There is nothing like hearing Eudora Welty’s stories in her own voice. We will listen to “Petrified Man” and if we have time for another one, “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maid”.

This Welty listening session is part of our Cereus Readers Book Club. Below you will see what we have been reading since January and what we’ll be reading over the next few months with an introduction to the book club by Carolyn Brown.

*     *     *

We call ourselves the Cereus Readers in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” In this same spirit of friendship and fellowship, this new book club is launched.

The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.

As an introduction to the writer we will start with my biography of Eudora Welty, A Daring Life, and pair it with Eudora’s essay “A Sweet Devouring,” found in her collection of essays The Eye of the Story. We will then read her Pulitzer prize-winning novella The Optimist’s Daughter followed by her collection of short stories The Golden Apples.

After reading these works by Welty, we will read authors and works she herself enjoyed: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Chekhov, and mysteries. Finally, we thought we would read authors who have acknowledged Welty as an influence and inspiration such as Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, and Clyde Edgerton. It’s a bold undertaking, but we plan to be meeting for a while!

Here is the schedule for Cereus Readers:

Thursday, January 24: A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty & “A Sweet Devouring” from The Eye of the Story (led by Carolyn Brown)

Thursday, February 28: The Optimist’s Daughter (led by Jan Taylor)

Thursday, March 28: The Golden Apples, Part 1 (led by Lee Anne Bryan)

Thursday, April 25: The Golden Apples, Part 2 (led by Lee Anne Bryan)

Thursday, May 23:

Two short stories: “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” & “The Demonstrators”

An essay: “Must the Novelist Crusade?”

Thursday, June 27:

We will listen to Miss Welty read “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maid” and if we have time for another one, “Petrified Man”.

Thursday, July 25: The Ponder Heart

Thursday, August 22: The Robber Bridegroom

Thursday, September 26: Short Stories, “Asphodel” & “A Still Moment”

We meet at noon in the dot.com building adjacent to Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. All books are available at Lemuria, and be sure to ask for the “Cereus Reader” 10% discount when making your purchase for the book club. Please e-mail lisa if you plan on attending or if you have any questions: lisa at lemuriabooks dot com.

This is a reading group open to all level of readers–anyone interested in learning about Jackson’s most important writer. Eudora Welty considered Lemuria her bookstore, and we want to honor her by discussing her books and authors she loved–meeting in the store where she shopped and signed her books.

Carolyn

I just finished Doug Stephens’ book The Retail Revival. This timely book is the most interesting business book I’ve read on the future of retail since The New Rules of Retail (see blog) a couple of years ago.

On surviving in the new age of consumerism, two statements Stephens makes in the first ten pages stand out:

1. Stephens lists brands that are under his “deathwatch” and his list includes Barnes and Noble. All of the brands on his list have one thing in common: “They each missed or ignored at least one universe-shaping shift in their market, and never quite recovered from it.” (xi)

2. “The bookstore channel has gone to great lengths in its attempt to convince us that deep down we all still love the smell and feel of paper books, when every available statistic suggests that we actually prefer the smell and feel of tablets and e-readers.” (xviii)

My reaction to these comments:

While at the very least B&N may appear to be backsliding, this bookstore chain is going through a re-branding process. And we don’t know the final result or what B&N will become. I’m not so sure B&N knows where they’re going either.

On the second statement, I simply disagree. I feel physical books are important to readers’ lives. Home libraries are what families are built around. I also feel that relationships with booksellers are meaningful associations within any community.

With all this being said, I’m getting to what this blog is really about.

I am proud of the announcement that Square Books as Publisher’s Weekly Bookstore of the Year in 2013. (see PW announcement here) My friends Lisa and Richard Howorth founded their bookstore in 1979. For over 30 years, they have made their community a better place to live. Their contributions have not just given Oxford something to be proud of but the whole state of Mississippi.

Richard and Lisa do an exceptional job of demonstrating why real bookstores won’t go away. Their dedication of a lifetime of vitality through books and reading have changed their culture and will have positive effects on generations to come.

So as a fellow bookseller, I applaud their achievement with a standing ovation. I consider Square Books a shining example that contradicts Stephens’ earlier statement about real books. I feel now is the time for Real Book Store Revitalization. If book people are wishing they had the strength and willpower to build a bookstore in their community, now is a great time to do so.

