Reading With My Octopus Hands...Again

Overbooked, under-timed.

Yes, I’m reading with my “octopus hands” again. In the past three weeks, I’ve started new books like a salt water taffy addict unable to stop after unwrapping the first piece. Book after book keeps getting added to my currently-reading list. The truth is, I am enjoying every one of these books, each in their own way. Since we’re heading into the weekend and I have a little extra time on my hands (ha!), I thought I’d give you a quick snapshot of what’s currently passing in front of my eyes.

Not everyone can say what they feel in words, especially words on paper. Not everyone can look at a camera and make their face do what it has to do to show a feeling.

On the Kindle, it’s Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. I’ve meant to read Butler’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection of short stories for years—nay, decades—but it has always somehow eluded my grasp. There’s always something newer, shinier, louder to snag my attention and good intentions fall by the wayside. Last week, I figured enough was enough. Damn the new Michael Chabon and full steam ahead into these stories of Vietnamese immigrants living in New Orleans. Collections of this size typically have one or two weaker stories; I’m halfway through A Good Scent and I haven’t found a single stinker. On the contrary, these tales are strong, strong, strong.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

On the iPod, Timothy West has been reading Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers to me in his velvet-lined, dulcet tones. There are approximately 54,987 characters in this novel and it can be a chore to keep them all separate and distinct from one another—especially when one is only sipping at the audiobook in the short 12-minute drive to one’s workplace—but Mr. West more than fulfills his role as Best Audiobook Narrator I’ve Ever Heard in the way he fully inhabits each of Trollope’s residents of the fictitious cathedral city of Barchester. Over time, I’ve come to think of Septimus Harding, Mr. Arabin, Bishop Proudie (and his hen-pecking wife), the Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni and, especially, the oily Obadiah Slope as comfortable pieces of furniture upon which to sit. By the way, Barchester Towers and A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain are part of my five-year Essentials Reading Plan (on which I’m making decent progress).

The paradox of auto tourism brings the natural world close up but it remains, figuratively if not literally, beyond the windshield: closer but still removed, beyond the footlights...we often remain seated, passive, and virtual: spectators at least one remove from sensory participation in the mountain scenery. The outside is magnified yet we remain within a theater of glass walls, bodily detached. We love to sit, especially behind or above an engine.

Full disclosure: O. Alan Weltzien is a friend of mine and, consequently, I’ve been hearing about his “volcano book” for a number of years. When I say Exceptional Mountains was as high on my much-anticipated list as a climber summiting Mount Hood, I’m not exaggerating. Now that I have a copy firmly in hand, I’m happy to report the wait was worth it. The book is a fascinating and illuminating study of why and how we love, revere, and abuse our favorite Pacific Northwest volcano-mountains. A lifelong climber and outdoorsman, Weltzien takes us on a sociological, cultural, political and ecological tour of the slopes of Mounts Rainier, Hood, Baker, Adams, St. Helens and others. While visiting my daughter in Tacoma last week, I’d hoped to take a quick trip up to Mount Rainier, Exceptional Mountains in hand, to get a selfie (a “bookie”?), melding the wonderful cover design with the actual mountain itself; but alas, I never made it to the park. I had to settle for a distant, cloud-shrouded view of Rainier and comfort myself with the zoom-in, telescopic pictures Weltzien paints in his pages. I heartily recommend Exceptional Mountains to anyone interested in how we interact with our wild places.

As ravening fire rips through big stands of timber
high on a mountain ridge and the blaze flares miles away,
so from the marching troops the blaze of bronze armor,
splendid and superhuman, flared across the earth,
flashing into the air to hit the skies.

I cannot recall when I first read The Iliad—junior high? my first year in college?—but it is far enough behind me that I knew I needed to revisit Homer to refresh my memory of Achilles’ Adventures in WarLand. When my editor at Grove Atlantic, going over his notes on my new novel, mentioned The Odyssey in the same breath as Braver Deeds, I turned to Robert Fagles’ translation of The Iliad to determine just how delusional my editor really was. I don’t remember which translation I read back in my younger days (Richmond Lattimore? Robert Graves?), but I’m confident that Fagles’ translation leaves them in the dust: bloodied, broken and mangled. These lines are alive and writhing and make for hardy sailing through the Trojan War. Bernard Knox’s introduction is lengthy, but also very enlightening. I especially liked this summation: “The Iliad is a poem that lives and moves and has its being in war, in that world of organized violence in which a man justifies his existence most clearly by killing others.” P.S. I still think my editor is delusional when he calls my novel Homeric, but I love him anyway.

But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, living on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body by hatred as once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy.

This has been my Summer of Sinclair. Starting with Main Street and moving through Babbitt and now Arrowsmith, I’m hitting Sinclair Lewis’ greatest hits (also part of my Reading Essentials plan). Up next: Elmer Gantry and then I’ll wrap up with Dodsworth (I don’t have the time to read the entire Lewis canon, for Pete’s sake!). While Arrowsmith isn’t as scathingly satirical as Babbitt and Main Street, it shows a definite maturity in Lewis’ ability to develop his characters. I’ve gotten so deeply involved in this saga of scientist-doctor Martin Arrowsmith trying to find a cure for disease that when I mentioned I was reading it to my wife, she said, “Oh, just like the rock band.” I’ll admit I had a Stupid Moment right then and there; somehow, I’d never made the linguistic bridge between the rockers and Mr. Lewis (though, according to at least one source, the novel was not the original inspiration for the band’s name).

He had...“an extraordinary energy of speech, a very great diversity of ideas, a certain air of frenzy in his look, speech and gait, a frenzy half comic, half melancholy.”

Throughout my Sinclairian odyssey, I’ve been using Mark Schorer’s 1961 tremendous (and tremendously-thick) biography as my roadmap. I’m taking my time with Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, trying not to get too far ahead as I read Lewis’ major novels in chronological order. Schorer strikes the right balance of scholarly reportage, respect for the author’s work, and forthright, painful honesty. To wit, the first sentence of the biography: He was a queer boy, always an outsider, lonely.


Poem Taking Place Before Lights Were Electrified
A man at a round table, his work boot
heeled on the rung of his chair,
his head in a black plate of blood.
I could see the bottle and the pan bread
through the blazing pine knots;
I watched the man who just shot him
walk the puncheon floor
bellowing My brother, my blood...
hoist the man onto his back
and stumble into a fine, filthy snow.

Ten lines, sixty-eight words—and yet, C. D. Wright manages to pack a novel’s worth of story into that one poem. And, man, that phrase “a black plate of blood“ will stick with me for a long time. Shallcross, published after the poet’s sudden death in January this year, is easily one of the best collections of poetry I’ve read this year (and I’ve read quite a few). In these pages, she pushes the boundaries of form while never losing the reader in a jimble-jumble of show-off poetics. One long sequence, “Breathtaken,” documents the murders in New Orleans across a two-year time span and the spare, haunting way she describes the victims’ bodies comes at us like startling flashes from the camera of a crime-scene photographer. It’s sad, sobering, and should be mandatory reading for every member of Congress. My favorite part of Shallcross, however, is the section called “40 Watt,” from which the above poem is taken. Each one of them reads like notes for a Raymond Carver short story; they are fascinating in their precision and compression. Worlds within worlds.

