knew of her extracurricular writing. Why do people discredit romance so much?

Romance novels are real page turners. They suck you in, and keep you in the story until the end, isn’t that what all writing is trying to accomplish? They sell TONS of books. Are other authors jealous? And they are just plain fun. Can more “serious” novelists claim that?

Valley of the deep deep depression

I just finished reading the Valley of the Dolls, and man, what a depressing book! A more appropriate title might have been Valley of Depression. *Spoiler Alert* if you are in my book club, and have not finished the book, you’ll probably want to stop reading here.

The story revolves around 3 women living in NYC: Anne, a nice girl from Connecticut wanting only to escape rural life and support herself, Jennifer, a beautiful girl on a quest for fame, and Neeley, a waif with real talent bent on self destruction. The three fight to make it in NYC and Hollywood while maintaining romances and finding true love.

Anne manages to marry the man of her dreams, the love of her life though he winds up cheating on her with every new starlet taking chunks of their marriage with him until there is nothing left but silent tolerance. Jennifer proceeds through a series of relationships in which men only want her for her body. Then when she thinks she finds true love, ends up killing herself because she realizes the man she thought loved her for her would be devastated if she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer. Neeley runs through two husbands only to steal Anne’s and drive him away through her alcohol and drug abuse. We don’t find out her final fate, but it is safe to say that she ends up dying alone of some sort of overdose.

All three women are highly successful in their careers. Neeley is a broadway, movie, and television star with a spectacular voice and rampant fan following. Jennifer starred in French films and was such a raging success that America recruited her again for films. Anne starred in commercials as the face of a major cosmetics chain and had her own television segment. They were financially comfortable, and the only woes in their lives seemed to be cause by romances which finally made them all so miserable they turned to pills for comfort.

However, both Jennifer and Neeley went through long periods of life where they could not make ends meet on their own incomes. Without family to help support them, they were forced to use their bodies to obtain support from lovers, both male and female. It really calls attention to the need for financial independence to ever have total control over ones own body. It highlighted the ability of women to stab each other in the back even after the most fervent professions of friends forever. Themes of the story include: women on an endless quest for fulfillment through love, fear of aging, the importance of physical beauty.

At times it reads like a smutty romance novel. It hooks you in, and you must find out what happens to all three. I found myself hoping against all odds that all three would live happily ever after, yet all three lives ended in tragedy. After pondering it all for a little while, I’m not really sure what message Jacqueline Susann was trying to send with this novel. That women are evil creatures bent on destroying each other? That women are overly dependent on relationships for their own happiness? That men are pigs who only care about young, thin, physical beauty? That true love does not exist?

Or maybe she just wanted to take a look at the real hard issues that women faced during the 1940’s. In the time period this was set, marriage was still a practical commodity, women needed a husband to support them financially to live, and found themselves making all kinds of compromises in the process of keeping that marriage alive. And yet, women were beginning to gain freedom to become gainfully employed and support themselves, giving them the option to shun marriage if they wished. However, none of these characters, despite their material success, wanted to live without love in their lives (who would?). So what, pray tell, is the moral of the story?

I’m not sure. Jacqueline Susann seems to want to show how vulnerable women can be, while also emphasizing their ability to survive nearly anything. The book reads like a warning, feel free to make moral sacrifices to obtain your goals, just be sure you can live with their repercussions for the REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Even though it was a bit of a downer, it was an easy read that I enjoyed. And for a 25 cent bargain, the hours of entertainment it gave me cannot be beat. Now, on to the next book in my queue.

A guilty pleasure

Call it what you will. Yard Saling, Garage Saling, often a little bit of both. I love it. You wander from lawn to lawn, and rifle through people's old belongings that they no longer want. Many look down upon it, and think it's weird. But I like to take the change to bargain hunt and search for hidden gems whatever chance I get (which, living in NYC, isn't very often). It's a great place to find expensive items, like bikes or furniture for deeply discounted prices, and often just gently used. It's really just how the world got rid of all their old junk before the advent of Craig's List.

I was upstate this weekend kicking off summer at my grandparent's house, and my Gram and I went out cruising for sales saturday morning. It was a beautiful day. There was a neighborhood wide sale going on. We traipsed from lawn to lawn for hours. There were furniture, flat screens, bikes, clothes, books, jewelry. Yet not a single jigsaw puzzle in sight. That was what started my penchant for yard sales, my equal love for puzzles.

I came out of the venture with the gorgeous 2 sided pendant you see above for only 10 cents! And two books, an Anita Shreve novel for the beach, and The Valley of the Dolls, all without dipping further than my change purse. You can't beat that for cheap thrills, and the beauty of it all is you never know what you'll find!