As B&N expands its retailing brand into what–we do not know, now is the time for the Real Book Seller to emerge by forming Real Book Stores and selling real books. If this blog touches the inclination of any wanna-be bookseller, I suggest you travel to Square Books in Oxford and experience the pinnacle of what a bookstore can be and what bookselling can accomplish for its local environment.

Once again, congratulations to Lisa, Richard, Cody, Lynn and the Square Books gang on making a difference. Square Books is a Real Book Store.

Link to abbreviated online version of The Clarion Ledger article on Square Books

Bookstore Keys Series on Lemuria Blog

From 2013: A Message from Emily St. John Mandel from My Bookstore From 2011/2012: Reading One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of amazon.com (March 19) Where will e-book sales level out? (June 2) Indie Bookstores Buying from Amazon? (June 1) BEA Roundup (May 19) Lemuria’s Headed for NYC (May17) Barnes & Noble Bankrupt? (April 28) Decluttering the Book Market: Ads on the latest Kindle (April 14) Independents on the Exposed End of the Titanic? (April 6th) Border’s Bonuses (March 30) The Experience of Holding a Book (March15) Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

Join Lemuria’s Book Club Registry and we’ll order your book club selections for you and let you know when they’re ready for pick-up!

Book Club Members will receive a membership card and receive a 10% discount on their book club’s reading selections.

We see members of Lemuria’s Book Club Registry as part of a reading community. Members will also have opportunities for exclusive sneak peeks at new releases and special author events.

To join have your book club leader fill out an application or stop by and talk to one of our booksellers.

Book Club Registry Application

Are you looking to join a book club? Lemuria hosts two book clubs that are open to our community.

The Lost Book Club of Atlantis

(open to the public)

The Lost Book Club of Atlantis began in 2006 and is facilitated by a Lemuria bookseller. Atlantis reads contemporary and modern fiction along with an occasional nonfiction selection chosen by a Lemuria bookseller.

This book club meets the first Thursday of every month at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot Com Building across the parking lot from Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. If you are interested in joining, stop by the bookstore and say hello to Lisa or e-mail her at lisa@lemuriabooks.com to be added to the e-mail list. Click here for more details and to see the reading list.

“A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” -William Styron

The Cereus Readers Book Club

(open to the public)

The Cereus Readers Book Club was created in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” In this same spirit of friendship and fellowship, this new book club is launched. The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.

All meetings will held at the dot.com building adjacent to Banner Hall from 12-1 p.m. Feel free to bring your lunch. If you are interested in joining, stop by the bookstore and say hello to Lisa or e-mail her at lisa@lemuriabooks.com to be added to the e-mail list. Click here to see the reading list.

“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them–with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.” -Eudora Welty

Would you like to start your own book club?

Here are some points to consider:

Would you like members by invitation only or is the book club open to the public?

How big should the reading group be? Usually 6-12 members is a good number, ensuring that the book club does not fall apart if a few do not show up.

How will you choose the books? Will the books be chosen by a different member each time? Or will a leader choose the books?

Will there be a certain theme? Mystery, Culture, Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Non-Fiction, Science, History, Literature by Women, or Poetry? Also consider keeping the reading selections diverse with titles that your members might not normally read.

Who will lead the discussion? Will the discussion be open or more guided? Do you want your group to stay on topic or just have good time with food & drink & books.

If you have a practice that works well at your book club, please feel free to share it in the comments section below. Every book club is different!

“A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.” -Henry Miller

All of the book quotes were found in Book Love: A Celebration of Writers, Readers, and The Printed & Bound Book edited by James Charlton and Bill Henderson, Pushcart Press, 2011.

“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” -Edward P. Morgan

Lemuria and The Library Lounge have teamed up for some special events this spring. Never heard of The Library Lounge? Imagine a place where there are comfy chairs, lots of beautiful books and a bar. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

The Library Lounge is kicking off a series of readings featuring local Mississippi writers.

Jack Butler, author of Jujitsu for Christ, will be the first author on Wednesday, April 17th at 6:30. Lemuria will be at the Fairview to provide copies for sale. Jack will be reading from his novel and also signing copies.

The Library Lounge is located in the Fairview Inn in Belhaven on 734 Fairview St, Jackson, MS 39202.