     I’m thinking of ending things.     Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It dominates. There’s not much I can do about it. Trust me. It doesn’t go away. It’s there whether I like it or not. It’s there when I eat. When I go to bed. It’s there when I sleep. It’s there when I wake up. It’s always there. Always.

A late entry into my “Oh-My-God-I’ve-Already-Got-Too-Much-To-Read” pile, Iain Reed’s creepy novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things has held my attention for the past two days. I was initially attracted to the book not only by those unnerving opening lines quoted above, but also by the blurb by Nick Cutter (author of The Troop), who said, “Here are some near-certainties about I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Number One: You’re going to read it fast. Over the course of an afternoon or an evening. The momentum is unstoppable—once you start, you won’t be able to stop. And Two: once you race to the end and understand the significance of those final pages, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it.” Well, I haven’t finished the 210-page novel in one sitting, or even in two days (I blame my octopus hands), but I am certainly thinking about it during nearly all my waking (and troubled-dream sleeping) hours. I’m midway through and I don’t know where it’s heading, but there are enough odd, scary things getting under my skin that I think I’ll probably swallow the rest of this book-pill today. No guarantee of sleep tonight, of course.

Soup and Salad: The Reading Habits of Authors, Finish That Book!, Joseph Heller's Long-Forgotten Musical Comedy, Is the Party Over for Amazon?, The Bad Idea Company, O-Dark-Thirty Sheds Light on Veterans, Bill Wolfe Reads Her Like an Open Book

On today's menu:

1.  Tim Horvath does it in the bathtub, Anthony Wallace did it at the beach, Judy Chicurel likes to do it on the couch at sunset, and Jon Clinch does it wherever he can.  And me?  Well....

The spot where I most frequently find myself with a book is a small, solitary spot tucked away from the bustle of human distraction. It’s a quiet Nirvana with only the occasional sound of rushing water to break the stillness. Yes, the bathroom—or water-closet, if you prefer the more refined approach—is where I get about 63 percent of my reading done. Apparently, judging by the reactions when I posted this on Facebook (“Eww!”, “I didn’t need to know this”), some people have a problem with my personal paradise. Maybe they don’t like the image of me perched on the porcelain throne, pants around my ankles, taking care of business. But I don’t want to dwell on the evacuation properties of this scenario (“waste out, words in”); I prefer to focus on why it makes the ideal reading spot.

Overshare much, Abrams?  Maybe, but you should check out the "Here I Read, There I Read" feature at Bloom anyway.

2.  I'm going to make a statement which may incense and inflame: If you don't finish reading a book, if you grow bored and abandon it midway through, if you treat books like chocolates nestled in a box and sample them with one bite before putting them back in the little brown paper cup, THEN YOU'RE WRONG.  That's the stance of Juliet Lapidos in The Atlantic, anyway:

To drop a novel after a few chapters is, then, to disregard what makes it a formal work of art rather than a heap of papers that reside in a desk drawer. Today, books and authors need all the help they can get; if you care about literature as an artistic endeavor and the people who create it, then you should do so fully. If you consider yourself a literary person, you shouldn't just embrace the intellectual cachet that starting books gives you. Starting, but not finishing, books is one step above saying, "Oh yeah, I've heard of that author."

I happen to agree with Ms. Lapidos--at least to a certain extent (I don't buy the whole "finish it for the endurance" strength training argument).  Like her, I'm a completist.  I can count on one hand the number of books I've started reading as an adult and stopped before I reached the last page (one of them, Jubilee Hitchhiker, William Hjortsberg's terrific biography of Richard Brautigan, was simply put on "pause" because it's such a massive book that I want to give it my full attention when the time is right).  Like the Atlantic article mentions, I'm probably in the minority, but so far that hasn't stopped me from not-stopping.

3.  I consider myself pretty familiar with the life of Joseph Heller, but when I stumbled across this article in Hazlitt, Penguin Random House of Canada's online magazine, I was brought up short:

In July 1962, Joseph Heller was open to any offers that came his way. Catch-22 was showing few signs of success: published nine months earlier, it was selling slowly. Heller and his family had left Manhattan behind to spend the summer on Fire Island. He was restless, worried about money, and eating enough for three. Late at night, he would sit outside on the deck of his house, waiting for something to happen. One day, something did, a thick envelope arrived with a pitch inside: would he be interested in writing the script for a new musical, Howe & Hummel? His collaborator would be a prominent composer, Harold Rome, whose latest show featured Barbra Streisand’s Broadway debut. The subject was two 19th century lawyers, William Howe and Abraham Hummel, and the scams they ran in New York. With his novel seeming more of a misfire than a blockbuster, Heller jumped at the chance.

And here's the postscript:

Howe & Hummel has never been performed. It hasn’t even been published. In the 50 years since Heller completed it, it’s never had so much as a public reading. Only two copies of the typescript survive, while more than 10 million copies of Catch-22 have been sold.

Do I smell an Off-Broadway revival?  (Or maybe just "vival" since the play was never alive in the first place.)


4.  Amazon and Hachette have apparently settled their long, muscle-straining arm-wrestling match over e-book pricing, but this article in Seattle Weekly (which came out prior to the announcement of the settlement) wonders, "Is the party over for Amazon Publishing?"  It's a long article, but well worth the read for anyone interested in the current state of publishing.

5.  If you aren't over-Amazoned after reading that, you might want to take a look at Keith Gessen's piece in Vanity Fair, in which he writes: "all the publishers feel bullied by Amazon, and Amazon, in turn, feels misunderstood."  There's a lot more to it, of course; but that seems to be the crux of the issue in which, like that spot-on illustration shows, two armies have lined up on opposite sides of the book world.  Here's another gem from Keith Gessen's article:

One of the interesting things about Amazon in its early years was the number of bad ideas it had. It was a bad idea to sell heavy home-improvement equipment on the Amazon site and charge a pittance for shipping, and it was a bad idea to consider storing merchandise in the apartments of college students living in Manhattan, so that the students could make deliveries in their neighborhoods. (The company had enough trouble worrying about theft at its warehouses; how was it going to monitor the apartments of kids?) Some people even thought that selling books was a bad idea.

