Written by Jimmie E. Gates, political writer/columnist at The Clarion-Ledger

When I was in my teens, one of my biggest thrills was coming to Farish Street in downtown Jackson.

It was the sight and sounds of a hustling mecca of black life. There were snappy dressed females with their hats. There were men dressed in classy suits, which made you think of The Apollo Theater or the old Cotton Club in Harlem. We had our Crystal Place on Farish Street, and for good measure, we had our Alamo Theater, which was a movie theater. I will never forget going to the Alamo Theater to watch Bruce Lee movies, Godzilla versus the Three-Headed Monster, and most of all watching actress Pam Grier in films.

Those were the days for me growing up. Farish Street was like a whole new world to me. There would be Mr. Armstrong selling Jet Magazines on Farish Street and vendors selling roasted peanuts in small bags and other items. The shoe shine guy, “Bear Trap,” would stay busy; there was a bakery/donut shop, but my favorite was the ice cream plant. Whenever we would be on Farish Street, we would always go by the ice cream plant. The ice cream man, whose name escapes me today, would give us ice cream bars. He would always be dressed in a white uniform and wearing a hat to match.

We would always come to Farish Street and shop. Although Farish Street was the mecca of black life in the 60s and 70s, many of the clothing stores and shoe stores were Jewish-owned.

I will never forget my Farish Street days. I don’t know when Farish Street began to deteriorate, but it probably occurred after the first mall opened in the city. Jackson Mall opened in 1969 followed by  Metrocenter in 1978. Farish Street stores and other stores began to leave the downtown area for the malls.

We longed for the bygone days of our youths; sometimes wondering if we can recreate those years.

I pass the empty shell of the buildings lining Farish Street today wondering if the hustle and bustle of the street will ever live again.

Decades have gone by since Farish Street was the place to go. There have been talk about reclaiming the area as an entertainment district, but the talk hasn’t materialized into returning Farish Street to its heydays.

I know others have their own fond memories of places and things in Jackson that were once special to them. Farish Street was that place for me.

There was a song by the late Luther Vandross  called “Dance With My Father” that was one of my favorites. The lyrics were based upon Vandross’ childhood  memories of  his late father and mother often dancing together. Vandross knew his dream could never come true when he wrote the song because his father was deceased. We all have our dreams; the dreams that would make us happy. Seeing Farish Street alive again with life and vitality would be a dream come true for me.

In my last blog, I mentioned Interview with the Vampire as one of my favorite Southern Gothic books. So yeah, I’m an Anne Rice fan. And it’s been 11 years with 11 books in the series. What do I think of her newest release?

Ok, to start, I think there are two types of Vampire Chronicles books. The first type is a memoir about one of the characters (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Vampire Armand, Merrick). The other type is “in which Lestat does something insane”. That’s really it. If you’ve read the books, think about it.

I’m right aren’t I?

Prince Lestat is the latter type. Through the years, Anne Rice’s fans have trashed her previous books on review boards when her stories began to sound like fan fiction and not like a serious actual book in the series. (Lestat joined an 80’s rock band?!)

But personally, I’m just enjoying the ride.

A lot of fiction I read is just for fun. Unless I read something that I believe legitimately hurts society with its message, I restrain from divulging into needless debate about something that’s just for entertainment. I save serious analytical debate for works I consider up to that par. Prince Lestat does have some crazy moments, but it has some great writing too. The characters are just as interesting as fans will remember, and the plot will throw you for a loop for about half of it until you can begin to connect the dots. It entertained the hell out of me, and that’s what it was supposed to do.

Four Tom Cruise’s out of five!

By Jostein Gaarder, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, and illustrated by Rosemary Wells

There are officially 25 days left until Christmas. In the Christian tradition, today marks the beginning of Advent, the period of anticipation and preparation before the birth of Christ on Dec. 25. This book is the perfect addition to any home, and will help your family on the journey towards Christmas, much in the same way Mary and Joseph journeyed to Bethlehem. The Christmas Mystery is a Norwegian tale about a young boy named Joachim who goes with his father to buy an advent calendar on Nov. 30. They find a very old one that looks homemade. The book-seller gives it to them for free, saying, “I think you should have it for nothing. You’ll see, old John had you in mind.”

When Joachim opens up the door to Dec. 1, a piece of paper falls out. On the back of the paper is a story of a little girl named Elisabet who follows a lamb out of the department store, and each day continues her journey following the lamb. The book is divided into 24 chapters, each representing a day of Advent, and would be perfect to read aloud for each day leading up to Christmas. Each chapter is preceded by a jewel-like illustration by Rosemary Wells, and flipping the pages feels like opening up the flap on an Advent calendar.

