Long Overdue

I went to the public library today. I had to return two overdue books - they were due back in August of 1991. One was a terrible novel called Mercy by David Lindsey. Never finished it - gave up after 30 pages or so. I saw a bit of the movie years later and it was crap, too. The other book was The Borderless World by Kenichi Ohmae. Can't say it left much of an impression on me. Even though these books were 15 years overdue, I didn't have to pay any fines. And I got a new library card.

I used my new library card to check out three books. I got the new John Harvey novel Ash & Bone, Jim Kelly's The Fire Baby, and Denise Mina's The Field of Blood. I tried to buy the Jim Kelly book in Ireland but couldn't find a copy. And I couldn't find any cheap American copies. It never occured to me that I could find it at the library - but there it was. On the whole, I was kind of surprised by all the books I found. I thought our library was strapped for cash but they had a lot of new books.

I'm reading the John Harvey book now. He's a great writer, one of my favorite crime writers of all time. He wrote a series of police procedurals set in Nottingham and stopped after ten books. After a bit of a break he's back with what seems to be a new series featuring a retired English cop. Ash & Bone is the second book. Flesh & Blood, the first, was pretty good. A new one is due to be published in the UK in April. (I have the English editions of most of his books and now that I'm seeing the American editions, I am shocked by how bad the American dust jackets are.)(Same for the Denise Mina book. What were they thinking?)

Both Harvey and Mina are very concerned with why crimes happen, especially the larger social forces that tend to produce crime. Its a very smart approach. And when well done, crime novels can tell us just as much (or more) about our world than literary/straight novels.

I don't know how much I'll use the library. I have a ton of stuff I really want to read already at hand. And the few things that are coming out that I want won't be out in the US for at least a year. But I may try and get Dope by Sara Gran when it comes out. And if they get a copy of her previous book, Come Closer, I'll get it. And maybe in March the new Sarah Waters. And I want to read more Paul Auster and I know they have his books.

The Visa and the Damage Done

I just got back from Ireland. I went to Galway for about a week with my dad. We made a pilgrimage to Kenny's Bookshop in Galway City before it closed its doors for good. (They'll continue with their internet store. And I heard rumors - which have not been independently confirmed - that they will open a new retail space in a new development in the docklands area of the city.) It was a great bookstore and I am glad I got the chance to go before it closed. (I was there when I was 10 years old but don't remember it.)

I also went into Charlie Byrne's Bookshop. And a place called Dubray Books, Eason Books, and Hughes & Hughes.

Kenny's was great. They had rooms and rooms of books. The place looks small from the photo but there were dozens of rooms in the place. In fact, on my third trip to the store I was still finding new rooms of books. We were there on their last day of business and the place was mobbed.

Charlie Byrne's has to be one of the best bookstore I've ever been to in my life. Really fantastic stock. It kills me that I can't go in there every week.

This is what I brought back with me:

Sleepyhead - Mark Billingham
Lazy Bones - MB
The Burning Girl - MB
Scaredy Cat - MB
Lifeless - MB
State of the Union - Douglas Kennedy
Imagination of the Heart - Vincent McDonnell
Always the Sun - Neil Cross
The Necropolis Railway - Andrew Martin
The Dark - John McGahern
Memoir - JMcG
The Swing of Things - Sean O'Reilly
An Accident Waiting to Happen - Adrian White
Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel
Juggling - Barbara Trapido
The Photograph - Eamonn Sweeney
Call the Dying - Andrew Taylor
The Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster
Arthur & George - Julian Barnes
Missing - Mary Stanley
A Game with Sharpened Knives - Neil Belton
The Moon Tunnel - Jim Kelly
Priest - Ken Bruen
City of Tiny Lights - Patrick Neate
Single Obsession - Des Ekin
Tokyo - Mo Hayder
Desire Lines - Annie McCartney
A Kind of Homecoming - Eugene McEldowney

Pre-Galway

I'm in Chicago for xmas and I managed to sneak in some book shopping while finishing my xmas shopping today. I went to one of those temporary book closeout stores that pop up in strip malls in the suburbs. These places specialize in remainders and overstock. I was about to leave, empty handed, when I spotted the new arrivals table.

