Showing posts with label bookstores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookstores. Show all posts
Saturday, August 17, 2013
4 shots
from Thursday's event at Books & Books. It is a truly beautiful store, you get a good glimpse of its glories here! (Thanks to Danielle Ebanks and colleagues for hosting and pictures - click for a bigger image.)
Monday, June 03, 2013
Friday, October 29, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Kindling
I did something this evening that made me feel very guilty: namely, I went to my favorite New York bookstore and surreptitiously noted down the names of books that I have now purchased from Amazon for Kindle. I did buy about $50 worth of merchandise at the real bookstore (Lydia Davis's new Madame Bovary translation, a 2011 weekly Moleskin planner - and yes, those two together totaled $47.80 with sales tax!), but I am now hunched over my computer at Starbucks guiltily gloating over my new acquisitions...
(I had eleven things on my list, with a twelfth added as I thought of it while looking at things on Amazon; perhaps it is worth noting that about two-thirds of the list was procurable via Kindle - I am too lazy to put in the links, but that includes Tom McCarthy's new novel, Joseph O'Neill's memoir, new novels by Jennifer Egan and Sigrid Nunez - but that four I particularly coveted were not: Martin Millar's Curse of the Wolf Girl, Thomas Disch's The Businessman, several British thrillers that are not available to U.S. Kindle-owners.)
Yesterday I read a spectacularly good book that is much more my dream Kindle reading experience than anything else I've had so far, not least because it was free: it is Lewis Shiner's Black & White. All of his fiction is downloadable at that link, as PDF files and in several other formats; the PDF worked out really well for me, I like being able to keep the original page formatting, and the transfer to Kindle was easy as pie.
(Here's where Shiner explains why he's making all this good stuff available for free.)
I have been recommending Glimpses enthusiastically for many years now - I picked up a copy from the fellow who sells used paperbacks in front of Milano Market, and read it in absolute shock that I had never heard of it before, it is so much exactly the kind of book I most like. I think about it all the time, it's definitely one of those novels that has really affected my sense of the world as well as of what's out there in terms of fiction (I must say that it was partial inspiration for my Clarkesworld story "The Other Amazon").
Black & White is a quite different novel, more ambitious in certain ways but surely equally gripping (I missed my stop on the subway, I was so immersed!). (Amazon needs to fix the blurb glitch on that page, by the way.) Maybe the most striking thing about it is the analysis of how the father of the present-day story's protagonist could have been at once in the grip of the dreams of the Civil Rights Movement and completely consumed by the notion of building an interstate that decimated Durham, NC's hitherto thriving black neighborhoods (I should have this passage, but have not quite figured out how to mark such things for subsequent retrieval - there is no true equivalent of the post-it in this context); anyway, it was such a good book, I am going to go right now and download the other couple novels of Shiner's I haven't yet read....
I think that The Explosionist and Invisible Things will be difficult as yet for me to make available for free online, but that I must really pursue the situation with Heredity and see if I could get it up as a PDF or in some other format that people can use with the common e-reader apps - not sure about logistics, but it really would be good....
(I had eleven things on my list, with a twelfth added as I thought of it while looking at things on Amazon; perhaps it is worth noting that about two-thirds of the list was procurable via Kindle - I am too lazy to put in the links, but that includes Tom McCarthy's new novel, Joseph O'Neill's memoir, new novels by Jennifer Egan and Sigrid Nunez - but that four I particularly coveted were not: Martin Millar's Curse of the Wolf Girl, Thomas Disch's The Businessman, several British thrillers that are not available to U.S. Kindle-owners.)
Yesterday I read a spectacularly good book that is much more my dream Kindle reading experience than anything else I've had so far, not least because it was free: it is Lewis Shiner's Black & White. All of his fiction is downloadable at that link, as PDF files and in several other formats; the PDF worked out really well for me, I like being able to keep the original page formatting, and the transfer to Kindle was easy as pie.
(Here's where Shiner explains why he's making all this good stuff available for free.)
I have been recommending Glimpses enthusiastically for many years now - I picked up a copy from the fellow who sells used paperbacks in front of Milano Market, and read it in absolute shock that I had never heard of it before, it is so much exactly the kind of book I most like. I think about it all the time, it's definitely one of those novels that has really affected my sense of the world as well as of what's out there in terms of fiction (I must say that it was partial inspiration for my Clarkesworld story "The Other Amazon").