And these un-tame words from literary agent Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie:

      The issues at the heart of the conflict are both margin and price, according to Wylie. Publishers have been slow to recognize the danger of percentage creep, he told me. “There was a European publisher in here recently who proudly sat on that sofa and said, ‘I’ve worked everything out with Amazon. I’ve given them 45 percent.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘But they wanted 50 percent.’ ” The European publisher thought he had won. Wylie stared incredulously at the memory of this encounter. “He’s a moron!”
      Losing the fight over margins would be an immediate blow to the publishers’ profits, but losing control over pricing could be fatal. “If Amazon succeeds,” said Wylie, “they will lower the retail price—$9.99, $6.99, $3.99, $1.99. And instead of making $4 on your hardcover, you’ll be making 10 cents a copy on all editions. And, Keith, you will not be able to afford to write a book.… No one, unless they have inherited $50 million, will be able to afford to write a serious work of history, of poetry, of biography, a novel—anything. The stakes are Western culture.”
      Western culture I could take or leave, but the part about me sent a chill down my spine. This is not what you want to hear from your literary agent. Surely we’ll think of something, I said to Wylie, if Amazon does win?
      “You think?”
      Wylie was not in the mood for a pep talk.
      And yet he believed that the publishers had finally wised up. Not only Hachette but HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster had started negotiations with Amazon, and none of them seemed willing to agree to Amazon’s demands. Perhaps a new era was beginning. Pointing to my Kindle, Wylie asked, “What if all the publishers pulled all their books from that fucking idiot device? Then what would you read on your silly Kindle?”
      But doesn’t Amazon deserve something for building the device, for making it work?
      “If the Kindle didn’t have any books on it, guess how many Kindles would be selling,” Wylie said, putting up his fingers to indicate zero Kindles. “They want the books, and they want the publishers’ profits, too? They should get nothing. Zero.”

Gessen even takes us on a trip to Amazon's Lab126 where Kindles are routinely abused--all in the name of science and commerce:

After meeting the designers and engineers, I went down to the Kindle stress-testing lab, where various machines twisted the Kindle and dropped it and tumbled it around as if in a dryer. There was a machine that specialized in tapping the Kindle, pressing the on-and-off button thousands of times, until the Kindle couldn’t take it anymore. There was a machine that sprayed a salty mist over the Kindle, because the devices are frequently taken to the beach. All of this testing was monitored by quiet, serious people in light-blue lab coats who looked as if they had once worked for Dr. No.

6.  And now we move to a battlefield of a more traditional kind.  The latest issue of O-Dark Thirty is now out--and, not to take anything away from the contents, but that cover art alone is worth the price of admission.  O-Dark-Thirty is a quarterly literary journal by and about veterans, service members and military family members.  I haven't yet had a chance to read this latest issue, but a quick skim yields some treasures:

      I wake to the nudge of a boot in my side. It’s my turn in the gun.

~"Shadows in the Night" by Christopher Baumer

      He spoke in a monotone, as though reciting a prayer learned in childhood, and he never looked me in the eye.
      “We were in a little village outside of Al-Karmah,” he began, “about sixteen clicks northeast of Fallujah. Karmah, ha! What a dumb name. It was the most violent city in Iraq.”

~"Imagining Iraq" by Bárbara Mujica

if they wanted me
to collect a check
buy expensive
shoes wear a tie
pay taxes sleep
at night raise
a son teach
him how to be
a man if they
wanted me
to live
why did
they give me
this gun
      ~"20 to Life" by David Bublitz

Full Disclosure: O-Dark-Thirty was kind enough to publish an interview with yours truly in this issue.  If you'd like to read about my Writing Habits, you can scroll down to page 103.  But I'd highly advise making pit stops at some of the other stories, essays and poems along the way.

7.  If you haven't yet discovered Bill Wolfe's blog, Read Her Like an Open Book, you're missing some insightful and lively writing about the joys of reading.... women.  Bill is a deeper-voiced champion of literature by females and God bless him for doing that.  VIDA counts aside, I know I need to do a better job of balancing the sexes on my reading list.  Of the 83 books I've read so far in 2014, only 32 were written by women.  I generally resist "quota reading" and go where my interests take me, but after reading Bill's blog, I certainly won't lack for recommendations.  I'd suggest starting with the recent "My Favorite Books of 2014" post which includes links to reviews of books like Katey Schultz' Flashes of War:

Schultz has performed an impressive feat of imagination with Flashes of War, putting us in the shoes — and heads — of all of her characters, providing a chorus of voices telling us the various truths about the last 12 years of war. When you are finished reading these compelling and flawlessly written stories, you too will be changed.

I second that emotion, Bill!

Sunday Sentence: Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

(NOTE: This week, for the first time in Sunday Sentence history, I'm going to break my own rules and share not just one sentence, but an entire bouquet of them.  As I'm going through Thunderstruck on my Kindle, I'm constantly pausing to highlight favorite lines, thinking each one is the best...until I go another couple of paragraphs and find another favorite...and then an even better sentence a few pages later.  Hell, I could have just transcribed the entire book for you this week, but I restrained myself and only picked the very best of the best.)

The way the neighborhood kids tell the story, the coffin was lowered into the ground and Missy Goodby's grieving mother leapt down and then had to be yanked from the hole like a weed.  Everyone always believes the better story eventually.  Really, Joyce Goodby just thumped the coffin at the graveside service.  Spanked it: two little spanks, nothing serious.  She knew that pleading would never budge her daughter, not because she was dead but because she was stubborn.

The soul is liquid, and slow to evaporate.  The body's a bucket and liable to slosh.  Grieving, haunted, heartbroken, obsessed: your friends will tell you to cheer up.  What they really mean is dry up.  But it isn't a matter of will.  Only time and light will do the job.

The bath mat looked made of various flavors of old chewing gum.

His hair looked like it had been combed with a piece of buttered toast.

In the December rain, the buildings around the town square were the color of dirty fingernails.  Still, the French had tried to jolly things up a bit.

The grandmother was a bright, cellophane-wrapped hard candy of a person: sweet, but not necessarily what a child wanted.

Her job as a mother--she believed this then, believed it now--was to make sure that her children would be loved by the maximum number of other people.  This was the source of all her anxiety.

Outside, in the light from the Drake's Landing's floodlights, the snow sparkled like something that wasn't snow.  Diamonds, or asphalt, or emery boards.

Nobody had warned her how deeply babies slept, how you couldn't always see them breathing.  You watched, and watched, you touched their dozy stomachs to feel their clockwork.

Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

My Library: Helen Benedict's Reading Experiment

Reader:  Helen Benedict
Location:  Medusa, New York, and New York City.
Collection size:  No idea.  Masses.
The one book I'd run back into a burning building to rescue:  Middlemarch by George Eliot.
Favorite book from childhood:  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
Guilty pleasure book:  Not much guilt here, but Persuasion by Jane Austen.


I’ve been conducting an eccentric experiment these past few months, reading three books at once in three different formats: a real book, an e-book, and an audiobook.  I wanted to find out which I remembered best, and why.

Now, I have to say right off there’s nothing scientific about this.  I wasn’t reading the same book in all three formats, and my sample was a statistically ridiculous size of one.  So whether my conclusions have more to do with the quality of a book or its format is hard to say.  But, like any essayist, I have formed my opinions regardless, and fully expect others to wildly disagree.

