October 20, 2010
Again with the Digital Books
Last year I posted in some depth on the subject of academic ebooks – a different subject entirely from frontlist/trade ebooks, let me state right up front. We’ve had some difficulty selling digital books, and I thought I’d update for 2010, with a view on providing some data to academic ebook publishers.
IT ISN’T WORKING. Whatever you are doing, stop. This year, like last, digital “codes” for textbooks was a COMPLETE BUST. Of one title, we have sold to date 750 traditional textbooks (which include the code for the digital book), and 2 copies of the “code-only”. The response at the cash is overwhelming – absolutely nobody wants to pay $55 for “nothing” – a piece of paper that gives them access to information for 12 months. They are willing to pay extra to “get something”.
Similarly, we thought we’d experiment this year with shorting orders of books which could be found online for free (the texts of which can be found at Project Gutenberg or similar). Students want free books, right? They love technology? Once again, the response was overwhelming in favour of “real” books. Paper books of open-source texts are so cheap anyway that students will pay the $3-$11 to get that “something”. About the texts online we hear you “can’t make notes”, “I don’t like all that scrolling”, “At least I get to keep it this way”, etc. The ephemeral nature of an ebook is not lost on these kids. There is a value to permanence.
Now, there are things that could be done to encourage the sale of the digital book. The paper books could be sold *without* the digital codes thrown in for free. Given the ultimatum, more students might go for the digital book over the paper one. Make the digital texts better suited to printing – that might help too. But I ask myself, why?
For what are we trying to force digital books on the unreceptive audience? And I do feel like I’m forcing the issue. Whether it be sending students away when we sell out of a book, telling them to “read it online” (one student has just now informed me that she wants the real book because they can bring a text to their open-book exam, but not a print out. Another consideration.) or desperately explaining that the “Infotrak” online content isn’t costing them anything extra, and no, they can’t buy it without it; selling students on the idea of digital media is like pulling teeth. The instructors aren’t onside either – we had one case where we had to send back 350 copies of a textbook because it came bundled with a DVD & online content the instructor didn’t want, and the publisher couldn’t understand why. (There we sat on the phone having the most unproductive conversation: Them: “But it’s free.” Us: “But they don’t want it.”)
Why are we doing this? Audience reception is part of what has always made me uneasy about ebooks. Aren’t we putting the cart before the horse? Was there some great need for a new way to read texts, thus came the ebook? Were readers clamouring for this technology? No, technologists came up with something new and they’re trying damn hard to sell it. Publishers are a wreck, bookstores are panicking and readers are grudgingly trying to find a way to like the technology. The only people who are happy are the technology manufacturers.
But another year, another step closer to the supposed internet generation. Maybe next year will be the big year for digital delivery of textbooks. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe now that the shine has worn off, we can start having a serious discussion about what constitutes value added. Right now the product we see looks like ill-considered trash to be thrown out with the cellophane wrapper. Or maybe if the technology manufacturers are so keen on a Kindle in Every Backpack, they’ll start bundling those for free with the texts. Just a thought.
October 15, 2010
“What to Read” Works Itself Out
Want something with a strong, character-driven narrative? Literary credentials? Depth and length? Elif-Batuman-inspired-Russianness?
How about a brand-shiny-new Pevear & Volokhonsky translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago?
I think I’m in love!
October 15, 2010
A Short Note on Books I Will Probably Never Read
About Cormac McCarthy’s latest, Michael Chabon says, “The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greater fears.” The rest of Chabon’s analysis in his essay Dark Adventure, in Maps and Legends, served as just as much of a warning-off: this is a book I will probably never read.
Never say never, I know, but I have to tell you I have no stomach for horror or gore at the best of times, and I am absolutely intolerant of harm and death of children. Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes floored me with its scenes of baby theft-and-murder swaddled in an otherwise feel-good tale. Jodi Picoult’s short story “Weights and Measures” in Neil Gaiman’s Stories collection had me tearing up at the cash register at work – I mean, I had to stop for fear that I’d start bawling in the middle of the store. I don’t think I could ever take an unapologetic, stark look at an unforgiving end-of-the-world scenario starring a little boy who is afforded no innocence. It ain’t happenin’.