Black & White is a quite different novel, more ambitious in certain ways but surely equally gripping (I missed my stop on the subway, I was so immersed!). (Amazon needs to fix the blurb glitch on that page, by the way.) Maybe the most striking thing about it is the analysis of how the father of the present-day story's protagonist could have been at once in the grip of the dreams of the Civil Rights Movement and completely consumed by the notion of building an interstate that decimated Durham, NC's hitherto thriving black neighborhoods (I should have this passage, but have not quite figured out how to mark such things for subsequent retrieval - there is no true equivalent of the post-it in this context); anyway, it was such a good book, I am going to go right now and download the other couple novels of Shiner's I haven't yet read....
I think that The Explosionist and Invisible Things will be difficult as yet for me to make available for free online, but that I must really pursue the situation with Heredity and see if I could get it up as a PDF or in some other format that people can use with the common e-reader apps - not sure about logistics, but it really would be good....
Friday, September 17, 2010
Light reading catch-up (travel edition)
Back in Cayman, after a very long day of travels yesterday. Hit the Book Market in Ottawa and got a decent stack of used paperbacks there, so had an adequate and highly affordable supply of reading for the trip.
Jane Adams' Final Frame was decent but broke the cardinal rule: it didn't work as a standalone installment in a series, it really seemed to assume knowledge of the previous installment. Lauren Henderson's The Strawberry Tattoo was poorly plotted but reasonably amusing otherwise. Caro Fraser's Beyond Forgiveness was a fairly mediocre example of a genre I do not really like, but I found it more or less readable.
Then I read two spectacularly good thrillers that had me on the edge of my seat in delight and pleasure: Caroline Carver's Blood Junction and Dead Heat. The second is even better than the first - richer, more complex - and I am certainly going to read all her others as soon as I can get hold of them, they are so much what I like (imagine somewhere on the spectrum between Peter Temple and Lee Child - not with the sheer intellectual force and stylistic beauty of the former, nor with the economy and genius elegance of the latter - but really, really good, and with eminently plausible female protagonists).
Jane Adams' Final Frame was decent but broke the cardinal rule: it didn't work as a standalone installment in a series, it really seemed to assume knowledge of the previous installment. Lauren Henderson's The Strawberry Tattoo was poorly plotted but reasonably amusing otherwise. Caro Fraser's Beyond Forgiveness was a fairly mediocre example of a genre I do not really like, but I found it more or less readable.
Then I read two spectacularly good thrillers that had me on the edge of my seat in delight and pleasure: Caroline Carver's Blood Junction and Dead Heat. The second is even better than the first - richer, more complex - and I am certainly going to read all her others as soon as I can get hold of them, they are so much what I like (imagine somewhere on the spectrum between Peter Temple and Lee Child - not with the sheer intellectual force and stylistic beauty of the former, nor with the economy and genius elegance of the latter - but really, really good, and with eminently plausible female protagonists).
Monday, July 26, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
The summer of sandwiches
Not yet at all back to normal - that will have to wait till I return to Cayman and get back in a decent work and exercise routine. It has been almost a month now without my having done a stroke of work, and it is not something I enjoy - I need to be thinking and reading and writing in order to feel more myself!
But New York visiting is very soothing. My apartment is sublet, so I'm staying downtown in fairly idyllic circumstances with adopted grandfather G., who is feeding and entertaining me and leaving me to my own devices in characteristically lovely fashion. You wake up and find that he has already been up and out to obtain muffins or scones from Balthazar or Once Upon a Tart and that the coffee is ready to brew, and the day proceeds from there: this morning I went back to bed after breakfast, for instance, and woke up again in the later morning for an excursion to the Housing Works bookstore to replenish the light reading supply followed by a delicious ham and cheese omelet for lunch in the absolutely lovely trellis-vined garden at Le Jardin Bistro.
I am not such a food-oriented person most of the time, but the last month has involved odd and irregular eating; I have mostly been living on coffee, chocolate, alcohol and non-delicious sandwiches. In other words, I am more than ready for the regime of nutritional stringency and hard exercise which will begin when I get back to Cayman, but in traveling limbo it is very good to have some truly delicious food in the New York vein!
On Tuesday after I got in we had a late lunch at Peep (grilled calamari, chicken with basil); in the evening we had dinner at Mezzogiorno (tonello vitello, beef carpaccio with arugula and parmesan - yes, I know the first two are really basically the same thing, but it is the sort of thing I most like! - and blood orange sorbet to finish).
Last night we went to a very decent (it was too long, but texturally highly satisfactory) theatrical adaptation of Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, then to Le Rivage in honor of Bastille Day for a tasty and reasonably priced prix fixe dinner (romaine with tomato and anchovies, chicken cordon bleu, peach melba).
Tonight: Sweet, Sweet Motherhood (doesn't sound great, but it's my sort of topic - I liked Lee Silver's Remaking Eden quite a bit).
