Up at the front desk of Lemuria sits an ever-growing pile of newspaper articles on various book related subjects that John has so thoughtfully placed at our disposal (just in case we should feel the need to expand upon our already vast bookselling knowledge, right John?) As I was thumbing through this pile one afternoon, I came upon an article from the Wall Street Journal that caught my eye. The article reviewed two different books that have recently been published on the state of America’s public education system and the ongoing “reformer vs. traditionalist” debate. The first book is Steven Brill’s Class Warfare, which is the book I am currently reading. The second is Terry Moe’s Special Interest, which I have not read yet, but am interested in after reading the WSJ article.

So far, I am enjoying the easy, journalistic style that Brill employs to discuss both the reformist and traditionalist agendas. Although, I have to admit that Brill favors the reformers and their ideals over the traditionalists and the teachers unions. Let’s just say that he does not shine a favorable light upon the teachers unions and the political sway they hold over the very people who can make legislative changes to the currently broken system.

Using the stories of unknown grass roots educators and also some more well known names such as Wendy Kopp (the founder of Teach for America) and Randi Weingarten (the teachers-union leader,) Brill manages to keep the reader (me) captivated, which is sometimes not that easy with non-fiction. So, if you’re in the mood for an interesting work of non-fiction with a valid argument, go ahead and check out Class Warfare. Keep the articles coming John!

Class Warfare by Steven Brill (Simon & Schuster, August 2011)

by Anna

Do you ever find yourself making excuses for a book when you are attempting to recommend it to someone? Stumbling over yourself to point out its shortcomings and failures, assuring your listener that it’s not really a bad book at all (instead of communicating why it’s a good book)?

I’ve been reading Bill James’ new book Popular Crime and I’ve been enjoying it so much I thought I would write up something for the blog about it. I sat down in front of my laptop, and as I tried to organize my thoughts about the book, I found that I was preoccupied with the book’s shortcomings – as if I needed to apologize for liking the book. I imagined myself handing a copy of the book to a customer and mumbling, “You probably won’t like it anyway…”

It struck me that too often I’ve tried to evaluate books on a simple, one-dimensional scale, with one end labeled “Unreadable” and the other end labeled “Life-Changing,” as if there’s only one relevant quality that can be measured and communicated. Books like Popular Crime challenge this notion – they may have obvious and possibly numerous flaws, but those flaws are either canceled out by the strengths, or at least they may be overlooked in order to enjoy the strengths.

Let’s get the weaknesses out of the way. The book is long but not comprehensive. James rambles at length; the digressions border on self-indulgent. The author’s research is essentially anecdotal; no footnotes or endnotes will be found. At one point he notes that he found a piece of information on Wikipedia; later, he recounts a story from an article he admits he can no longer find. This habit would be less noticeable if James didn’t frequently criticize other crime writers for their poor research. James repeatedly reminds the reader of how many crime books he’s read. The structure of the book is uneven; it’s organized chronologically, but the amount of attention paid to each story varies greatly – James may explore the crime for ten or fifteen pages, or he may abandon it after two paragraphs. I could go on, but I won’t.

So why read it? Because all those flaws are momentary distractions. Actually, that’s not even true – I’m not distracted by them while I’m reading – they are just little realizations that come to mind when I’m not reading. But when the book is open, it’s just enjoyment. Yes, it’s a bit rambly, but it’s not tedious, just a pleasantly relaxed discussion on some fantastically interesting crime stories. The digressions may be occasionally self-indulgent, but James always returns to the main story before the readers’ interest wanes. The writing style is direct and unaffected; writers are often described as writing in a “conversational” tone, but too often that simply means that their writing is unpolished. Not here — James’ writing is unadorned, devoid of cliche, and readable.

I will unapologetically recommend Popular Crime. Yes, it has flaws, but they are incidental, not fatal. To allow its flaws to distract from one’s enjoyment would be, well, a crime.

A few months ago I blogged about a children’s book that I absolutely love and couldn’t more highly recommend to all ages. Well now it is time to recommend the author of that book to everyone.