I bought a copy of Barbara Trapido's Frankie and Stankie for two bucks. Brand new, a UK edition. I don't know if it was published in the US (it came out in 2003) but I've been looking for a copy since then. She's a South African who left for England a long time ago. I think this is her first book about South Africa. (I love South Africans who leave for England and become writers. J.M Coetzee is probably the most famous one now, but until last year - when he won the Nobel - that wasn't the case. And Justin Cartwright, too. And Trapido.) Her novel The Travelling Hornplayer (first chapter)is a fantastic book - its a sprawling story about a few English academic families and what links them - but its only 250 or so pages. I don't know why but I love coincidences so much. This book is full of them and every is connected in the end. A very moving book, too. And she's a great writer. A super-impressive feat in my mind. I was thrilled beyond belief to find her book today.

And I also bought a newly republished Michael Frayn novel, Towards the End of the Morning. Its an English copy and it will look very nice on my Michael Frayn shelf. (In a remarkable act of self-restraint, I passed on an inexpensive copy of the biography of Samuel Pepys that Frayn's wife wrote. I wanted to read it based on all the laudatory reviews it got - but I realized that I am never going to read 500 pages on the life a 17 century diarist no matter how much I might want to.) Also, I bought a new copy of something called The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin - a mystery novel revolving around trains in early 20th century England. I've read reviews of a few of his books and have been looking for them for a while - but again, he doesn't seem to be published in the country.

Lastly I picked up a copy of Juno and Juliet by Julian Gough. Its set in Galway, Ireland. I have it in hardcover, unread, at home. But since I am going there in a few weeks I thought it would be fun to read before hand.

I started reading one of my two unread Ken Bruen mysteries, The Magdalene Martyrs. A few summers ago I read a review in The Guardian about his first book to be set in Galway. The Guardian review said good things about it so I ordered it from Amazon UK. And I got hooked. There were, I thought at the time, seemingly a million things wrong with the book. I kept thinking, you can't do that. But I got hooked. And really fell for him. I've read all of his other stuff since.

Fish News

The first real reader (someone who seems to read read all the time, who really loves to read, that kind of person) I ever knew just sent me a copy of Charles Clover's The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat and it is a fantastic book. I read the chapter on Japan and the Tsuikiji fish market in Tokyo at lunch today (while eating sushi). Obviously, the book has me convinced that fishing and eating fish faces a bleak future so I am eating as much fish as I can while I can (though I end up feeling bad about it halfway through the meal - same with the tuna melt I ate when I read the introduction).

Clover occasionally mentions the amount of fuel it takes to sustain the modern fish economy. Trawlers burn a tremendous amount of diesel and planes fly fish everywhere. (One town in the north of England where the once legendary fishing has collapsed is now a market for fish caught all over the world - fish is flown in and distributed instead of fish caught locally and exported.) Clover slyly writes of all the carbon emitted by each flight of fish to Tsukiji. (Which reminded me of Ian Jack, editor of Granta, calculating the amount of carbon each of his potential family vacactions would emit - I believe he chose a train to France as the most sensible.)

I started reading Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler in bed last night. Its the perfect complement to the Clover book. O'Hanlon, a former science editor at the TLS, specializes in demented travel writing. In Trawler, he goes to sea in the North Atlantic to observe a scientist friend and the crew of a trawler. But they set to sea in the worst weather imaginable and I know there's to be trouble of some sort. Its also sort of an anthropology of commercial fisherman. (Link)

Trouble

Its still early December but I can tell my plan to not buy books in 2006 is already in serious trouble. Some nice literacy group just opened a bookstore in Dupont Circle. And I paid a visit on Thursday. And the place is fantastic. Almost tailor-made for me, in fact. Most of the stock is new and inxepensive (much less than the average half off cover price at a used bookstore). And the selection was overwhelming. In 20 minutes I found Francis Wheen's biography of Karl Marx, a book that I had been looking for the past few years but had never seen in a used bookstore, for 4$, and a brand new hardcover mystery novel to be used as a gift. I found about 50 things I wanted to buy.

I've been wanting to read the Marx biography primarliy because I like who wrote it, Francis Wheen, a British journalist. A few years ago I got his book How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions and really liked both it and his style. And then I found out about his Marx book and wanted to read it. (At the time I was about to go to Mississippi on vacation and thought it would be a funny book to bring along and be seen reading. No one else found this amusing.)

I found my library card and plan to return the last two books I checked out (in the summer of 1992) and will try to use the libary to save my 2006 experiment. It may work. But I'm nervous.