About Jujitsu for Christ

Jack Butler’s “Jujitsu for Christ”–originally published in 1986–follows the adventures of Roger Wing, a white born-again Christian and karate instructor who opens a martial arts studio in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, during the tensest years of the Civil Rights era.

Ambivalent about his religion and his region, Roger Wing befriends the Gandys, an African-American family–parents A.L. and Snower Mae, teenaged son T.J., daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, and youngest son Marcus–who has moved to Jackson from the Delta in hopes of greater opportunity for their children.

As the political heat rises, Roger and the Gandys find their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Their often-hilarious interactions are told against the backdrop of Mississippi’s racial trauma–Governor Ross Barnett’s “I Love Mississippi” speech at the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky football game in Jackson; the riots at the University of Mississippi over James Meredith’s admission; the fieldwork of Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; and the lingering aura of Emmett Till’s lynching.

Drawing not only on William Faulkner’s gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County but also on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s high-adventure Martian pulps, “Jujitsu for Christ” powerfully illuminates vexed questions of racial identity and American history, revealing complexities and subtleties too often overlooked.

It is a remarkable novel about the civil rights era, and how our memories of that era continue to shape our political landscape and to resonate in contemporary conversations about southern identity. But, mostly, it’s very funny, in a mode that’s experimental, playful, sexy, and disturbing all at once. Butler offers a new foreword to the novel. Brannon Costello, a scholar of contemporary southern literature and fan of Butler’s work, writes an afterword that situates the novel in its historical context and in the southern literary canon.

I don’t know if many of you know about this but Goodreads has been bought by Amazon.  I love Goodreads and have been just devastated by the news.  Here is my last post on Goodreads….

I’m sorry to say that this will probably be the last book that I post on Goodreads. As a bookseller in an independent bookstore, the purchase of Goodreads by Amazon has forced me to rethink my use of the website. I am already bothered by customers coming into my store and asking for advice on what books to read and then not buying anything because they are going home to order the titles online so in good conscience I will be closing my Goodreads account very soon.

If in the future, if you are interested in what I and/or my co-workers are reading please visit, Blog.LemuriaBooks.com.

Please know that I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience here on Goodreads and loved to see what the world was reading and y’all were instrumental in helping me choose books to read. I loved feeling like someone was selling me a book for a change.

Thanks,
Maggie

As many of you already know, we each post about 2 or 3 times a month but I am going to need your help!!  I loved seeing what people out there were reading and really did use Goodreads to feel like someone was selling me a book.  Every few blogs of mine I plan to do a list of what I’m reading and I would really appreciate it if y’all would  comment and let me know what you are reading.  We readers have got to stick together!!!

Here are a couple that I have read recently…

The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro

Of course, Claire Roth has heard of the Gardner Art Heist but she never thought she would end up involved.  Being a struggling artist in Boston has had more downs than ups for Claire but she can make ends meet by painting reproductions of famous paintings.  She is approached by gallery owner, Aiden Makel, with a deal she can almost not refuse.  He claims to have the stolen Degas from the Gardner in his possession and if she will paint a reproduction of it then he will let her have a show at his gallery.  This show would put Claire back on track in the Boston art scene but is she willing to do what is asked of her.  Makel’s plan is to turn around and give the ‘fake’ back to the Gardner like he has found the painting on the black market.  She decides to go through with it but then begins to have her doubts about the authenticity of the stolen Degas itself.

The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper

David Ullman is an expert on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  After the school year is over he receives a mysterious job offer for a ‘demonologist’  in Venice but the details will remain unknown until accepts the position.  Things are not going well at home so he decides to travel to Venice and take his daughter, Tess, with him for a mini vacation.  What he encounters there will completely alter his belief system and his life.  When Tess falls from the hotel roof, David becomes completely consumed with getting her back that takes him on a quest across the United States.  Will he find her in time?

History has shown us that the art of talking trash started eons ago, back when Cain first said to Able “Hey bro, sweet veggies. Nice parsnips! Oops, I meant parsNOPES. Boom!” Sadly, in the past decades, the hallowed hall honoring some of history’s greatest talkers of trash (Ben Franklin and Winston Churchill have prominent, lamp lighted-portraits hanging directly in the middle) has become increasingly empty. Young potential students, wandering aimlessly across the fields of fruit ripe for the bashing have no teachers, no Obi Wans to guide them or tell them to wait until the moment is perfect. Emily has shown us that.