Lesley M. M. Blume could quite possibly be the most delightful human being on the planet. Her new book is called Let’s Bring Back: An Encyclopedia of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful, Chic, Useful, Curious, and Otherwise Commendable Things from Times Gone By. This books contains, in its very aesthetically pleasing cover of brown and mint green, a veritable smorgasbord of fun knowledge.  It is laid out like a dictionary, which happens to be one of my most favorite things. The book starts out with Acquaintance and ends with Zinc Bar.

We have had this delightful little book sitting at the front desk so whenever I have a moment I often reach for it to learn something maybe not new but fun. My personal favorite is Hotel Living, which looks a little something like this:

Hotel Living: This used to be a common practice in hotels of grandeur and disrepute; you would simply move into town and “take rooms.” One advantage to hotel living: If you die there, you’re more likely to be found in a timely manner.

Some Famous People Who Died in Their Hotel Digs

Oscar Wilde, in a small, frowsy room at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris. His reported last words: “I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means.” (Other sources claim that he utterd, “Either those curtains go, or I do.”)

Dorothy Parker, at the Volney Hotel in New York City. Ironically, in earlier years, she love to ridicule the culture of old hotel-dwelling ladies. The worst part: After Parker was cremated, no one collected the ashes, and her urn was stored in her lawyer’s metal file cabinet for fifteen years before being properly interred.

Eugene O’Neill, in room  at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. The playwright’s reported last words: “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room-GD it, died in a hotel room.”

So that is a little teaser of the clever wit (which is also explained in the book) which this book is made of. I would love to receive this book as a gift and have already given it as a gift. -Ellen

George Prochnik writes in the introduction to In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise:

“One spring day I went in pursuit of silence in downtown Brooklyn. I live not far away from where I began my search, on a leafy street that is, relatively speaking, a haven of quiet in a relentless city. I have a small garden, and the rooms where I sleep, work, and spend time with loved ones are surrounded by old, thick walls. Even so, I’m woken by traffic helicopters; I’m aggravated by sirens and construction . . . And then there are the screeching bus brakes, rumbling trucks unsettling manhole lids, and the unpredictable eruptions of my neighbor’s sound systems. I’m scared of becoming a noise crank, but I’ve just always loved quiet. I love to have conversations without straining to hear. I love, frankly, staring up from my book into space and following my thoughts without having any sound crashing down, demanding attention.”

George Michelson Foy is also in pursuit of silence in Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence. Prochnik and Foy both share a variety of perspectives on silence–from history, science, religion to their own personal recollections and experiences. In Foy’s quest for silence he even ventures to what the Guinness Book of World Records calls “the quietest place on earth,” a place where no one has ever been able to spend more than 45 minutes before finding the silence unbearable. It seems there is a fine balance between over and under stimulation. Foy writes of a farmhouse, a place which seems to be just right for him:

“It’s an old, dark house, smelling of dry rot and smoke, with a fieldstone hearth and thick walls. The farm lies deep in the hills of the Berkshires, far from any roads. It’s the dead of night, at midwinter. The air is frozen and void of wind. Farmhouse, meadows, and woods surrounding are buried in a quilt of snow so deep that everything alive has chosen not to fight, but burrow instead below the white and go to sleep. All is cold and silent, on that farm in mind, that the stars, shining against a sky the color of tarnished lapis, seem to give off a vibration that is not sound and not light but something in between–something that is perhaps the essence of silence itself.”

I hope after the loud and bustling holidays that you find just the right place, too. Maybe you can lazily stare out into space, maybe with a book in your lap, having no particular aim for your thoughts.

Earth by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Grand Central Publishing, September 2010)

Jon Stewart takes readers through a clever look at various aspects of earthly living.  With an Alien Preface, this guide is a handbook for post-human existence.  Stewart and the writers of the Daily Show take these planetary outsiders through the gamut of all things Earth: from our of understanding of planetary geography to weather to evolution to the human body to reproduction. Our views of politics, science, and social practices, such as religion and weddings, are explained.