I admit I have similar fears about Emma Donoghue’s Room. I understand the material is presented with innocence and humour, but the subject matter gives me the shivers. Is this a mommy thing? How did it treat the rest of you? Is my squeamishness unfounded?
October 14, 2010
Characters vs People
Somehow I grew up biased against non-fiction. I suspect it has to do with the libraries of my parents, stacked wall-to-wall with excellent literary and Canadian novels, interrupted only by old university textbooks. At first non-fiction seemed boring and later, when I came to know a thing or two about the Public’s reading habits, I associated non-fiction with reading celebrity memoirs or true crime accounts. Non-fiction was either academic or low-brow. I forced myself to read non-fiction about 1/3 of the time: I considered this a sort of penance paid for self-education. Mostly these books were about science, politics, environmentalism or food. Things about which I felt I ought to be Educated.
So it surprises me to some extent to find that, over the last few years, some of my favourite books have been non-fiction: Eleanor Wachtel’s collections, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading and Deep Economy by Dave McKibbon. The extent to which I am beginning to prefer a good collection of essays, or a memoir, was made obvious this week as I read Michael Moorcock’s contribution to the Neil Gaiman-edited short story collection, Stories. Moorcock’s contribution, also called Stories, starts out “This is the story of my friend Rex Fisch…” and launches into the history of a group of writers. It took me three or four pages to realize that what I was reading wasn’t fiction, but autobiographical. The shift in my perspective, the sudden sharpening of my interest was a physical sensation, like putting on a new pair of glasses. Suddenly, this was the best story I’d read yet. A dozen pages in I hesitated and wondered, maybe this is fiction after all? Can anyone write fiction that true, that compelling? All those characters, dates, events, histories, relationships! The depth and complexity of the story Moorcock is telling seems impossible to replicate in fiction. Maybe it’s the lack of descriptive landscape, and of poetic language. Maybe just knowing it’s true makes me more curious. But something is different.
The best book I’ve read in a long time is Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. No, maybe not the best. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was amazing. So was Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators. But I haven’t been as engaged by any book this year the way The Possessed engaged me. The books is a series of vignettes of Batuman’s time spent In Academia, from life as an undergrad, to post-graduate assignments in Russia in the dead of February. She sets out explaining that she wanted to be a writer, but that the right path, for her, was to study literature, rather than to study writer’s craft. The experiences she subsequently racks up, from a summer in Samarkand studying “Ancient Uzbek” to helping to coordinate a conference on Isaac Babel certainly made for meaty retelling. Somehow I can’t imagine workshopping stories in New Jersey can provide quite the same anecdotal kick (but I could be wrong). The Possessed was side-splittingly hilarious, insightful and inspiring. These were good stories. The complex connections she can draw between her life, the lives of her beloved Russian masters, and the universal experience of life did justice to her ambitions. I’d read anything Batuman writes now, right down to a laundry list. She has authority, experience, insight and style. What more can a novelist boast?
Now, as a life-long devotee of The Novel, I feel I need to engage with something longer and deeper, with characters I can root for and despise, and longer plots I can follow. I need something that can reaffirm my faith in the novelist’s ability to write as true and as deep as an essayist or memoirist. Batuman makes me crave Tolstoy – Anna Karenina? – , Moorcock tempts me to explore Dashiell Hammett – I think I have The Thin Man on my shelf – and Michael Chabon now has me re-eyeing Sherlock Holmes.
What would you recommend? Who are the best story-tellers, the best crafters of narrative truth and story? I’m in the market for a new book…
October 12, 2010
Two Cents Worth on Canada Reads 2010/2011
As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, CBC has announced some fairly major changes to the format of their annual Canada Reads competition in celebration of their 10th anniversary. The response to the announcement has been mixed, by which I mean everyone is complaining about it. The reader-responses posted to the Canada Reads website have all been positive, but the media/blogosphere criticism has already drawn out some official justification from the CBC (complete with straw-man defenses, claiming they don’t have the budget to include poetry and short story collections in the competition).
I have done my share of complaining here and there, but after a beautiful weekend’s reflection on the matter, I thought I’d elaborate my primary issues with the new format.
