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. 

At the moment, it seems the only spines of books I’ve been cracking involve how to use the direct or indirect method in chemistry, or how the respiration cycle works best with glucose instead of pyruvate. Let’s just say I miss reading for fun. Sadly, I doubt such a thing will happen before my Christmas break.

To ease the pain of my reading rut, I’ve started to form a list of what I plan to read the moment I get a break from the demands of college life. One involves short stories, the other novels, and the third is a collection of both but for a younger audience. As this will be a three-part blog, here is the first section, in no particular order, of short stories.

Part One

Short Stories:

1. A Guide to Being Born, by Ramona Ausubel

This collection of short stories was recommended to me by my friend/coworker, Kelly. So far I’ve read the first story in this collection. Let’s just say it’s weird, like, really weird, but that kind of weird that’s incredibly wonderful and makes you wish you’re existence involved more weirdness. Does that make sense? (Oh well, if it doesn’t, then maybe you’re not weird enough. Ever think of that?)

2. The Color Master, by Aimee Bender

I can’t remember what made me grab this book in the first place (although, I believe it had a lot to do with the attention other Lemurians were giving it when it first came out), but I’ve been dying to try this author out for some time now. I mean it, as I write this sentence now, I can see her book on my desk––it looks so pretty. And while her other collection, Willful Creatures, didn’t necessarily make its way into my dorm room as of yet, you can bet I plan to read it just as much.

3. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, by Lydia Davis

I started reading this collection last year at the beginning of my freshman year, and continue to pick it up from time to time. (Personally, I pair this collection with Damien Rice’s album, O.) I’m a fan. You can also ask Adie, she has some mad love for this author.

4. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, by Karen Russell

UGH. It practically kills me how long this book has been on my to-read list. I feel like barely a day goes by when someone isn’t telling how wonderful Karen Russell is, specifically this book. I want to be able to say these things too!

5. Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek

I’ve read the first three works in this collection, and can already tell that this book is definitely worth reading the whole way through, not that it necessarily needs to be read in any certain order. I feel confident in this recommendation. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to finish it before the New Year.

6. The Elephant Vanishes, by Haruki Murakami

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of the reason as to why I picked this book up in the first place didn’t involve the title or the cover. (Like you don’t judge a book by its cover?) But I don’t think I could ever go wrong with this author, I haven’t met a Lemurian yet who doesn’t like him.

7. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, by Kate Bernheimer

I LOVE fairy tales, so imagine my excitement when I found this little gem in our anthology section. Aimee Bender? Neil Gaiman? Kelly Link? I believe it was Oliver Twist who said, “Please, sir, I want some more?”

8. Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, by Anton Chekhov

I decided last year during my creative fiction class that I would like to read more Anton Chekhov than the one short story we were assigned. Don’t you also feel your life needs more Russian authors? I know mine certainly does.

Written by Elizabeth 

Being on facebook has at least one very good advantage. My friend from high school Becky H. Parrish is a recently retired art professor at the University of Texas at El Paso; she is a fantastic artist, an outspoken Democrat, and a bibliophile. When she posts on facebook about books she has read, I usually find them at Lemuria and read them, too. A few weeks ago, she posted that she was enjoying a day outside, under an umbrella, reading a great book that made her laugh and cry; and what’s more… it is fantastic. It’s Mona Simpson’s new creation Casebook.

A teenage boy named Miles and his friend Hector jerryrig a listening device in the basement that somehow (don’t ask me how) picks up the conversations on the upstairs phone. In the meantime, his parent’s marriage is quietly falling apart, a fact that wouldn’t be apparent if it weren’t for that piece of detective equipment in the basement. Miles has two sisters, younger twins he affectionately calls the Boops. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of affection in this book even though marriages are dissolving and people are moving to new neighborhoods to live on divided goods once shared by the intact families.

The two self-proclaimed detective friends Miles and Hector start to notice new phone calls and grow suspicious enough to engage the services of a private detective who lives far enough away for them to jump on their bikes and cycle over. Of course, there’s the matter of money and how to pay when they are just in middle school. How they do this is part of the fun and pathos of the gentle story which, like the art professor from UTEP says, will make you laugh and cry in this well crafted book seen through the eyes of a boy coming of age in California.

Written by Pat