Don't let all the hype stop you

Typically I am not one to run out and pick up the latest NY Times Bestseller. I don’t know why, maybe it’s literary snobbery, but I often suspect these bestsellers as being mediocre popular fiction that is a fast page turner, but isn’t necessarily prose genius. Granted, I read many bestsellers, I just don’t base my reading list around them, and I tend to pick them up with caution. I’ve had a few experiences when I hate the books that won acclaim. For example, The Black Book by Orham Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I could not get through it. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger was just upsetting, not enjoyable. There’s something about reading what everyone else is reading that makes me suspicious. I guess I just don’t trust the taste of the general populace to match my own.

So, I was more than a little wary when my book club wanted to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larson, with #1 National Bestseller emblazoned across it’s neon yellow cover. And for the fact that I have seen no less than 1 person reading it on every vehicle of public transit I have taken in the past month.

I picked it up, and the first 3 chapters were difficult to get through at best. I was worried. Then, by Chapter 4, I was so totally hooked that I could not put the book down for the next week until I finished it. I stopped watching tv after work, and just went home to read more. I fought people for seats in the subway, and had an extremely difficult time putting it down once I reached my stop. It was, quite frankly, the best murder mystery I’ve read in a long time, and I was sucked in by suspense. Now, a week later I am halfway through the second book, in what I discovered is a trilogy (YAY!), but the second of only three books that author wrote before his death (NOOOO!!!). I suppose I couldn’t sustain this high pace of reading for too long, but with summer coming up, I am rather devastated that after book 3 I will no longer have an exciting beach read lain out before me.

The story is centered around Lisbeth Salander, a social outcast who has a photographic memory, an uncanny ability to trace the most minute aspects of other people’s lives, and an unpredicatable temper that makes her fascinating. The other main protagonist is Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist/ladies man who is seemingly irresistible to all women. It’s not too often that you get a male-female main character pair, and the two work together perfectly. I won’t betray too many of the details to ruin the plot---half the fun is figuring out what it’s all about—but the first book revolves around two industrial giants: The Vanger clan and Mr. Wennerstrom. The Vanger family is expansive and full of evil secrets. Wennerstrom is an evil genius who seeks to undo Blomkvist’s journalistic success. All four players become inextricably intertwined and climax into a battle of the powerful that will surprise you even after the mystery is mostly solved.

All I can say is pick it up. ASAP.

If you're a woman and you don't love her a little I judge you

Even Ensler is the poster child for modern day girl power. She is notorious for her public fight against violence against women, promoting the controversial (but AWESOME) Vagina Monologues, and generally encouraging women to take control of their lives and love themselves. Who couldn't benefit from that message every once and again.

I came across an excerpt from her latest book I am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World in Glamour magazine this month while I was on the bike at the gym. It was placed in a section about love and life advice for women, and I'm not going to lie, it gave me goosebumps. If you're in my book club, and you're reading this, get ready I'm going to recommend this book at our meeting on Monday.

Read and enjoy ladies. That's all there really is to say.

Dear Emotional Creature:
I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple, or hike up your short skirt, or blare your music while you lip-synch every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You possess the energy that, if unleashed, could transform, inspire and heal the world.

Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be - your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In reporting my new book, I learned a very disturbing statistic: 74 percent of young women say they are under pleasure to please everyone.

I have done a lot of thinking about what it means to please: to be the wish or will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please men, we push ourselves when we aren't ready. To please our parents, we become insane overachievers. If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? The act of pleasing makes everything murky.We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We forget what we know. We make everything OK rather than real.

I have had the good fortune to travel around the world. Everywhere I meet teenage girls and women giggling, laughing as they walk country roads or hang out on city streets. Electric girls. I see how their lives get hijacked, how their opinions and desires get denied and undone. So many of the women I have met are still struggling late into their lives to know their desires, to find their way.

Instead of trying to please, this is a challenge to provoke, to satisfy your own imagination and appetite. To take responsibility for who you are, to engage. Listen to the voice inside you that might want something different. It's a call to your original self, to move at your own speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color.

When I was your age, I didn't know how to live as an emotional creature. I felt like an alien. I still do a lot of the time. I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be OK with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don't want you to have to wait that long.

Love,
Eve Ensler

The Bell Jar

I am reading The Bell Jar (this very edition shown) by Sylvia Plath for my book club this month, and though I am not finished with it, I am utterly fascinated with it, and by her-to the point that I willingly read the forward to the book just to know more about it. My only thought is that I cannot believe that it too me so long to get around to reading it.

This woman has such an amazing voice, it sounds as if she could have been writing the book today, speaking to a young woman today, telling her fears and doldrums, a remarkable feat for a book written in the 1960's when women held such a different place in society when compared to today. Though I have not yet reached the tragic part of the novel, her hints at a character's unraveling are stunning. I recommend.