Discover the story within a story; as Joachim unfolds each day on the Advent calendar, he also reads about Elisabet’s journey through time to Bethlehem and the birth of Christ. Joachim and his parents also become involved in a journey — to discover the identity of John, the man who made the Advent calendar, and the mystery of the real-life Elisabet, who disappeared 40 years ago on Christmas Eve. This Advent season, pick up the The Christmas Mystery for the whole family to enjoy the wonder and mystery of Christmas.

Written by Clara

As one grows older, reading for hours on end is a luxury. More often than not, a book is read in bits and pieces. So it was delightful to discover the books of Katherine Rundell, who writes with such vivid lyricism that I finished both of her books, uninterrupted, in one Sunday afternoon.

Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (Simon and Schuster, 2014)

This book is perfect to read, in fact, when it might be thundering outside. Wilhelmina Silver (or Will for short) loves running wild on the African savanna where her father is the foreman of Two Tree Hill farm. Rundell’s prose dances like the lilting speech of the savanna: “It was like the world was carved out of expectant silence. Will sniffed and tucked her legs under her chin. Her knees smelled the same as the air, of woodsmoke and earth. Had anyone ever been as happy as her?” When Will’s father dies of malaria, she is left an orphan and is sent away to boarding school in cold, urban London. Boarding school in England, she discovers, is not a place that welcomes racing, singing and cartwheeling, but is a gray contrast to her sunny Africa. Young readers will recognize Will’s journey to stay true to herself as the world around her changes. The magic of the African savanna comes from Rundell’s own childhood growing up in Zimbabwe, where she lived until she was 14.

Rooftoppers (Simon and Schuster, 2013)

Rundell’s first novel begins with the lines, “The morning of its first birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel.” In Rooftoppers, Rundell flexes her storytelling muscles: “Think of night-time with a speaking voice. Or think how moonlight might talk, or think of ink, if ink had vocal chords. Give those things a narrow aristocratic face with hooked eyebrows, and long arms and legs, and that is what the baby saw as she was lifted out of her cello case and up into safety. His name was Charles Maxim, and he determined, as he held her in his large hands — at arm’s length, as he would a leaky flowerpot — that he would keep her.” Charles names the baby Sophie, and what follows is Sophie’s adventure to find her mother, whom she believes is still alive. As she races over the rooftops of Paris, young readers will be swept up in the magic of the story.

Written by Clara

3 or 4 nights a week I moonlight as a bartender. And so whenever a new cocktail book comes out, I can’t wait to see what it’s all about. The craft cocktail revolution over the last ten years has brought in many new “classic cocktail” books. But I am not exaggerating when I say, they all pale in comparison to Death + Co’s book. Here are some reasons:

1. This book is sexy. The cover (black boards with silver inlay lettering, the photography, and the illustrations (pen and ink drawings of the tools of the trade are interspersed throughout) all come together to make this a well-rounded addition to any cocktail enthusiast.

2. Reading recipes was never this much fun. I’m sure that not everybody wants to spend their Sunday afternoon reading cocktail recipes, but that’s not the only thing on these pages. Wondering exactly what Aquavit is? Check out page 37. The authors recommend that you try Linnie Aquavit or Krogstad Aquavit. Wondering what bitters do to a cocktail, page 47 is invaluable. (Did you know there are 2 basic ways bitters work in a drink–lifting or binding?)

3. The Regulars. Being a bartender is great, not just for the creativity of making something that somebody is going to drink and enjoy immediately, but because of the regulars. Death + Co features some of the people who have kept them on their toes and in business throughout the book. This homage to the man or woman on the other side of the bar is pretty classy. (I’m also nosey; I want to know what Sherri Harrison drinks and why.

4. Graphs and Charts. There is a flow chart to help you decide what kind of spirits/cocktails you should drink. There is a glossary of bar terms. A pie chart breaking down the flavor profile of the major spirit categories and how they mix together.

5. It’s for everybody. Yes, this book is chockfull of information for bartenders and restraunteurs (in fact, I think that EVERYBODY working behind a bar should read this book) but it’s also a great starting point for the hobbiest. There is advice for setting up a bar in your home, and even recipes for large-batch cocktails to serve at your next Christmas party.