I began with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rohinton Mistry, and Penelope Fitzgerald, a eclectic mix from the start.  I took in Love in the Time of Cholera by ear, read Such a Long Journey on my Kindle, and soaked up The Blue Flower from old-fashioned paper.

Hmm, I thought as Mistry’s book quickly disappeared from my mind, the voice of the actor who read Garcia Marquez echoed insistently in my ear, and Fitzerald’s stunning prose mesmerized me.  Something’s happening here.

Next, I moved on to Cara Hoffman’s wonderful new novel, Be Safe, I Love You on paper, listened to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch through my earphones, and took in Phil Klay’s collection of war stories, Redeployment, via Kindle.

This time it was actor David Pittu’s voice reading Tartt that echoed in my head (he is an excellent reader), but it was Hoffman’s story that stuck.  I had to keep rereading Klay to remember where he’d said what, even though his stories are powerful.  Why can’t I remember them properly, I wondered?  Is my brain scrambled?  (I had to reread the book in solid form to take it in.)

On I went, charging through ten more novels.  In audio, I took in Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin, and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.  In actual book form I read The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim, and reread Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  On Kindle, I drank down White Fang by Jack London (for research purposes–don’t ask) and–oh, I can’t remember.  I think you can see where this is going.

Conclusion: E-books are the worst.  I don’t own an iPad, so can’t speak to whether that’s any better, but reading on a little gray slab is like reading a shrunken photograph of a manuscript, each page blowing into the wind the minute you finish it.  Without actual pages, the heft of a book, the sense of how much you’ve read and how much is left (my Kindle doesn’t even have page numbers), or the book’s cover, the experience is more like dreaming a book than reading it.  The words go in one eye, out the other, with nothing to hold them down.  And when you’re done, all that’s left is a tiny gray icon on the screen, nothing really but a blob.

Exacerbating all this is Amazon’s idiotic decision to make its e-books open on Chapter One.  To see anything that comes before–the cover, dedication, epigraph, or prose (prologues sometimes come up first, but not always)–you have to know to deliberately scroll backwards to the cover.  If you don’t know this, you’re reading a chopped-up book from the start.

No, reading on Kindle is like licking the drips of an ice cream cone and never getting to eat it.  Frustrating and forgettable.

Now for audio.  In my experiment, I found that listening to a book sticks much better than reading it on that horrid slab.  For one thing, listening is much slower.  A book I could read to myself in two hours takes at least five to read aloud.  The good side of this is that it forced me to dwell on the book slowly.  If my mind wandered, I could rewind and listen again.

The bad side, though, is that there was someone standing between the book and me: the actor.  I realized this when I listened to Meryl Streep reading The Testament of Mary.  Streep read it so beautifully that I caught myself listening to her voice more than the text.  Then I realized something dreadful: my favorite audiobooks were not the best books but those that had been read the best.  I had fallen in love with the actor’s voices, not the author’s writing.  And conversely, I had stopped listening to books because they were read badly, not because they were bad books.  Oops.

And, as with Kindle, audiobooks are made of air.  Once you’ve finished listening, all that’s left is a tiny square the size of a postage stamp sitting forlornly on your electronic gewgaw.  Virtually invisible.

Now to the actual book, bless it.  I don’t have to tell anyone what it’s like to read an actual book.  I’ll save that for upcoming generations, who will probably need to be told what it’s like to read a paper book the way we need to be told what it was like to travel by horse and carriage.  But meanwhile–and here, at last, I come to the subject of libraries–a book is by far the easiest to remember simply because it exists.  It sits there on a table or a shelf, dressed in its colorful cover, and every time we glance at it, it says, “Hey, remember me?  Remember those hours we spent together?  Remember the stories I told you?”  And we do, whether consciously or not.

Indeed, I’d posit that every time we walk past a book and see it out of the corner of our eye, it reminds us of its contents, if only subliminally.  What’s more, it does that for years–even for our whole lives–whereas those poor disappearing audio and e-books have no way to remind us of themselves even the day after we finish them, let alone forever.

So now when I’m done with a real book and put it on a real shelf of my real library, I stand looking at it, along with all its brothers and sisters, with new appreciation.  For I’ve learned that a library isn’t simply a collection of books.  It’s a vast and invaluable mnemonic.


Helen Benedict is the author of six novels and five books of nonfiction.  Her latest novel, Sand Queen, set in the Iraq War, is culled from real life stories of female soldiers and Iraqis.  Her books Sand Queen and The Lonely Soldier, along with her articles about the sexual assault of women in the military, inspired the award-winning documentary, The Invisible War.  Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Women's Review of Books, and many other newspapers and magazines.  She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University.  Click here to visit her website.


My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections.  Readers are encouraged to send high-quality photos (minimum 150 dpi) of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile.  Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

The Big Christmas Read

It happens every year, as predictable as bad drivers after the season's first snow, dust on ornaments brought up from the basement, and tears wrung by Rankin-Bass animated specials: I feel compelled to set aside time for a Christmas-themed book.

Beautiful, but blech

By this point in the calendar, my reading schedule is in a state of Panicked Scramble as I frantically try to finish books I've already started so they can be included in the tally for that year's reading logs (see 2012's "My Year in Reading" post, for example).  But in the midst of all that page-turning and Kindle button-pushing, I always make time for a special year-end Christmas-y book.  Usually, it's an Agatha Christie holiday mystery; last year, I explored Anne Perry's Christmas novels for the first time; and one year, I read a beautifully-illustrated, poorly-written religious-tract-in-the-guise-of-a-novel called The Romance of a Christmas Card by Kate Douglas Wiggin.

This year, I didn't choose one book.  I picked out four.  It's as ambitious and most likely as knuckle-headed a move as Clark Griswold's Christmas light display in Christmas Vacation.  We all know how that ended.

Last week, I started Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell, A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition by Lee Mendelson, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler, and London Snow by Paul Theroux. Whether or not I blow a fuse and fry myself with this reading plan remains to be seen.  For now, I'm getting in the Christmas spirit, dammit--even if it kills me.

Three of the books have already gone down quickly.  With the word "Big" in one of the titles, you can probably guess which one I'm still fa-la-la'ing my way through.  I may or may not finish Mr. Penzler's 654-page doorstopper by the time I'm drinking New Year's champagne, but I'm giving it my best shot.

~

Christmas at High Rising by Angela Thirkell (Virago)

At the beginning of the month, I was in the midst of culling my home library--a massive project which involved slimming my 8,000-plus volumes by at least two or three hundred titles, replacing some existing titles with Kindle versions or just plain getting rid of some books I know I'll never ever read (harder than it sounds--trust me, there were plenty of Sophie's Choice moments)--when I stumbled across a set of Barbara Pym novels which a friend had given me nearly a decade ago, making me swear I would read at least one of them because, he thought, they would be my cup of tea.  I assured him I would.