“For Earth, weather was the physical manifestation of daily and yearly fluctuations of the atmosphere. For us, weather was the topic of choice used to fill the myriad of awkward silences that plagued our daily lives.  No other shared experience evoked this kind of elemental empathy. Weather reminded us that we were all in this together, that for all our differences, rich and poor, black and white, zealot and atheist could all agree that yes, last Wednesday was, in fact, cold enough for us.”

Interspersed throughout are helpful FAQs (Future Alien Questions).  A few of my favorites include:

“Q: What was the happiest period in a human’s life?

A: Either the one immediately preceding the period one was currently in, or the one immediately following it.”

“Q: In a population of billions, how did you decide whom to marry?

A: Most of us believed we had one perfect soul mate somewhere on earth. Luckily for us, that person usually lived not too far away, spoke the same language, was of an equivalent level of physical attractiveness, and shared our love of mountain biking.”

-Peyton

Zita recently introduced me to the quirky essays of Sloane Crosley (which is great because I was starting to get a little stuck in the 639 page task that is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and needed a quick pick-me-up read).  Sloane is a young woman living in NYC who has a tendency to stumble upon awkward situations–whether they be Portuguese circus clowns, a guy named Daryl who smuggles expensive carpets, throw pillows, and whatever else you might want from a fine furniture store, or curious children inquiring about what happens to butterflies after they die.

As a girl who wanders into some awkward situations herself and never seems capable of tempering the awkwardness, I can relate to Sloane.  In fact, I’d love to be friends with her and exchange stories.  I’m sure it would be a fun time. Who knows, maybe we’d become B.F.F.s.

Below is an excerpt from Sloane’s essay “Bastard Out of Westchester.”  After finishing this essay, I actually called my boyfriend and read this excerpt aloud to him over the phone.  “Joseph, this is me,” I chirped. “I have this same idea! Don’t you think I should be best friends with this girl?”  I’m sure he was rolling his eyes at me on the other line while placating my excitement with an “Mmhmm, honey. That’s funny.”

From I Was Told There’d Be Cake (pg. 67-68):

If I ever have kids, this is what I’m going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil–preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp–destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you’ve been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers.  All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.  This is where I want to raise my children–until the age of, say, ten, when I’ll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they’re fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move them to someplace like Lansdale, Pennsylvania. There, they can be not only the cool new kid, but also the Belgian kid.  And none of that Toblerone-eating, Tintin-reading, tulip-growing crap. I want them to be obscurely, freezingly, impossibly Belgian. I want them to be fluent in Flemish and to pronounce “Antwerpen” with a hint of “vh” embedded in the “w.”

Oh, if only my parents had done this for me.

For more about Sloane Crosley, check out Nell’s blog here.  -Kaycie

There are a lot of things to love about this bookstore: first editions in abundance, the First Editions Club, this blog is pretty cool, you can spend years investigating and getting to know the shelves, and we have some pretty awesome author events.  But I think that one of my favorite things about the store is the wealth of knowledge that walks around shelving, is busy on IBID or sits in the office. These people that work here know so much about books. I think it’s probably one of the most valuable things in the store. For most, they can help find a better book than one could alone….or at least more books and in a shorter amount of time.  Yesterday I decided I wanted to find a book that discussed the decline of small farms and the further push into the corporate run, government owned America. Since I couldn’t think of any, I thought it better to ask. I talked to Joe for about 3 minutes and even though the population of books on that subject is quite small, I found just what I was looking for.

The Art of the Commonplace is a collection of essays that offers a perspective on living that is quite different then the one that dominates our culture. It rests a greater portion of importance in being content and at peace where you are and placing effort into the soil and finding value in the crops that are harvested. He contrasts the efforts of the expanding Americans of the late 1700s with that of the native Indians. Citing the unquenchable  thirst for progress and success in even the first Americans. The essays are wonderfully written and are a pleasure to read, unlike a lot of essays that I have read that are quite rigid and blocked. I can’t wait to get deeper into this collection as I have not read Wendell Berry before and I think I am at a loss because of it. This bit is taken from the first essay “A Native Hill.”

“We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America. And in spite of our great reservoir of facts and methods, in comparison to the deep earthly wisdom of established peoples we still know but little.”