6. The Drinks. Death + Co opened in NYC in 2006 and their attention to detail has made them one of the best cocktail bars in the country. Taste a drink and you will know why. From simple and classic (Negroni, Last Word, Old Fashioned) to complex (Smoked Horchata, Cobra’s Fang, Sweet Hereafter) these drinks are worth lingering over.

-A

The Life- Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo is brimming over with a treasure-trove of wisdom.  What can I possibly say to convince you that it is a gem of a book that may be the pick of the non-fiction crop of best books of 2014-2015?  Moreover, it is a call to action that can make anyone’s life better.

It’s all about getting your house in order, both literally and figuratively; by following a set of perhaps counter-intuitive steps.  Rather easy steps if you want to start your again life feeling fresh, transformed, and light as a dust bunny.  Ms. Kondo’s mantra is “discard anything that doesn’t spark joy.”  Are you truly ever going to wear that t-shirt that made you feel like Superman? Touch it.  Does it still give you a spark of joy?  If not, discard it.  She says discarding things is a letting go, that frees you up for your passions and your purpose.  Are you holding onto letters from old boyfriends who are now just pleasant memories of things past?  Throw them away.  That was then.  Now is now.  Make room for yourself.

Ms. Kondo is a self-professed lover of tidiness, a love kindled as early as age 5 when she was left to her own devices and imagination by a well-meaning mother whose nurturing centered around a younger and an older sibling.  While other kids played on the playground, our gentle author tidied up the bookshelves and janitor’s closet; not for recognition, but out of a passion for putting things in their rightful place.  Now she is a consultant around the world and her book has sold more than 2 million copies, having been particularly embraced by the Japanese, German and British.

So take my word for it.  Read it, act on it, then pass it on.  Ms. Kondo says of practicing the principles in this book, ”A dramatic reorganization of the  home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective.  It is life transforming.”

Here’s a fun Christmas idea that we book movers at Lemuria can do for you, except for the bow:  Buy 5 or 6 books, just enough to stack without them toppling, starting at the bottom with Jackson by Ken Murphy, and then top it off with The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  Secure with flat, thick strands of gold ribbon leading to the fluffy generous bow right on top of Ms. Kondo’s book.  All tidy and nice.

Marie Kondo  213 pages, $16.99 Ten Speed Press

Written by Pat

Adie’s got a nose for winners, ladies and gentlemen! Redeployment just won the National Book Award! 

The National Book Award for fiction (as well as the other genres) will be announced this Wednesday, and the list of contenders is, as it is every year, a compilation of some of this year’s finest releases.

This year’s list is a fruit salad of books. Blockbuster Marilynne Robinson’s Lila. Overlooked until now, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Anthony Doer’s World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See. Lebanese-American Rabih Alameddine’s quiet but unboring An Unnecessary Woman. And Phil Klay’s debut collection of short stories, Redeployment.

The real surprise here is Redeployment. As we head into another year of war in the Middle East, American soldiers once again returning to Iraq, this is a war we would like to see behind us. Give us stories of soldiers returning home. Of lives rebuilt from the wreckage of war. Of battlefields grown over. Of anything except IEDs and terrorist cells and soldiers crippled with PTSD. But Klay writes about the Second Gulf War in a way I have never read about it before.

Each of the 12 stories drowns the reader in a different facet of contemporary warfare–the chaplain sent to minister to marines, a state department worker establishing a water treatment facility for Sunni and Shiite, a veteran on the GI bill, a soldier in charge of collection remains.

Reading Redeployment, I was pleasantly surprised by the subtle power Phil Klay displays. Many of the stories walk the line between comedy and tragedy. His adherence to his characters is a force to be reckoned with.

Written by Adie

Working at a bookstore has unfortunate side effects.  One of the prerequisites for working at Lemuria is being a fairly regular reader.  We encourage all of our employees to read, and read often.  The basis of being a good bookseller is reading and being able to accurately (and honestly) convey your experience with customers looking for the next best thing.  For me, this means prioritizing my time for only the best books.

Therein lies the unfortunate side effect.

You see, you can never truly appreciate the sun without rain.  So, objectively, can we place one above the other?  The sun and rain both provide pros and cons.  Objectivity is almost impossible when choosing why we like one more than the other.  Adam Sternbergh has cooked up a torrential downpour with his hard boiled mystery series.

Earlier this year Random House sent the us a huge batch of Advance Reading Copies.  These special edition books are printed for the sole purpose of spreading the good news about upcoming releases.  I like to site down with a few crates and start dividing the books in keep and toss piles respectively.  Shovel Ready had a hilariously bad title and an even worse cover.  I threw it in the keep pile.  Shovel Ready is the first in a new mystery series that follows Spademan.