Last year after the announcement of the 5 books in competition, there was a fair amount of disappointment voiced by Canada Reads’ more ardent followers because the list was too contemporary, and included two books which “everyone had read” – Fall on Your Knees and Generation X. This spawned the Canada Reads spin-offs of which the CBC was so supportive, including Canada Also Reads and Canada Reads Independently. The genesis of these spin-offs has been ret-conned, it seems, with Canada Reads supporters claiming these stemmed from the success and enthusiasm for Canada Reads, rather than from disappointment in the official list.
For anyone who was paying attention last year, this year’s format-change seems completely baffling. Rather than shore up last year’s weaknesses and push for a more diverse list, the CBC has decided to go whole-hog in the direction of Fall On Your Knees by presenting a format that will ensure that every book nominated will be something everyone has read. Three caveats of the competition guarantee this result: the narrowing of the time-frame to the last 10 years, letting readers nominate their favourites and taking the “top 40” by vote tally, and an odd emphasis on books which have demonstrated “commercial success”.
Now one of two things has happened here: either I have wildly misjudged who Canada Reads’ followers are, or the CBC has. Why do we need to have a competition between the five best-selling Canadian books from the last decade? Are we presuming a great love of re-reading amongst the CBC’s listeners, or is there a secret mass of non-readers who tune in to Canada Reads of whom I am unaware? A Canada Reads listener will be someone who loves books, and someone who tunes in to the CBC. Some defenders of the new format have lashed out against criticism, saying Canada Reads is some kind of populist competition, to which I have to say bullshit. That might be the intent, and I’m sure there are light readers out where who make Canada Reads their one literary excursion per year, but I don’t buy for one second that these make up any kind of listening majority.
I heard a paper delivered once called “Divergent paths? Postcolonialism, book history and Three Day Road” which argued, basically, that there was a gap in the 2006 competition between the readers who loved Three Day Road and the panelists who felt it contained problematic postcolonial themes. This young academic felt the “average reader” wasn’t picking up on the nuanced issues with the book that panelists did, suggesting that the Canada Reads followers were less sophisticated readers than the panelists. Sounds like the CBC’s line, right? During the question period following this paper, the academic was asked what sort of sample she’d drawn on for her research – who were these “average readers” who’d held such strong opinions of Boyden over Toews? They were, we learned, librarians. Dozens upon dozens of librarians, people who read all five nominated books and furthermore, were well aware of the postcolonial issues and liked the book anyway. Four years later, Three Day Road is rising in the opinions of critics, academics and readers, and seems less and less like a simple, entertaining book, suitable mainly for simple readers.
Research sampling is fraught with issues, but nevertheless it fits, in my mind, that Canada Reads listeners would be librarians, book bloggers, book-club members and English graduates. These people may not be Frederic Jameson or Frank Kermode incarnate, but they are people who read and who think. They are people who have read the bestselling books of the last five years. I don’t know who could possibly be served by a Book of Negroes nomination. The book has sold 500,000 copies in Canada. It might be the favourite book of 50,000 of those people, but that doesn’t mean Canada Reads needs to recommend it to anyone. We already know.
Let me back-pedal in conclusion, and say that we know not what lies ahead and, who knows, we may be surprised by a short-list of new books that haven’t already won all the major literary awards and bestseller spots. I will read those books and be glad of it. But right now it looks unlikely, even if the daily “Reader Recommendations” are to be believed. I forsee a shortlist of Life of Pi, Three Day Road, and Elle; more laurels on their laurels, and a bored listening public. I miss keen, unexpected recommendations and rooting for the underdog. What’s a heavy reader to read?
October 4, 2010
Writing “Great Men”
The subtitle of Iliya Troyanov’s Collector of Worlds had me giddy with excitement: A Novel of Sir Richard Francis Burton. The last time I’d read a novel of Richard Francis Burton it was To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book of Philip Jose Farmer’s classic Riverworld saga, in which an eternally resurrected Burton hunts an eternally resurrected Hermann Goring down a river, along which lives every human being who ever lived.