With that being said, allow me to gracefully introduce you to my final two contestants in this competition.

I favor an older school of illustrating, one that puts emphasis on both originality and talent. (This is probably why I can’t get behind Chris Raschka, another Caldecott winner–check him out and make up your own mind, you may love him) It’s this perfect combination of artistry and imagination that makes Madeline’s Rescue by Ludwig Bemelmans such an amazing pick for this competition. As the story of Madeline, her classmates, and the ever-watchful Miss Clavel unfolds to introduce Genevieve the dog, Bemelmans moves seamlessly from childlike pen and ink drawings to breathtaking scenes of Paris that are playfully detailed, making it no wonder that it won the Caldecott in 1954.

It’s a normal day for the twelve little girls in two straight lines until Madeline falls in the river and is rescued by a heroic dog named Genevieve. Naturally the girls take Genevieve home to live with them and of course the board of trustees chooses this time to visit and expel the life saving canine with the awful words “DOGS AREN’T ALLOWED IN SCHOOL”. The girls and Miss Clavel spring into action! Will they find their beloved Genevieve again?

Parents just DON’T understand! Um, I mean trustees.

In the end, all is as it should be, twelve little girls in two straight lines who left the house at half past nine in rain or shine….plus maybe a dog or two extra.

You want more unbelievable fabulousness you say? Alright, first of all, calm down. Second of all, let me tell you about Amos and his perfectly sweet menagerie of friends. Teaming up to win the Caldecott in 2011, husband and wife duo Philip and Erin Stead (He writes, she illustrates) created an amazing book called A Sick Day for Amos McGee. This story chronicles a few days in the life of Amos, an elderly zookeeper who takes such good care of his animals that when he is taken sick one day, they decide to go to his house to take care of him in turn. Touching without being syrupy, this book is the cream of the crop. And the illustrations! Oh please can we talk about these illustrations for a minute? Combining the old school with the new Erin Stead gives us graceful pencil sketches that experiment with the back and forth between black and white and color. But that’s enough of me describing, just look at them. In this case, a picture really is worth a thousand words. (Or points.)

And that’s all, folks. We’ve limited ourselves to five contestants each and I truly believe that I picked the best of the best. What I’m going to do now is pick my absolute favorite one from the five I have chosen, which is hard because it’s like picking a favorite child, but here goes…..[pause while I walk away and do some shelving because this actually deserves some serious thought]…Ok, it’s been about 30 minutes and not only did I have a short visit with my mother in the store, I have also picked a favorite. It’s Amos. I love Mirette her red-headed determination. I love Sylvester and his silly blunderings, and I love, love that industrious Ox Cart Man. And gosh I love Madeline. But I honestly believe that A Sick Day for Amos McGee is the perfect blend of good storytelling and masterful art. It seems now that it would be silly to choose anything else. I await your final contender with great anticipation, Emily Grossenbacher.

Join Lemuria’s Book Club Registry and we’ll order your book club selections for you and let you know when they’re ready for pick-up!

Book Club Members will receive a membership card and receive a 10% discount on their book club’s reading selections.

We see members of Lemuria’s Book Club Registry as part of a reading community. Members will also have opportunities for exclusive sneak peeks at new releases and special author events.

To join have your book club leader fill out an application or stop by and talk to one of our booksellers.

Book Club Registry Application

Are you looking to join a book club? Lemuria hosts two book clubs that are open to our community.

The Lost Book Club of Atlantis

(open to the public)

The Lost Book Club of Atlantis began in 2006 and is facilitated by a Lemuria bookseller. Atlantis reads contemporary and modern fiction along with an occasional nonfiction selection chosen by a Lemuria bookseller.

This book club meets the first Thursday of every month at Noon in Lemuria’s Dot Com Building across the parking lot from Banner Hall. Feel free to bring your lunch. If you are interested in joining, stop by the bookstore and say hello to Lisa or e-mail her at lisa@lemuriabooks.com. Click here for more details and to see the reading list.