He’s a garbage man.  Not the kind of garbage man that takes out the trash.  He’s the kind that takes out the trash.

Spademan considers himself a bullet.  Just point, pull, bang.  Only one rule:  no kids.  All he needs is a name, he’ll take care of the rest.  Point, pull, bang.  Except he doesn’t use guns.  He uses a box cutter; it gets the job done. The book starts up with Spademan receiving a call with his latest hit and he sets off the do what he does best;  only he doesn’t because its a kid.

Shovel Ready takes place in a dystopian New York recovering from a nuclear terrorist attack on Times Square.  The city has been all but abandoned by the rest of the country leaving a great divide between the city’s elite and the poor.  Just before the attack an alternate reality is constructed for the people that can afford it called the limnosphere.  The limn allows for a user to fulfill visor her wildest fantasies.  After the bombing, Spademan sinks into the limn to escape the world around.

Now, I’d like to pause for a moment to say that all of this is ridiculous.  If it sounds that way, it’s because it is.  It’s ridiculous and I love it.

After a trail of bodies, the book wraps up quite nicely and ties up all the plot points in under 300 pages.  Almost.

I had absolutely no idea a sequel was coming out until 2 days ago.  I immediately stopped all of my books in progress and settled in for another wild ride through the disjointed and frequently inconsistent world of Near Enemy.

Near Enemy picks up a year after Shovel Ready.  Spademan gets a call, and gets to work. …then he doesn’t.  Again.  Near Enemy’s narrative genesis is identical to Shovel Ready, and I have no idea how Adam Sternbergh got away with this.  It contradicts everything that Spademan is supposed to be.  In the first book  Spademan doesn’t kill his target because she’s a kid, but in this book, he just doesn’t do his job.  I’m expected to just go with it.

And I do.

These books are the perfect palate cleansers.  After reading book after book, classic after classic, it’s nice to just sit back and enjoy the ride.  I can’t be objective about this series because I know the only reason I’m reading them is because how fun they are.  Things rarely make sense, characters are unpredictable, everything is convenient, and I don’t care.

Like the characters I’m happy to leave the dark, dense literary world behind and tap-in to the world that Adam Sternbergh has created for me.  His limnosphere of happenstance.

Shovel Ready is available now in paperback.

Written by Andre

People often talk about all the places you can go with a book. LeVar Burton assured me on Reading Rainbow that, partnering with a book, my imagination is unstoppable, and I can travel anywhere in time or space. I can empathize with others and learn what it’s like to be a pauper, a king, or that person next door I just didn’t quite get before.

Everyone should travel through books, with books, and to places where you can’t even take books, then write about it. But as I’ve traveled around the world and moved within the US, my yearning for settledness, or a sense of home, has intensified.

Feeling a hunger for community, identity, and home, I became engrossed in literature of displacement, particularly Irish literature. Home preoccupies many Irish writers, who have been scattered from their close-knit island across the planet, left to make sense of their identity without the help of the familiar. This struggle obviously isn’t unique to the Irish, though. Today, according to the UNHCR, over 51 million people are forcibly displaced from their homes, and millions more are unsure where to call home for other reasons. Displaced or not, we feel the longing for home, the need for settledness that we may not find even in familiar surroundings.

As I leaf through the pages of the Jackson book, each image helps me piece together my home. I didn’t grow up in Jackson, but in many ways I’m finding myself here. The memories I have of each image join with the collective memories of my neighbors and others across the city, helping me know and love this place better.

When I see photographs of the Eudora Welty Commons, memories of wedding receptions I’ve attended there come back to help me piece together what was. Friends who now live across the Atlantic are suddenly back with me on that page to re-celebrate their special day and remember distant community.

On another page, I visit the Elite Restaurant, where my family used to regularly dine before attending a ballet, theater, or musical performance at Thalia Mara Hall. The cozy booths reassemble memories of good conversations, delicious food, and feelings of anticipation in this historic Jackson landmark.

This is why I can’t recommend the Jackson book enough—for long-time Jacksonians and those tasting their first sip of sweet tea, for brides and grooms starting their first home together here, and for Jackson ex-pats who need a tangible way to reconstruct home wherever in the world they find themselves.

No, you can’t really buy home in book form. But you can re-remember it, putting splintered fragments back together in your mind. And Jackson helps make home whole again.

Written by Marianna 

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com.