Burton was a gift to Farmer, a figure who was easily as fantastic as his major literary contribution, the first major English translation of the 1001 Arabian Nights. He spoke 30 languages, completed a Hajj (in 1853 no less, when you really had to walk there), fought more duels “than perhaps any other man of his time”, brought both the Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra to the English-speaking world, and tried in earnest to learn the language of monkeys. If Farmer had made this stuff up, it would have been gratuitous. But Burton really lived, publishing widely and kept extensive diaries proving he’d lived, so he was fair game. In all of human history, he was the one real man suited to serve as the hero of Farmer’s novel.
The possibilities Burton offers to a contemporary, literary writer are many. Even I, a Burton fangirl if there have ever been any, will admit he is a problematic figure. He may have been something of a real-life Allan Quartermain, but Burton could not have been Burton and Quartermain could not have been Quartermain if the British hadn’t been swarming all over Africa and the Middle East during that period, conscripting, bullying and shooting the locals. Even Burton’s unusual sensitivity to the rights and customs of the local people is offset by his participation, and a sense that he is treating his life as an extravagant circus-show.
Still, I have the sense that there was something different about Burton, something which set him apart from his peers. Regardless of his moral culpability, he did things no man before him did, spoke loudly against things no other man would (to the great detriment of his career and personal life), and left a bigger footprint than almost anyone else. Whatever sort of man he was, he was a special one. Therein is the meat and potatoes of a great novel.
The biggest disappointment of Troyanov’s treatment of the material is that it is boring. He takes on the modern task of filing all the heights of the Burton legend down, laboriously and at length turning exciting and remarkable episodes of his life into bland, introspective, third-person accounts. The “action” (as it were) is narrated by three “native” observers: a Hindu manservant, three Turkish officials, and the Yao guide Sidi Mubarak Bombay. All of these observers are deeply confused by Burton as a man, and so their recollections of him are marked by a total inability to account for anything he does. Burton is never allowed to speak for himself in these chapters. As soon as he opens his mouth, his words are replaced by a banal description of approximately what he might have said. Burton is given an interspersed “point of view”, but it also fails to speak for the man. These passages are psychological episodes. Rather than put you in the event, they remove you by fogging the view with the ramblings of Burton’s memories, or self-doubt. Again, he never seems to speak. He hums and haws his way through a Hajj and a months-long hike from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika. There is certainly an expert hand drawing the scenes for this play. The landscapes and weather patterns of North and East Africa some so alive as to make the reader shiver and sweat along with the suffering characters. And perhaps this was Troyanov’s project to some extent: to show a place so unmasterable that even characters written into its midst can’t take their place at the top of the narrative hierarchy. Burton, along with the rest of the British (and local, for that matter) life, was barely a smudge on the inalterable qualities of Africa.
If that be the case, I say: pick someone other than Burton! Why squander such a wonderful character by burying him in all this noise? Unless the project is to bury him, and all I can say to that is that I think our historical memory is poorer for it.
It isn’t that I think the task of fiction is the romanticize our history: far from it. But any treatment of a historical personage – especially one with such a legendary reputation as Burton – has to address the question of why he or she has the reputation he has. If Burton is just another Brit, this time with an affinity for languages, why have we made of him the legend that we have? What special, or privileged, or misinterpreted, or unrecorded quality of the man or his chroniclers brought about the history we’ve written and accepted? This is probably the central question of a much better work of historical fiction: Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators. Koestler, like Troyanov, has chosen an oft-romanticized but problematic historical figure as the centre of his novel – this time the escaped gladiator-slave and revolutionary Spartacus. Koestler’s account of the events of the Gladiator War (73-71 BCE) is nuanced, politically astute, and incredibly relevant. He deftly shows that the problems of leaders two thousand years ago are the same problems of leaders today, and the ethics of leadership are every bit as knotty and unappreciated. This war is bloody and completely without heroes, without a “good guy” or “right” in sight. Nevertheless, Spartacus emerges as an important figure. He has been humanized, especially when compared to Kirk Douglas’s bronzed swashbuckler. He flirts heavily with tyranny and commits many atrocities. His followers denounce him from time to time, and he makes no friends. And yet we understand what it is that makes him a hero of history. His character might be complicated, but it hasn’t been diminished.