I have since broken that vow by never cracking open a single Pym (not through lack of interest but rather through my inability to shoehorn Excellent Women into an already-tight reading schedule).  I knew I'd keep all the Pyms, but I wanted to see if they were available on Kindle so I could free up some shelf space.

Well, yes, I found the electronic versions, but they weren't at the price level I'd set, so I opted to keep the paperbacks in the collection.  Before I left that Amazon page, however, my eye was caught (as the Amazon elves had hoped) by the "You Might Also Like...." book covers below.  There I found a neatly-illustrated cover design of a woman skating on a pond, a splay-legged boy following behind, snow falling, a rabbit dashing away, and--most important--the word "Christmas" in the title.  Click.

I'd heard of Angela Thirkell before, but only on the farthest periphery of my attention span.  A contemporary of Pym's, she was most famous for her 1933 comic novel High Rising, which is set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire.  Before Thirkell died in 1961, she wrote nearly thirty Barsetshire novels which, if Christmas at High Rising is any indication, were light and airy as butter scones.  It's full of sentences like this one about a woman suddenly learning her ex-lover was in the next room: "Amelia still could not hear William Hay's name without feeling that she was rather drunk in the middle of a display of fireworks."

Frankly, I was a little disappointed with Christmas at High Rising--not because the writing isn't any good (it's mostly excellent, and severely funny in patches), but because there was very little Christmas within its pages.  Oh, the eight stories in the collection are all fine and dandy, but only one of them is unmistakably set during the Yuletide season: "Christmas at Mulberry Lodge," which has a nasty little streak running through it (the nature of which I can't divulge without giving too much away).

Still, I'm glad I discovered Angela Thirkell (if nothing else, she stokes my fire to really actually truly sit down with Barbara Pym someday soon).  In fact, I enjoyed Thirkell's writing so much, I went in search of her other novel High Rising.  I found a copy on Abe Books and to my delight, I saw that it definitely takes place during Christmastime.  To my crushing disappointment, however, the book won't arrive until December 30.  Oh well, there's always next year's Big Christmas Read.

~

A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition by Lee Mendelson (It! Books)

The lights came up in the screening room and the two television network executives looked at each other, then turned to the show's producer.

"Well, you gave it a good shot," said one.

"It seems a little flat...a little slow," said the other.

The producer was crushed.  So much hard work had gone into this half-hour animated special.

"Well," said the first TV executive, "we will, of course, air it next week, but I'm afraid we won't be ordering any more.  We're sorry; and believe me, we're big Peanuts fans.  But maybe it's better suited to the comic page."

History, of course, has proved those two network suits to be lunkheads.  A Charlie Brown Christmas had the #2 spot in the ratings when it was first shown on December 9, 1965 (just behind Bonanza) and in the forty-eight years since then it has been a holiday staple as certain and dependable as that can-shaped quivering tube of cranberry sauce on the Christmas dinner table.

For those of us who came of age soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the holiday season doesn't officially get underway until Charlie Brown's tree droops from the weight of its single red ornament.  Just a few bars of Vince Guaraldi's jazzy score can get us soggy with nostalgia faster than the sight of Andy Williams in a sweater.

In this book, the show's executive producer, Lee Mendelson, goes behind the scenes of the animated cels to give us a warm-hearted history of 30 television minutes which proved it is possible to be weird and low-key and still be wildly successful.  We take A Charlie Brown Christmas for granted these days, but when it first aired in the mid-60s, it was something very unique and different. Jazz during a cartoon?  Using child actors for kids' voices instead of adult actors?  Reciting an entire passage from the Bible on prime-time TV?  It was mold-breaking, bubble-bursting stuff back then.

Mendelson's book (which was first published in 2000) gives us the entire script, plus personal stories about Charles M. Schulz, animator and director Bill Melendez, jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, and a few of the kids behind the voices (they grew up to be schoolteachers and real estate agents).

The show is all about depression and the commercialization of the holiday--let us not forget the glum mood which settles over everything like a wet blanket--but it also has the joy of a dancing beagle, catching snowflakes on the tongue, and the rebirth of a skinny, neglected tree into a bright, twinkling Tannenbaum.  And that's what Christmas is all about.

~

The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard/Vintage Crime)

Murder never takes a day off.  It certainly doesn't enjoy a holiday during the Christmas season, as the sixty stories and novellas in this volume can attest.  As Otto Penzler notes in his introduction:

While most of us are busy shopping for gifts for those we love, or decorating a home and putting up a Christmas tree and hanging mistletoe, and generally enjoying the extra warmth of hellos from friends and shopkeepers...unsympathetic souls will find solace in the fact that crime, violence, and even murder continue to flourish at what should be a time of peace, joy, and love.

I blame Mr. Penzler and his Big Book for jarring and jolting my well-laid holiday reading plans all out of whack.  I'd already started thinking about the Agatha Christie book I'd read to cap off the year and in my mind I was all set.  But then, while I was working as a Bookseller for a Day during Indies First at Fact and Fiction Books a few weeks ago, I spotted the cover of The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.  "Kill me now," I said softly.

It was all over in an instant.  The book was paid for, bagged, and I was on my way to tearing up my holiday biblio-plans.

(One interesting note: the cover design is a detail from the February 1938 issue of The Country Home and in the original--which you can see here--the distressed damsel hurrying away from the car is not holding a revolver.)

I'm only one-fifth of the way through the anthology, but I've enjoyed what I read so far, starting with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot investigating a jewel theft in "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding."  The book is full of bodies in the snow, drunk (and murderous) Santas, poisoned mince pies and a general lack of goodwill toward men.  There's also a liberal dash of good humor, as supplied by writers like John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey), Damon Runyon, Donald E. Westlake, and Ellery Queen, whose Christmas festivities are interrupted by the arrival of a lawyer seeking help:

December the twenty-third is ordinarily not a good time to seek the Queens.  Inspector Richard Queen like his Christmas old-fashioned; his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for twenty-two hours of over-all preparation and some of its ingredients are not readily found at the corner grocer's.  And Ellery is a frustrated gift-wrapper.  For a month before Christmas he turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons, and artistic stickers; and he spends the last two days creating beauty.

The Queens cannot, of course, resist a puzzle.  And so it is that they find themselves in the middle of a department store crowded with last-minute shoppers, trying to figure out how a priceless doll was stolen from a heavily-guarded glass case.  I had great fun trying to figure it out (I couldn't), as I'm sure I will sleuthing the remaining mysteries in the book--stories by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John D. MacDonald, Bradford Morrow, Ed McBain, Sara Paretsky, Mary Higgins Clark, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, and O. Henry (not "The Gift of the Magi").