I finished The Passage - I really, really liked it. It is haunting, it is bleak, it is well worth your while if you like that sort of book at all - a friend tells me that it has not met the publishers' "big book of the summer" expectations, but if this is so, I would guess that it is because it is too much of a 'real' book and not enough of a simple beach read. And I also polished off a little book by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Fall of Light, which I enjoyed quite a bit but found puzzling on account of my complete inability to tell whether it was an installment in a series or just a hastily written one-off with a large number of loose ends.
(And I forgot to mention the other book I read just before leaving Ottawa, Wendy's copy of Bimbos of the Death Sun - I had mentioned to her a few years ago that I was reading Zombies of the Gene Pool because it had been pressed upon me as a loan by the fellow who sells books in front of Milano Market on Broadway, and she observed that in her circles, the other book was rather better thought of!)
The Housing Works haul really is excellent. Being in a good used bookstore like that also makes me want to write novels - it is a more interesting and less bland selection than what you see in a non-excellent big-box bookstore where it's almost all new stuff. For US$40.78, I obtained the following, which will certainly tide me over to next week: Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News?, John Twelve Hawks' The Dark River, Sam Bourne's The Last Testament, Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a novel the NYT remains unwilling to name in its pages), Stewart Home's 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess, Jenifer Levin's The Sea of Light and Water Dancer (swim lit!), Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces and a funny curiosity that I'd never heard of before but am very much looking forward to reading, Mary McMinnies' The Visitors.
But New York visiting is very soothing. My apartment is sublet, so I'm staying downtown in fairly idyllic circumstances with adopted grandfather G., who is feeding and entertaining me and leaving me to my own devices in characteristically lovely fashion. You wake up and find that he has already been up and out to obtain muffins or scones from Balthazar or Once Upon a Tart and that the coffee is ready to brew, and the day proceeds from there: this morning I went back to bed after breakfast, for instance, and woke up again in the later morning for an excursion to the Housing Works bookstore to replenish the light reading supply followed by a delicious ham and cheese omelet for lunch in the absolutely lovely trellis-vined garden at Le Jardin Bistro.
I am not such a food-oriented person most of the time, but the last month has involved odd and irregular eating; I have mostly been living on coffee, chocolate, alcohol and non-delicious sandwiches. In other words, I am more than ready for the regime of nutritional stringency and hard exercise which will begin when I get back to Cayman, but in traveling limbo it is very good to have some truly delicious food in the New York vein!
On Tuesday after I got in we had a late lunch at Peep (grilled calamari, chicken with basil); in the evening we had dinner at Mezzogiorno (tonello vitello, beef carpaccio with arugula and parmesan - yes, I know the first two are really basically the same thing, but it is the sort of thing I most like! - and blood orange sorbet to finish).
Last night we went to a very decent (it was too long, but texturally highly satisfactory) theatrical adaptation of Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, then to Le Rivage in honor of Bastille Day for a tasty and reasonably priced prix fixe dinner (romaine with tomato and anchovies, chicken cordon bleu, peach melba).
Tonight: Sweet, Sweet Motherhood (doesn't sound great, but it's my sort of topic - I liked Lee Silver's Remaking Eden quite a bit).
I finished The Passage - I really, really liked it. It is haunting, it is bleak, it is well worth your while if you like that sort of book at all - a friend tells me that it has not met the publishers' "big book of the summer" expectations, but if this is so, I would guess that it is because it is too much of a 'real' book and not enough of a simple beach read. And I also polished off a little book by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Fall of Light, which I enjoyed quite a bit but found puzzling on account of my complete inability to tell whether it was an installment in a series or just a hastily written one-off with a large number of loose ends.
(And I forgot to mention the other book I read just before leaving Ottawa, Wendy's copy of Bimbos of the Death Sun - I had mentioned to her a few years ago that I was reading Zombies of the Gene Pool because it had been pressed upon me as a loan by the fellow who sells books in front of Milano Market on Broadway, and she observed that in her circles, the other book was rather better thought of!)
The Housing Works haul really is excellent. Being in a good used bookstore like that also makes me want to write novels - it is a more interesting and less bland selection than what you see in a non-excellent big-box bookstore where it's almost all new stuff. For US$40.78, I obtained the following, which will certainly tide me over to next week: Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News?, John Twelve Hawks' The Dark River, Sam Bourne's The Last Testament, Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a novel the NYT remains unwilling to name in its pages), Stewart Home's 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess, Jenifer Levin's The Sea of Light and Water Dancer (swim lit!), Sebastian Faulks' Human Traces and a funny curiosity that I'd never heard of before but am very much looking forward to reading, Mary McMinnies' The Visitors.
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