How long have you worked at Lemuria? Eight years.
What do you do at Lemuria? I look after Lemuria’s First Editions. We have two rooms of collectible books plus the first editions we have in the Dot Com building next to Banner Hall. I take care of the first editions we have, and I also take special orders for ones we do not have. I maintain Lemuria’s First Editions page on the website, and since our new website went up this year, I have slowly been adding our first editions to the website. I also write a column about book collecting for The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Book Page and look after our two book clubs, Atlantis and Cereus Readers.
Talk to us about what you’re reading right now. I just finished reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami for Lemuria’s Atlantis book club. He’s one of my favorite authors. I’m a fan of magical realism for total escape! A few others:
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti
Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser
M Train by Patti Smith
A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
What’s currently on your bedside table (book purgatory)?
The Early Stories of Truman Capote
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (reading for book club)
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (reading for book club)
Hemingway in Love by A. E. Hotchner
The Mare by Mary Gaitskill
How many books do you usually read at a time? One to five books at a time.
I know it’s difficult, but give us your current top five books. I could list my favorite books according to different stage of life. A book can mean everything to at one stage of life and then it means less in another stage until another book takes its place. But here are some of my all time favorites:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir
Anything by Robert Walser
What did you do before you worked at Lemuria? I taught English as a Second Language, mostly at the university level, in the United States and in Austria. I worked about a year at Davis-Kidd booksellers in Jackson, Tennessee during college.
Why do you like working at Lemuria? The books, new and old—for the way they smell and feel, for the beautiful craftsmanship of some of the finest and rarest books. The people—everyone comes to the bookstore looking for something different and I like helping them find it.
If we could have any living author visit the store and do a reading, who would you want to come? Alice Walker.
If you had the ability to teleport, where would you go first? A quiet tropical island.
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