Whether the role of the novelist is to serve history or simply to tell a story, the use of real people is a powerful tool. History has already awarded them weight. You need to treat the character as if they carry that weight, either to offset the weight with other devices or to address why it’s there. You can’t pretend it isn’t there. Or you could, I suppose, but the result (in my case, at least) with make the reader suspicious of your motivations or storytelling skill.
October 1, 2010
It’s Raining Deluxe Editions!
I (and others) have observed over the last few years that the rise of the eBook might be a Good Thing ™ for those of us who love and value the art of the book. Relegating most of the drivel published to an appropriately temporary medium might free up print resources for those things which benefit from a tactile existence – that is to say, it might widen and clarify the difference between works read unthinkingly to pass the time, and works owned to preserve and venerate the quality contents. The books one wants to own and the books one wants to read are not always the same. Perhaps the Reader would spend more on the former if they could spend less on the latter (insert snarky comment about the long-standing existence of libraries here).
I have absolutely no data to back up this claim, but I am starting to detect actual evidence of this trend. Not that the flow of cheaply printed works of drivel has lessened any (maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t – I like to think we don’t stock or sell these things, so as a bookseller I’m pretty oblivious to them), but the availability of premium editions from mainstream publishers – that is, not from small and private presses who’ve been producing these all along – has really increased. These books might not be exactly to the standard of an artisan private press work, but they certainly are striving to appeal to the sensibilities of collectors.
Harvard University Press’s new release Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition (annotated by Patricia Meyer Spacks) is a beautiful example. The book is bound in ochre cloth with the most lovely wood-grained endpapers, and is lavishly illustrated throughout with historical references, diagrams and portraits. It’s a non-standard 9 x 9 1/2″, and weighs a tonne because of the excellent paper stock. Best of all, it’s fantastically affordable at $35US.
“Dover Publications” doesn’t bring to mind “quality editions”, so they wisely launched their latest enveavor under the imprint Calla Editions. These hardcover editions are mainly reprints (as is most of Dover’s catalogue) of classic illustrated editions from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But oh my goodness, who cares? These are stunning reproductions of iconic editions illustrated by Golden Age artists like Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen and Harry Clarke. The list keeps expanding, too – I’m giddy at the possibility that I might someday get a big, beautiful edition of one of my favourites from Dover – E.R. Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros, illustrated by Keith Henderson. Once again, the price is right – the backlist thus far has come in at $50-$54 CDN per volume.
In honour of Puffin’s 70th anniversary, they have released these Puffin Designer Classics. These limited-edition runs of classic children’s books are drop-dead gorgeous in jpg form – I’ve yet to see one in person, though! I’ve pictured their edition of The Secret Garden because it is probably the most stunning – but unsurprisingly, I’d line up for their Treasure Island in glass-bottle slipcase!
Both Barnes & Noble and Penguin Classics are onboard, of course. I saw my first Penguin Hardcover Classic (left) in the wild at Type on Queen St. the other day, and it exceeded my expectations. Generally I’ve found Penguin Classics to be cheaply made, overpriced- and subjected to Pearson’s insane book packaging and shipping methods, which frequently end in bent and damaged books. But they weren’t messing about with these editions- the paper is more forgiving, the bindings are tight and of course, they look wonderful. Barnes and Nobles’ Leatherbound Classics (right) I can’t attest to – but they give a mean photograph.
In administrative news, I’m back! Apologies for the extended summer vacation – the bookstore has been a zoo busy lately, only now settling down to our usual, sit-and-read pace. I have a backlog of reviews, interviews and reports to kick out, so I hope you’ll be back. Happy autumn!
September 6, 2010
Wishlist, Fall 2010
I sometimes wonder how some of you can get through books so quickly. I’m coming to suspect I am a Slow Reader. It could also be that I have a 2-year-old who does not like me reading on her watch (though she ought to be counterbalanced by a job that lets me read, sometimes, 7h a day), or that for the second time this summer, I am embroiled in a book that exceeds 700 pages. Nevertheless, my “want to read” pile is growing much, much more quickly than my “read” pile.
We have a rule in my house: you read 5 books off the shelf before you get to buy one more. My history with this rule is poor, but lately has been improving. It helps that I’ve moved, and in rearranging my library I’ve rediscovered many delicious reads I’d forgotten I’d bought. But the list of books I want to buy is growing unwieldy.