“A good book should leave you slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” -William Styron

The Cereus Readers Book Club

(open to the public)

The Cereus Readers Book Club was created in honor of Jackson writer Eudora Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower and called themselves “The Night-Blooming Cereus Club.” In this same spirit of friendship and fellowship, this new book club is launched. The goal of the Cereus Readers is to introduce readers to the writing of Eudora Welty–her short stories, essays, and novels–and then to read books and authors she enjoyed herself or were influenced by her.

All meetings will held at the dot.com building adjacent to Banner Hall from 12-1 p.m. Feel free to bring your lunch. If you are interested in joining, stop by the bookstore and say hello to Lisa or e-mail her at lisa@lemuriabooks.com to be added to the e-mail list. Click here to see the reading list.

“I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them–with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.” -Eudora Welty

Would you like to start your own book club?

Here are some points to consider:

Would you like members by invitation only or is the book club open to the public?

How big should the reading group be? Usually 6-12 members is a good number, ensuring that the book club does not fall apart if a few do not show up.

How will you choose the books? Will the books be chosen by a different member each time? Or will a leader choose the books?

Will there be a certain theme? Mystery, Culture, Classics, Contemporary Fiction, Non-Fiction, Science, History, Literature by Women, or Poetry? Also consider keeping the reading selections diverse with titles that your members might not normally read.

Who will lead the discussion? Will the discussion be open or more guided? Do you want your group to stay on topic or just have good time with food & drink & books.

If you have a practice that works well at your book club, please feel free to share it in the comments section below. Every book club is different!

“A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.” -Henry Miller

All of the book quotes were found in Book Love: A Celebration of Writers, Readers, and The Printed & Bound Book edited by James Charlton and Bill Henderson, Pushcart Press, 2011.

“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” -Edward P. Morgan

It may still be cold outside but at Lemuria we’re already thinking about Summer Reading! This is our third year to work with One Jackson Many Readers, a collaborative partnership with JPS, United Way, Jackson-Hinds Library Systems, City of Jackson, MPB, Jackson Zoo, Mississippi Children’s Museum, and others to support summer reading. We are also honored to share that One Jackson Many Readers has been named one of the Governor’s Top School-Community Partnerships.

Last year the Jackson Public School system saw dramatic increases in books read over the summer along with a significant increase in circulation at our Jackson-Hinds Library system. This year the One Jackson Many Readers team has set a goal to find ways to increase reading among middle and secondary school kids. Any parent knows this is no easy task! Despite the challenges of getting kids to read, the gains will last a lifetime, and kids who don’t read during the summer can lose up to three months of academic progress.

As our One Jackson Many Readers team strengthens every year, I am continually encouraged by what our community can do. Thank you to everyone who supported the Pages of Promise book drive last year. We collected many donated books from individuals but also we were able to offer our 20% discount to large donors who have adopted schools or school groups. When these orders are placed through Lemuria, all of your tax dollars stay here in our community. It’s a win-win situation.

This year when you donate a book to the Pages of Promise book drive not only do you get a 20% discount on those books but you also get a free pass to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (March 21-24) for every book you donate. You can get up to four tickets. Come get yours before they’re all gone!

Stay tuned for more news on One Jackson Many Readers!

If you have any questions about how you and your group can be involved in One Jackson Many Readers, contact lisa@lemuriabooks.com

Fairy tales are literally everywhere. In the movies hitting the big screen to a swath of new show on the small screen. I myself love the show Grimm and Once Upon a Time. We could call this new wave of modern fairy tales a fad, but these age old tales were being told long before the Grimm Brothers wrote them down. They were altered and rearranged and changed. They spark emotion, give a template in which to be creative and relive a familiar tale. So it makes perfect sense that novelist would also be modernizing these stories. In fact, they have been for decades.

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer takes it a step further–into the future. Lizzie already told you about Cinder here, but as of yesterday, book 2 in this series is here–Scarlet! And you know how second books usually have the sophomore slump? Not this one! Meyer does something that is ingenious, because yes, she does switch perspectives and introduce a whole new character and plot line, but the timeline of the series keeps chugging along. Scarlet picks up days after Cinder ended. And as you can guess from the cover of the book, Scarlet’s story is a take on Little Red Riding Hood. The tag line for the book is one of my favorites: “This time, it’s Little Read Riding Hood set in the distant future. And yes, there is a big, bad Wolf.”