Smuggling, Vonnegut, and Dick

I wound up smuggling 12 years of old New Yorker magazines into my dad's basement at Thanksgiving. The plan was to throw them out now that I have them on DVD. But then I read an article in the Wall Street Journal which reminded me that DVDs won't be around forever. And then I had so much fun leafing through the copies as I packed them that I decided it would be better to keep them. My dad just had shoulder surgery so I knew he wouldn't come out to the car to help me unload when I arrived - and that meant I could sneak them into his basement without him knowing. He's been trying to clean out the basement for years but hasn't made much progress. Still, if he knew there were to be more boxes stored in the basement, it would freak him out.


I took some time over Thanksgiving to dig through boxes of books I had put into storage a long time ago. I excavated all my Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks. I've been thinking about him lately and felt like rereading some of his books. I read most of them in my early 20s and I think I have forgotten them enough to enjoy them all over. (I've also forgotton why I once liked him so much. I'm rereading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and I'd say its enjoyable. But there's a level of goofiness in much of his work that I don't find as thrilling as I once did. Like when teenagers read and identify with The Catcher in the Rye - it seems that if you read that book as an adult, the impact isn't the same. Vonnegut may be the same way but for people in their early 20s.)

I also dug out all my Philip K. Dick novels. I spent a few years in my early 20s buying up all the copies I could find - which was kind of hard as I remember it. Most of his work was out of print then and the Dick revival had yet to start. After looking through all the old books, I remembered why I bought them but never read them - he's not a good writer. He has some great ideas. But he's not a good writer. I suppose if he had more time to work on his books, wasn't on drugs the whole time, and had publishers and editors who valued his work, then the books would have been much better. A visionary, yes. But not a fun guy to actually read.

The other books I pulled out of the crawlspace were all old Penguins that I wanted to add to my Penguin bookcase here in Washington.

I estimate I have 20-25 large boxes of books in the crawlspace. I plan to rummage through them again at xmas in search of 1980s Vintage trade paperbacks with Lorraine Louie cover art.

2006: The Year of the Shark

I am considering a radical experiment. I plan to not buy any books in 2006. Of course, there will be a few exceptions. But, in general, with a few exceptions, I will not buy books in 2006.

I reserve the right to buy Philip Roth's new novel in the spring. And if Ian Rankin publishes a new book in 2006, I'll get it.

I am going to Ireland in January and since I will be on foreign soil, I will be allowed to buy a few books. Truthfully, the entire trip is devoted to buying books. Kennys, a famous bookstore in Galway, is closing its shop and shifting its operations to the internet. Since my dad and I have a long history with the store, we're going to see it one more time before it closes. I was there when I was ten years old but don't remember it. I discovered the store's website in the late 1990s and got books that way. My dad has been back several times without me. So, I have to buy books on this trip, my 2006 plans notwithstanding.

A private school in the Washington suburbs has a wonderful used booksale in the spring - I'll go to that.

When the Booker Prize longlist is announced in August, I think I should be able to buy a few from the list if I feel the need to.

I have enough stockpiled to last a few years. I hope to read the rest of Peter Robinson's novels. I have a bookcase entirely filled with books by George Simenon that I need to get through. Sometimes if I am sitting in front of a bookcase, I play this game where I plan which books I would read and in what order if they were the only books I could read. I might play that game for real now. Or the game where I am about to go into the FBI's witness protection program and can only take 25 of my books along with me.

We painted the apartment this weekend and I had to move hundreds and hundreds of books in order to do get to the walls. Thousands, probably. And I saw a lot of books that I had lost track of or forgotten how much I wanted to read. I think that the only way to do this is to stop buying new books.

I'm worried how this will go. I used to hear that sharks never stopped swimming because they needed water forced through them to breathe - and if they stopped moving, they would die. I think it turns out that this is only partly true. Scientists found sharks that sort of slept in currents of water and kept breathing that way. (I have this interesting looking book called The Shark Net by Robert Drewe - an Australian memoir about life in the west of the country when a killer is on the loose - or something like that. I think I'll read it next year.) (I also really want to read, but don't yet own, Charles Clover's The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat but I don't own a copy yet. I could probably get a copy in Ireland. And Neal Ascherson's The Black Sea, I can read that now, too. And Redmond O'Hanlon's last book, Trawler. I gave away my copy of that book on how cod saved/shaped/changed-whatever the world. I never finished it. I could finish that.) I fear that I am shark-like with my insatiable desire to acquire books. I should stop with this shark stuff because I have a long history of getting shark information wrong - especially when it comes to fresh water sharks.