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson
Has anyone else around here noticed that Canada houses a really disproportionate number of the world’s most excellent speculative writers? Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles DeLint, Nalo Hopkinson – and Robert Charles Wilson? Wilson’s latest, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, has racked up more awards and kudos than I could possibly list here – but watch to see who wins this weekend’s Hugo [ETA – it didn’t win, but I’m still excited!]. I talked myself into skipping this one in cloth, but now that it’s out in trade format, I’m twitching impatiently. My heart always has room for another work of post-apocalyptic steampunk social commentary!
The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
Three things made this book drool-worthy for me: 1) NYRB publishes beautiful, well-made books of great literary value and somehow, I don’t own a single one… yet. 2) Michael Chabon is in the small club of Authors Who Can Do No Wrong as far as I’m concerned – and if he says this book is good, I believe him! 3) I’m an unashamed devotee of historical fiction – and, come on, Vikings!
February by Lisa Moore
I had something like zero interest in this book until recently. Steven Beattie’s assessment that “For Moore, language has always been more important than plot,” killed any enthusiasm I might have had right off the bat. Then Salty Ink featured it in its “Atlantic Canada Reads” competition. Of all the awards to pay heed to, sure, this one was obscure. But the recommendation was borne out by the Booker Prize panel, who longlisted it for the prize this fall. Kudos flooded in then, and suddenly, over a year after it was released, everyone was claiming to have loved this book all along. Okay, okay, you win! Let’s see what language has done here. I look forward to being wrong on this one.
Kanata by Don Gillmor
Meanwhile, Don Gillmor’s Kanata has been exciting for me right from day one. Have I mentioned I adore Don Gillmor? And historical fiction? And Canada? Unlike some, I don’t feel Canadian Literature is groaning under the weight of ponderous works of collective nostalgia: I rather feel that we still lack a good national historical imagination and it shows in our increasingly vacuous sense of context. Most Canadians don’t know their history and I feel it’s in no small part because we don’t have enough memorable stories about it. Will Kanata help flush out that body of work? I can’t wait to find out.
Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Even though I haven’t read this books, I’ve still referenced it and quoted it in dozens of conversations over the last half-year – one of the advantages of working in a bookstore, I guess. I can skim and sample enough to talk about something without actually reading it. But this one demands a full read-through. The notion of “cheap” is one of my pet peeves; rooted in a bit of a bourgeois attitude that it isn’t cool to speak of or care about prices, and exacerbated by my close involvement in an industry which is suffering in large part because people would rather save $2.50 than help support an important cultural industry. Of course it’s cheaper to buy books from Amazon than your local independent – but at what cost? I am going to read this book and then, I hope you will too.
Have you ever wished you could just pick up a book, press it to your forehead and absorb its contents? I’m sure this would suck all the pleasure out of reading but some days, like today, I really have picked my preferred superpower. So many books, you know? And so little time…
August 26, 2010
Distribution, Technology & Small Bookstores
I’m going to surface for a few moments here, take a few gasps of air before I dive back down under the apparently infinite shipments of books currently flooding into my bookstore. Though my brains have been near-fried by fatigue and repetition, my outrage gland is apparently unharmed. I’ve let bile build up there long enough, and I’m looking at you, distributors. I’ve had just about enough of your shenanigans.
I am not a machine. It’s true that I work like a machine, and I have a encyclopedic knowledge of my product that rivals at least some databases. I can do some pretty impressive mental math too, but the analogy pretty much runs out there. I am a mere, fallible human being who works with other human beings, interfacing only with human customers who, anachronistically, enter the store and speak with us to obtain the books they want. We do, yes, have a computer in the store. For nearly four years now, it even provides us with internet access. But we do not run industry-specific software and we don’t have an electronic inventory system. We don’t “scan” books (unless we’re trying to read them very quickly) and when we “look things up”, we’re doing so in reference books. Nevertheless we’re a vibrant, healthy and extremely viable independent bookstore.