We here at Lemuria are all huge fans of this series. I think five of us are reading or have read it so far. And for a bookstore, that pretty amazing. Meyer doesn’t rest on the laurels of these ancient stories. She takes them and uses them as building blocks to make something entirely new. We all especially like the really the evil villains Meyer adds to these stories. And no I’m not going to tell you who they are.

So come gush over fairy tales, meet an exciting new author and have a good time, tomorrow, Thursday, February 5th at 5:00!

My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read and Shop

Edited by Ronald Rice

Black Dog Books (2012)

Barry Moser’s reading of his essay about our bookstore was surely the highlight of Lemuria experience in 2012. Many old friends shared the evening toasting to bookselling. Barry’s reading of his heartfelt essay was sentimental and beautiful. I spent the last hundred days of 2012 reading this delightful book, drinking it in slowly, finishing the afterword on December 31st.

Emily St. John Mandel’s concluding essay reconfirms the importance of bookselling as a service and an art form. Mandel’s concluding thoughts on consumer responsibility and spending your money and time are ways that you influence your community. Your choices should reflect your concern for the future of your town. Mandel ends with “if it happens that you’re someone who enjoys having a bookstore in your town, I would argue that it’s never been more important”

My Bookstore includes essays about stores I’ve visited and ones I’ve just heard about. I’ve discovered new stores offering new horizons for me to hopefully experience. I’ve been reinforced by Ron Rice’s collection that bookselling as an occupation of choice is alive and kicking as 2012 comes to an end.

Here are some of my favorite comments from other bookstore essays:

Park Road Books (Charlotte, NC) by Carrie Ryan:

“Independent bookstores like Park Road Books are so much more than a place to buy books. They’re a place for gathering, for sharing, for learning, for meeting new people. They are a home. There have been times I’ve been far away traveling and I’ve become homesick and walked into an independent bookstore because that’s something they all have in common: a feeling of coming home.”

From Mike Cochrane’s essay, The self-stated goal of Talking Leaves Books (Buffalo, NY):

“. . . to make available life-changing books, books that ‘open us up to new worlds, or illuminate more clearly our own,’ books that ‘stretch and deepen our vision and our comprehension of the universe and its creatures, cultures and ways.'”

Stephen White’s essay about the great Tattered Covers Booksellers (Denver, CO):

“Intuition seemed to inform them when I was just looking, which was usually. But engage one of them on the floor with a question or a request for guidance and any staff member would talk books with you, patiently. Find books for you, eagerly. Ask what you liked, recently. Tell you about books they loved, passionately.”

I end this blog with comments from a great essay by Wendell Berry on books and bookselling from Carmichael’s Bookstore (Lousiville, KY):

“To me, it is not enough that a book is thought realized in language; it must also be the language further realized in print on paper pages bound between covers. It is a material artifact, a thing made not only to be seen but also to be held and smelled, containing language that can be touched, and underlined with an actual pencil, with margins that can actually be written on. And so a book, a real book, language incarnate, becomes a part of one’s bodily life. One’s bodily life, furthermore, is necessarily local and economic. And so to the life embodied in books must be added to the life of bookstores . . . It is a fair incarnation of the manifold life of books. To go there and find a book I didn’t expect or didn‘t expect to want, to decide I want it, to buy it as a treasure to take home, to conduct the whole transaction in a passage of friendly conversation–that is in every way a pleasure. A part of my economic life thus becomes a part of my social life. For that I need actual people in an actual place in the actual world.

Long live tangibility! Love live slow communication!”

Lemuria, just off the electric George Saunders event, is planning a big 2013 year. This year influence our work efforts, get involved and let us influence your reading interest.

If you haven’t gotten a copy of My Bookstore we still have some signed by Barry Moser.

Real books signed by real authors in a real bookstore for real readers that care.

Finally a piece on My Bookstore and memories of Mississippi bookstores by Jim PathFinder Ewing, our friend, journalist, author, writer, editor, and blogger living here in Jackson.

“I’m definitely browsing in My Bookstore — as well as all the bookstores I’ve known — and enjoying immensely the memories of them in the company of literary friends both found in the book as well as in my own recollections. At the current pace of reading, I’ll probably finish My Bookstore sometime in the next year, or two. But, you know what? I’m finding, it’s like being in a bookstore itself. Browsing is part of the experience.”

Read more of this lovely essay here. It’s a wonderful read.