The Big Book is a wonderful tribute to Christmas literature and, while some of the stories might be a little redundant in terms of crimes and settings, there's no mistaking the publisher's devotion to the season.  How into Christmas are they?  Take a look at the Black Lizard logo:

~

London Snow by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)

Shortly after going through the "P" section of my library (and renewing my vows with Ms. Pym), I came to the Ts, and there, sandwiched between The Mosquito Coast and Millroy the Magician, I saw a slender red spine.  London Snow.  I opened to the first of the book's 50 pages and started to read:

On this winter afternoon the bright window of the sweet-shop crackled with colour--the red ribbons on a pyramid of chocolate boxes, trays of glazed fruit, marzipan wrapped in crisp green cellophane, and bins of humbugs that shone with an enamelling of sugar.  In the centre of the window was a Christmas tree with silver needles, and decorated with baubles of mint lumps and wine gums.  It had been raining since morning, but the day had turned cold and the raindrops had frozen on the shop window, coating it with crystal pebbles that crazed the light and made it merrier.

Oh my, my, what exquisite writing.  Once again, I shifted course and added another book to the Big Christmas Read (but hey, it's only 50 pages).  I swallowed the book as quick as I would a mouthful of wine gums (which, I've just learned, are basically Swedish fish candies).  When I went to my book log to add this title to the 2013 list, I was shocked to discover this was the first Paul Theroux book I'd ever read.  How could that be?  Somehow, he'd lived all these years on my shelves, untouched.  I'm glad events conspired to bring us together this Christmas.

Out of all the books on my list, London Snow epitomizes the true spirit of the season.  Its story is simple: a candy shop owner and her two adopted orphans are threatened with eviction by a nasty-wasty landlord (he first shows up at the shop with "the wet wool of his shaggy coat dripping" and a face that was "all red lumps and bristles").  The ill-tempered bear of a man storms out, the candy-store kin ponder their future, and all looks bleak.  But then things appear to take a turn for the brighter when the landlord disappears during a heavy blizzard which strikes London the next day.  The mother, Mrs. Mutterance with a heart as sweet as her wares, decides they must go out in search of Mr. Snyder, much to the dismay of her adopted children Wallace and Amy.

      "But we don't like him," protested Wallace.
      "We have to like him," said Mrs. Mutterance.
      "Why, Ma?"
      "Because it's Christmas.  If we don't find him, we'll lose Christmas."

How you read that sentiment will depend on whether you're a Tiny Tim or an unreformed Scrooge.  Either way, there's no denying this short book is long on heart.  Though the ending is rather predictable (what Christmas story isn't complete without spiritual reformation?), I savored every line Theroux set down.  Like this description of London just after the storm:

      It was snow.
      It clung thickly to the rooftops where it was nearly blue.  It was mounded like white eyebrows above the windows of the houses, and it had blown against the brick walls and stuck, making beards hang from the sills.  It was piled against the doors and made caps on the tops of lamp-posts.  Each spike on the churchyard fence was encased in a fluffy sheath, and so far the only marks in the white street--what a beautiful street it seemed!--were the milkman's footprints.

Sentences like those are gifts to all of us.  I couldn't have asked for anything better under my tree this year.

Bookstore of the Month: Iconoclast Books

Iconoclast Books
671 Sun Valley Road
Ketchum, ID  83340
(202) 726-1564
Iconoclast Books on Facebook
Iconoclast Books on Twitter

For your health's sake...for complete relaxation and enjoyment...visit Sun Valley this winter.  It's a delightful, easy-to-take tonic...skiing, skating, warm-water, outdoor swimming and joyous evening hours.  Nature's big, white blanket soon will be spread.  Plan now to see this land of sun and fun in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains.  A robust, western welcome awaits you!

--from an ad for Sun Valley ski resort in the Milwaukee Sentinel, Dec. 7, 1952

Drive up Idaho Highway 75, past the quaint towns of Bellevue and Hailey, along the Big Wood River (one of Ernest Hemingway's beloved trout streams), and into the shadows of Old Baldy and Dollar Mountain.  There, just when you think the forests, mountains and streams couldn't possibly be equalled in beauty, you'll discover they were just the prelude to Ketchum, Idaho, a jewel of a town set in the Sun Valley crown.

Ketchum is home to about 2,700 residents.  Make that 3,700 because Sarah Hedrick has the dynamic energy of 1,000 souls.  She is at the heart of Iconoclast Books--the Hope Diamond of Ketchum's crown jewels--and she is one of the most dedicated and tireless booksellers I've ever met.  On the June day I drove into Ketchum, it was raining in Sun Valley (Irony Alert!) and clouds had pulled a dark blanket over the town, but all the lights were on in the bookstore and Iconoclast fairly glowed on its corner of Ketchum's main street.  Somewhere inside the shop, I'm sure that electricity was caused by Sarah swirling and humming through the bookshelves, helping a customer find the best biography of Hemingway, recommending the latest staff pick (like Alexander Maksik's A Marker to Measure Drift), or frothing milk for a latte at the store's small cafe.  Though she has a great and equally-dedicated staff of booksellers (some of whom "came for the skiing and stayed for the books"), there's no getting around the fact that Sarah Hedrick is Iconoclast Books.

Sarah Hedrick and her daughter Penelope welcome Papa Hemingway to the store

I first met Sarah at the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book shortly after the publication of my debut novel, Fobbit.  I'd just given a reading and was sitting at the book-signing table when a slender blonde-haired woman came up, kneeled in front of the table, and took my hands.  "You must come to Sun Valley."  Did I mention Sarah is also a one-woman Chamber of Commerce for Ketchum?  Just like those Union-Pacific posters which called the rich and famous to come play at the Sun Valley Ski Resort back in the 1940s, I was being summoned to the mountains of Idaho.  How could I possibly resist?  (It took nearly eight months, but I eventually did make my way to Sun Valley and gave a reading at the Community Library and then splurged an appropriate amount of money on books at Iconoclast the next day.)

In preparing for this Bookstore of the Month post, I asked Sarah to tell me a little bit about what the store has to offer. Here's what she wrote in an email: "We encourage intellectual curiosity.  We pride ourselves on being unique and going beyond the bestseller selection. New, used and rare titles, Hemingway and Idaho history, book clubs, magazines, gifts, stationery, candles, educational games and toys, and more. Our cafe features locally roasted coffee, local organic dairy, homemade chai, organic teas, smoothies, fresh-baked goodies, bagels, homemade soup, paninis and salads. We specialize in unique cards, gifts, candles and host the area's largest children's section--from baby gifts and board books to a phenomenal Young Adult selection, with everything in between. We host author events, Poetry Slams, music events, Open Mic Nights, book club discussions and educational events. We are also very fortunate to be a part of so many great partnerships with arts and non-profit organizations in the community, like the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, The Sun Valley Center for the Arts/Company of Fools, and The Community Library."