So look, I get that maybe you need to use all of these things – databases, scanners, computers and Cylons – to run your business, but something is going on here that goes beyond mechanization of tasks. Technology has to interface with people somewhere along the chain. It is meant to serve us, after all, it ought to be decipherable. But we’ve grown lazy, or maybe we’ve lost some skills, and it seems to me that increasingly, technology does not interface with real humans anywhere along the line. The system is made, instead, to interface with other machines. This is highly irritating if one happens to be a human.
Let me be specific. I received an order the other day – a smallish one – of about 60 boxes, 1300 lbs. This order contained between 20-300 copies each of a few dozen titles. Now, a human would expect if one had ordered 20 copies of, say, Don Quixote, that they might be found in one box, stacked together. Maybe two boxes if they fit more nicely that way. A human does not expect that the quantity would be split up over six boxes, interwoven with dozens of other titles similarly dispersed. In order to find a complete quantity, the human has to open nearly all of the 60 boxes uncovering one copy here, two copies there, all the time sorting the books into dozens of incomplete piles.
How does this even happen? The only explanation I can come up with is that the books are spread haphazardly over a conveyor belt which winds its way around the warehouse. Specially trained packing monkeys grab books they recognize as they rattle by. I’m sure this is no problem at all if the bookstore is scanning each book as it comes out of the box. A computer keeps track of quantities as they arrive, yup, fifteen down, only eighty-five more to locate of title 4 of 109. If it shows up tomorrow, in another shipment, no biggie. The inventory system has got your back.
The human, simple being that I am, is angry and frustrated. We didn’t need an inventory system until the books started being packed by monkeys and itemized by an inventory system on the other end! I fail to see whose job got easier: instead we’re both saddled with expensive (and fallible) infrastructure to encode and decode needlessly.
Another example. Much like the bank or the cable company, the publisher and distributor is now a slave to “the system”. I’m sure you’ve heard this one: “I’m sorry ma’am, the system won’t let me override the hold on your cheque.” “I’m sorry sir, the system bills you for the whole billing cycle even if the service was cancelled a day in. The system will credit you next month.”
We order thousands of trade titles into our trade bookstore this time of year, every year. This year, an unscrupulous sales rep sold one of our professors on the idea of a “pack” instead of individual books – several trade books packaged together for meager savings to the student. The ISBN generated for said “pack” came from the college division. Suddenly the books – the same trade books we carry every year – have become college books, with a college discount. Saving to the student? $4.85. Cost to the bookstore? $3000. Outraged, we call the publisher to ask what on earth they were thinking. “Sorry,” we were told, “The system gives short discount on college books.” But we could just return these packages and reorder the books separately and save the money, we cry. To fill the second order, they’ll probably actually have to unwrap those stupid packages. Why not just give us the trade discount and save everyone some trouble? “The system.”
I’ll addend to these two issues my ongoing complaint that Indigo/Amazon has trained customers to think like machines too. “I need a book. Can I give you the ISBN?” No, you can not give me the ISBN. How about a title? Author? You’d cry if you knew just how many of these customers don’t have the title and author. They didn’t write it down, see. They just took the ISBN. And if that ISBN is old, out of print, or doesn’t have Canadian rights? Too bad. If we were Chapters, I suppose we’d just tell you we don’t have the book and move on. Silly humans that we are, we go to the trouble of sussing out what you’re actually looking for. And how much easier that would be if we weren’t all expected to be machines.
I wonder if, as in agriculture, smaller bookstores are starting to suffer under this pressure to mechanize. I know booksellers are supposed to “get with the times”, but thus far I’ve heard this in the context of selling online, competing with ebooks, and providing services in addition to just selling books. But that’s the difference between telling a farmer he has to open a petting zoo and telling him he has to buy a $1.5 million dollar thresher. You don’t need the petting zoo to grow carrots. You don’t need a cafe to sell books. And the thresher?
July 22, 2010
Birth and… more Birth at The Breakwater House
Becoming a mother these days is a decidedly political act. For what is I suspect the first time in history, women in Western societies now by and large have children very deliberately and by choice. This has resulted in a radical shift in how we view motherhood: rather than being the inevitable condition of our sex, it is a lifestyle choice. Every step from conception to your child’s University career and beyond is riddled with politics and judgement. Is the world overpopulated? Should you wait until you buy the house? What about fertility treatments? Is coffee okay while pregnant? Were you forced into that c-section? Is breast best? Gentle discipline or tight control? Private, public or alternative school? Does the unschooled child have any social skills? “Free-range kids” or parental neglect? Is it okay to make a kid “repeat a grade”? Is it okay to call my kid’s professor about his marks?