His lines are full of good-thinking material because it is quite different from most anything that you hear today. I don’t follow politics really close; a lot of it strikes me as a bunch of foolishness. But I do know that it doesn’t seem that we are on course for a sustainable way of living. China seems to be a little better at the modern approach of “bigger, faster, and more of it.” I love America and I even think free market capitalism is alright, I think it is the pit of unbound greed that gets me. These essays are a pleasing insight that are a reminder that the way in which we live and our people have lived and what was thought as success for the past hundred years is not the only way people have lived and worked throughout histories and cultures.

-John P.

Up until this week I avoided books by Chuck Klosterman on principle. That principle, of course, was fairly stupid: I didn’t like the titles of his books. Also, though, I didn’t like the looks of the people I saw reading them: mostly aggravated hipster scene kids with a half-lit cigarette in one hand and Sex, Drugs and CoCo Puffs in another.

Chuck Klosterman, if you are reading this then please accept this as my  apology.

I have laughed out loud over almost every page of the book Eating the Dinosaur. I am a fan of essays (so if you are not, you won’t like this), but Klosterman has taken “essay” to a new level. Each little nugget of an essay in this book is two parts story and about eleven parts cultural commentary, in a voice that is crisp, refreshing, and spot on.

If you don’t believe me, immediately read his essay on ABBA. Never have I thought so much about the impact that ABBA has made on society, but Klosterman  points out things that I immediately found myself nodding along with, thinking, “Wow, all of the answers to life are in the phenomenon that was, is, and forevermore shall be ABBA.”

If I had to give this book a fault, it lies in that last sentence: You get so into it you begin to think that Klosterman is the end-all be-all answer guide to society. Which, of course, he makes no claims to be. Quite the opposite: he merely situates himself as a careful observer and in doing so creates a staggeringly broad commentary on America (and Germany, and Sweden, and Obamaland).

So, is this book going to change the world? I don’t know the answer to that. I doubt it. But I learned a few things reading it , and that, to me, is what matters the most. In all reality, (which, surprisingly, is kind of what this book is about) you will find yourself making cultural connections you never thought were possible after reading this book. And that, I think, proves to me that this is a good read.

Nell

“Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than is what is commonly thought small.” – Virginia Woolf

if you’ve never before explored Schott’s Original Miscellany, i highly suggest you do.  it’s everything you could ever need to know and even more of what you don’t.  simply put it’s awesome.

Golf Stroke Nomenclature

Double Bogey…..+2

Bogey…..+1

Par…..0

-1…..Birdie

-2…..Eagle

-3…..Albatross, Double Eagle

Nouns of Assemblage

a malapertness of peddlers, a spring of teals, a gang of elk, a murmuration of starlings, a suit of sails, a wilderness of monkeys, a doping of sheldrake, a clutch of eggs, a coven of witches, a staff of servants, a field of runners, a sheaf of arrows, a chattering of choughs, a cete of badgers, a bench of bishops, a murder of crows, a bundle of rags, a barren of mules, a pontification of priests, a rag of colts, a walk of snipe, an exaltration of larks, a muster of peacocks, a desert of lapwing, a drift of swine, a stud of mares, a parliament of rooks & owls, a glozing of taverners, a covey of ptarmigan, a business of ferrets, a drunkship of cobblers, a sounder of wild boar, a nye of pheasants, a fall of woodcock, a sege of herons, a herd of curlews

Sneezing

If you sneeze on Monday, you sneeze for danger;

Sneeze on Tuesday, kiss a stranger;

Sneeze on Wednesday, sneeze for a letter;

Sneeze on Thursday, something better;

Sneeze on Friday, sneeze for sorrow;

Sneeze on Saturday, see your sweetheart tomorrow.

Birthstones

January…..Garnet

February…..Amethyst

March…..Bloodstone

April…..Diamond

May…..Emerald

June…..Pearl, Alexandrite

July…..Ruby

August…..Sardonyx, Agate

September…..Sapphire

October…..Opal

November…..Topaz

December…..Turquoise

and it just goes on and on and on…

by Zita

From PenguinGroupUSA: This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. We hope you enjoy it (and make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point, there’s a surprise!).