Iconoclast Books, now occupying 4,800 square feet, began in the trunk of a car in the University District in Seattle. Here's a bit of the store's history, taken from its website: "Iconoclast Books was founded in 1993, to very little fanfare. After many years of working in restaurants and bike shops in Ketchum, Gary Hunt, a practicing ski bum, set out to find his niche in life. He traveled. He worked in more restaurants and bike shops. He grew weary of that and more importantly, he felt vaguely unfulfilled. He had a friend, Royce Wilson, who managed a used bookstore in the University district of Seattle and they would often talk late into the evening over red wine or scotch while Royce outlined the basics of the used book business to Gary. This led to a period of a few months in which Gary went around to garage sales and thrift stores buying books and selling them, or attempting to sell them, to used bookstores throughout the city. This is what is known as book scouting, and Gary discovered that he had a certain knack for it....It wasn't long before a tidy little stack of boxes of books had been built up and they no longer fit into the trunk of the car. And so Iconoclast Books was born. At first it was just on weekends in the street market on Capitol Hill, with weekdays devoted to scouring the yard sales for choice inventory. By the end of the summer there were enough boxes of books built up to open our first store, in Greenlake, a suburb of Seattle."

Eventually, Gary grew restless and in 1994 he decided to head back to Sun Valley (remember, he was a "practicing ski bum"). He landed in a basement studio of about 800 square feet off 4th Street where he could sell used and out-of-print books.  Somewhere along the line, he met Sarah (then a bookseller at, um, The Book Cellar).  They fell in love, got married and joined forces at the revitalized Iconoclast.  The business grew and moved from one location to another, adding new books, magazines, and gifts. Iconoclast Books spent five years in the historic Griffith building on Main Street in Ketchum before moving into its present location on Sun Valley Road at the end of 2007. Sadly, Gary was killed in a car accident less than a year later.  Even from the dark valley of her grief, Sarah has carried on Gary's drive and vision for the store.

I'm going to turn the rest of this section of the blog post over to Sarah because, frankly, I couldn't have described the store or the current state of bookselling any better than she did in an email to me yesterday....

*     *     *

Our philosophy is along the lines of this: anyone can sell New York Times bestsellers; we want to introduce you to something about which you haven’t already heard. We want to be relentlessly current and honor the classics.  We want to help you find you that rare book you remember from your childhood. We want your experience in a beautiful space--with a curated selection of books, beautiful music playing (often live on our “Dead Man’s Piano”), the smell of house-made chai being steamed, and a wise and well-read staff--to be so wonderful that you wouldn’t even consider an Amazon experience.

I think bookstore customers in general are the best out there.  Think about it: they’re intellectually curious, they’re usually not in a hurry, they are CHOOSING to be in a real store and not at their computer or in a fluorescently-lit box store (we like to say it’s the difference between a fine dining experience and fast food) and they’re buying something that is going to enlighten them, make them laugh, weep or think. This is an entirely different experience than buying most other retail items.

In a small valley we’re so grateful to our customers, not only for choosing us as the place to buy books, but because in a small town, they’ve become our friends and in some cases, our family.  We have some of the most curious and intelligent people coming through our doors and we not only get to help them, we learn from them. We have time to chat, to get to know their tastes, to remember what their spouses loved to read last month, or what we chose for their grandchildren. Because of the café we have people who stay for hours and hours. We have a customer we call “The Moon Man” because in the winter days when my daughter Penelope was a toddler, he’d take her outside and show her the early evening moon and recite “I love the moon and the moon loves me.” She’s now 8 years old and still brings him every book with moon in the pictures or title to read to her. These people are raising my children with me!

There's no way to choose the most rewarding thing about being a bookseller, but maybe one part of it can be found in this email from an employee the night before he left the country for a trip abroad:

Dear Sarah,
      I really want to thank you. Working at Iconoclast has been one of the best things that's happened to me. I don't think many people can say they love going to work, and I feel lucky that I can. I feel so much love from you and the people around me everyday. There's nothing more important than that. Working at Iconoclast I've grown as a person. I've become a reader, and have a deep appreciation for books that I couldn't have gotten elsewhere, and will have for the rest of my life. You've also given me the gift of travel. Letting me leave for 7 months and having a job I love waiting when I come home is invaluable. It's allowed me to live the life I want to live. There's no amount of quotes, novels, or libraries to express how grateful I am. You've changed my life.
      So really, truly, thank you Sarah, you're a great boss, and an even better friend.

Or maybe it's in this moment when, driving up to my store one day this summer, I saw a pre-teen girl having her photograph taken in front of the store’s sign like she was being photographed with Justin Bieber...I asked about it and she nearly screamed/wept: “Because I’ve been able to visit bookstores all over the world, and THIS IS MY FAVORITE. My friends will be so jealous when they see this.”

I now have a toddler customer who comes in once a week with his father, hollers a hello to “Uncle Sarah” and makes a beeline to my (now almost 18 year old) son’s wooden train set in the children’s section while telling his father which books to grab to read to him. His father has been a customer since his teens, buying Bukowski. From Bukowski to Board Books...

Three nights ago, I left work after a 14-hour Black Friday, which included an Open Mic Night of prose, poetry and LOTS of music, including a trio with a stand-up bass. We had a full house and the performances ranged from an 8-year-old telling jokes, to a 16-year-old singing and playing the ukulele, to a gray-haired, conservatively dressed father getting up there with an acoustic guitar and blowing us away (we found out later it was Dave Dederer, formerly of the Seattle rock band The Presidents of the United States of America). I went outside to my car at one point and what I saw from the outside made me nearly weep.  This beautifully-lit store with silver snowflakes hanging in the windows--it was packed with people, books, ideas, music, old and new friends, and three of my own children.  I just felt full, nourished and proud. We do good things inside those brick-and-mortar walls. So on my exhausted, I-can’t-keep-up-this-pace, drive home, I realized I can. I love it too much and we’re good at it.

I also love watching someone’s face light up when you finally nail the book they didn’t know they were looking for until you describe it and place it in their hands. Or the kid who calls my home, late in the evening with a shaking voice, “Sarah, do you have the third book in the Divergent trilogy at home? Or at The Modern Mercantile?  I am three blocks away....” (You can substitute that with Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, Series of Unfortunate Events, etc.)  It happens more times than you'd think and it's been this way for decades. You gotta love small towns.

Alexander Maksik signing books at Iconoclast

We’ve hosted so many amazing events it’s hard to choose. We’ve danced on table tops with Alex Kuczynski (author of Beauty Junkies), we’ve watched Billy Collins sing “Mustang Sally,” and I can remember making Pete Fromm nearly cry many years ago when he showed up at the store and we had a guitarist walking around strumming while a packed house of eager Fromm fans drank wine and nibbled cheese before his event. We go out of our way for authors because we realize we're off the beaten path. We found a Polish speaking ski instructor for Anne Applebaum’s kids when she came here, we took Jonathan Evison to every single Hemingway watering hole and closed down Ketchum, and we’ve called in favors to the best restaurants that were booked solid just to get a table for Walter Kirn. We’ll score you lift tickets, concert tickets, sometimes a funky condo.