The world of parenting is pure insanity, frankly. Absolutely gone are the days where you had kids because it just happened, and then you raised them because you loved them, come what may. No, now parenting is as much about you, the parent, than it is about the child. Or, if Pascale Quiviger can be considered any kind of expert (I can not determine if she has any children of her own – it does not seem to be the case, but these days, who needs to have any idea what they’re talking about to spout off about motherhood?), motherhood is much, much more about the mother than the child. In The Breakwater House, birth is a thaumaturgical force which has the power to both save and destroy mothers’ lives. The resultant child is a powerful talisman who can heal, mend or weaken its mother. It is decidedly not a person.
There’s no question that motherhood is a powerful condition. A child provides a richness and sense of expanded purpose that I certainly enjoy in my life. Nevertheless Quiviger’s characterization of the condition as “the wound of love” was maddeningly narcissistic. The many mothers of her novel lack the strength of character to transcend the experience intact. Victimized or damaged women are given babies (often by the eponymous house, a lovely little device that would have been right at home in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez if Quiviger hadn’t over-explained her allegory out of either lack of faith in her readers or fear of a genre designation.) in order to heal them and give them a reason to be. Tragically, the gift of a child is as likely to make a mother miserable as it is to heal them. Here is the “wound” of motherhood’s love. The collective voice of Quiviger’s mothers shouts, “I love you because I have to but I want my life back!” The tone of the book is sympathetic: these poor women, crushed by maternal love. Don’t you feel for them? Aurore, mother of Lucie, is more or less exonerated of the crime of abandoning her 14-year-old daughter because she never wanted the child to begin with, and anyway, Lucie was apparently in the way of the lifestyle she wanted to pursue. This rather late term abortion can be contrasted with Alambra’s sacrificed fetus; Alambra at least having been able to shed her burden before she had to give 15 year of her life up to it. Both women share the same air of tragedy. They loved their babies but, alas, my life. My life.
Claire and Lucie, the “eyeyuyueye”, are a warning; collectively losing their lives to the loss of Odyssée. They do not want to imagine life without her, and yet it’s difficult to discern their happiness at having been mothers from under the heavy veil of the novel’s insane, grief-stricken framework. The only mother who seems truly pleased with motherhood is Gisèle, whose disabled daughter is literally nothing more than a love-generating device for a woman who suffered a debilitating mental illness until she was able to procure a baby which would love her forever, unconditionally, without inconveniently growing up and gaining its own life. What this says about mental illness, the disabled, and the selfishness of mothers is almost unfathomably unethical.
Birth is not, in the Breakwater House, a process of creating a life outside yourself. It is a process of conjuring up more of yourself. Quiviger deserves kudos for composing the mother-who-lives-through-her-child to pitch-perfection, but that woman is extremely grating.
The “illuminated” prose the Globe and Mail blurb led me to expect was also a disappointment, either because I lack the ability to decode it or because the process of translation rubbed it out. Three pages in the Sphinx-like pseudo-wisdom begins: “It makes sense to begin at the end – at the beginning of the end, which in itself is a beginning.” The “insights” which begin as simply asinine eventually become completely inscrutable: “Without peace, she writes, survival is redundant.” Huh? Poetic descriptions without meaning assailed me throughout. I have never been a big fan of novels written by poets for this very reason. You can keep your Michael Ondaatjes and Gil Adamsons, I like my language to be clear and meaningful. “Schizoid-pink” is not a colour, and if it is, it’s downright un-PC.
One last quibble: The blurb on the back of the 2010 English paperback edition (pictured) is completely misleading. It suggests a narrative structure which is not there at all, and even describes events which never happened: Lucie and Claire take turns telling stories to Odyssée? When? The blurb inside the front flap is much more honest. This marketing sleight of hand I think reveals the difficult task Anansi has ahead of them: How to sell a book about motherhood which will probably frustrate most actual mothers and mystify most non-mothers? I wish them luck but I’m afraid I can not help.