*     *     *
I can testify to Iconoclast's Author TLC.  More than six months after Sarah first grabbed my hands and insisted I come to Sun Valley, my wife Jean and I drove our car off that beaten path and visited Ketchum for an all-too-brief stay.  Sarah did indeed arrange for us to stay at a friend's condo (an elegant place which was far from funky) and made sure everything was set up for me at the Community Library's lecture room (which is a bland name for what turned out to be a gorgeous auditorium--all the more impressive given the small size of the town).  The next day, Sarah even made us some of her Idaho-famous lattes (did I detect a hint of potato in the foam?).

While Jean and Sarah chatted about mutual vintage mercantile interests (Jean had just opened The Backyard Bungalow in here in Butte, Montana, and Sarah is the proud owner of the Modern Mercantile in Hailey), I wandered the store, browsing the books.  I zeroed in on the Hemingway section--an entire wall of shelves dedicated to the author who lived in Sun Valley off and on for part of his life and chose this mountainous Garden of Eden as the place where he'd end it with an early-morning shotgun blast.  While I didn't find exactly what I was looking for (a book specifically about Hem's Ketchum days), my eye was caught by another book on display near Iconoclast's front door: The Sun Valley Story by Van Gordon Sauter.  Perfect.

For those of you with even a passing interest in the ski resort's history, I highly recommend this sumptuously-illustrated account of the valley's history--its rise from a sheepherding crossroads to a multi-million-dollar winter wonderland where stars like Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood and Jamie Lee Curtis came to play.  Sauter emphasizes Sun Valley's self-made entrepreneurship and resilience even during economic downturns.  Bottom line, the region's successful legacy begins and ends with the mountains and rivers, the solid foundation of nature which will never change.

Except when it does.

Resiliency and nature collided in Sun Valley this past summer, two months after my visit.  Six years after the devastating Castle Rock Fire roared over the mountains and down into the lowlands, flames once again threatened Ketchum, Hailey and the other small towns dotting the valley floor.  The Beaver Creek Fire forced hundreds of evacuations this past August and brought everything to a standstill--at a time when Sun Valley normally depended on heavy tourism traffic.

Most of us (myself included) hear about these things and while we may pause to read the headline stories and feel a little pinch of sympathy inside, the truth of the matter is, we turn the page of the newspaper, go on eating our toast and eggs and rarely give the ashes of Sun Valley forests a second thought.  Until, that is, someone takes us by the shoulders, gets all up in our face, and tells us that we should care.  Such a thing happened to me when I read the following heartfelt note Sarah included in her bookstore newsletter a few weeks after the fires had been extinguished.  I'll close with Sarah's words in hopes that, like me, you will be moved to help out the store with a donation or--as I did--by ordering a few books from Iconoclast instead of that Other Place which rhymes with Shamazon.

*     *     *

I've been ruminating for weeks on thoughts and the proper way to put them into words about the impact of the Beaver Creek Fire on our community, to my store and to my family. I've been interviewed many times--locally and nationally--and have (this should come as no surprise) worn my heart on my sleeve and often, possibly, said too much. The focus of many of these conversations has been about devastation: The damage to our beautiful landscape and the impact of that on our economy, the repercussions that losing the busiest three weeks of our season has on a budget that absolutely depends on tourism, the trickle-down effect of what occurs when a store loses necessary income and can no longer support the causes it normally does; the struggles with paying employees, vendors, taxes, rent and utilities. Sometimes, I've imagined the loss of the store.

Tonight, I want to tell the good stories and I hope you'll bear with me. I've thought a lot about the last 6 years--the Castle Rock Fire from which we're still not recovered as evidenced by still paying off the disaster relief loan from the Small Business Administration, the death of my husband and true iconoclast behind the store, the loss of our locally-owned bank which carried our credit lines so that we could get through slack seasons, the recession that hit not long after Gary's death, the egregious efforts of Amazon to destroy brick-and-mortar stores of all kinds, and yes, I have a hard time with that little Kindle.

Despite all of these obstacles, I am awake at midnight feeling invigorated about Monday morning--mostly because I adore what I do and also because I have a lot of great ideas AND I have a few beautiful stories to tell.  They may not save the store, but they have nourished my soul on sad days and reminded me why I do what I do, seven days a week.

In no particular order and because no monetary value can be attached to goodwill.

1.  During the evacuation I received a Facebook message from a stranger in Twin Falls: "Sarah, I know we're only fb friends but I love your store and all that you do for your community and book lovers. I was in the mall today and heard that all hotels are booked in Boise and Twin. If you and your children need a place to stay, we have a guest room for you. We'd love to have you."

2.  Numerous, and I mean numerous, offers similar to this from all over Idaho and beyond.

3.  This week, an online order from the Stanley Library for 25 books, all of which could've been purchased at cost through a book distributor. Yesterday an online order came in, for one book, with this message: "I'm a bookseller in California and I just heard about the wildfires in your area. I so hope things start looking better soon. Solidarity!"

4.  And a story that I hope goes viral, not for the benefit of Iconoclast Books, but because I hope people who are able will be inspired to support all local businesses--and for those of us who cannot, will remember it and do something similar in another way, down the road. Most of us know Carol and Len Harlig as they've been figures in and pillars of this community for decades; they're kind, generous and passionate about our valley, giving of themselves in more ways than this email will allow. I've known them for nearly 24 years and they never cease to amaze me. Read on...

This is what they've done and how Len explained it to me: "Carol and I sat down the other night and identified businesses that we're concerned about as well as the people we're grateful to in our valley, especially the fire fighters who saved our community. We would like to support and thank a few." The Harligs proceeded to spend a very generous amount of money at Iconoclast Books, citing us as a business they consider to be one of many that are integral to our community and they couldn't envision being without.

Clearly I wanted to give Carol and Len a public thank you without embarrassing them.  In their graceful way, they stated that they don't want acclimation for this gesture, but in hopes that others would do something similar, I was free to share. In Len's words:

      Our "plan" is to buy $1,000 worth of $100 gift certificates at local businesses for five months, thereby helping local businesses to survive until the snow flies, and by gifting the cards to emergency responders (firefighters first, law enforcement next, hospital workers third, and then another round for firefighters and law enforcement), as a way to thank the women and men who did so much for so many. (Apologies to Winston for the paraphrase).
      Our first thought was to do this below the radar as neither of us seeks publicity for our community efforts, but if getting the word out will encourage other residents to shop locally or to do something similar to our "plan" then we'd give up a little privacy for the higher cause. Maybe we can start a movement and help revitalize our local economy. "OCCUPY MAIN STREET!"

Need I say more about this incredible community and state we live in?  Yes, I want my store to survive this latest tragedy, not just because I want a job I love and appreciate, but because it allows me to live and raise my children in a community full of so many creative, smart and caring people in hopes that they'll continue in that vein for the rest of their lives.

Iconoclast Books is the featured bookstore all this month at The Quivering Pen.  By clicking on the links to books mentioned in this month's blog posts, you'll be taken to the store's website where you can purchase the book (or, better yet, several books).  The Quivering Pen is dedicated to supporting independent bookstores.