Congratulations to Shelf Awareness sales and marketing manager Melissa Mueller, who tomorrow is marrying Dakota Solberg. We wish the cute couple all the very best!

Google executives told a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday that the company plans to "open its digital library to rivals and bookstores," according to Reuters. The hearing had been called "to discuss criticism of a 2008 settlement between the Authors Guild and Google on the grounds the deal to allow Google's massive scanning project created antitrust concerns, infringed copyrights and potentially posed privacy concerns."

In a statement, Google said it would "host the digital (out-of-print) books online, and retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore will be able to sell access to users on any Internet-connected device they choose."

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ABA member stores with IndieCommerce websites on the Drupal platform can now "sell more than 220,000 e-books in several formats," Bookselling This Week reported. "The new functionality allows consumers to purchase e-books and to have those books downloaded from store sites to consumers' computers and/or handheld devices." Supported devices include Adobe Digital Editions Readers, Microsoft Readers and Palm eReaders, including the iPhone.

"We're pleased to be able to offer IndieCommerce stores a way to take advantage of the burgeoning e-book market," said ABA IndieCommerce director Ricky Leung. "Most experts agree that the prevalence and popularity of digital media among consumers--especially younger people--will continue to grow. We believe that our new e-book functionality will help drive sales to ABA member stores and will be a great complement to the bookstore's traditional inventory."

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Jessica Seinfeld did not plagiarize another writer's work for her cookbook, Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, according to a ruling by Judge Laura Taylor Swain of Federal District Court in Manhattan, as reported by the New York Times. The wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld had been accused of copyright infringement, trademark violations and unfair competition by Missy Chase Lapine, whose The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals addressed a similar theme.

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The first time Pat Conroy came to Highlands, N.C., one of the banks didn't recognize him and declined to cash his check. "Maybe they'll know who I am at the bookstore," he thought. As a result, a beautiful relationship between author and bookshop began and hit another high mark last week when Conroy signed copies of South of Broad at Cyrano’s Bookshop, owned by Arthur and Clair Simpson.

The Macon County News reported that as "early as 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, a line began forming in Highlands. Filled with eager Pat Conroy fans, it snaked down Main Street and by noon . . . the line had moved around the corner and down Highway 64 East. Throughout the afternoon Highlands residents and visitors from North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and other surrounding states chatted as they waited to purchase the book and meet its famous author."

The original 12-3 p.m. schedule for the event stretched to 4:30, and 1,300 books were sold. Arthur said the shop has hosted big signings before, but "this is the first time we've had a book signing by an author while he was number one on the best seller list."

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Organizers of a bookstore cooperative that hopes to occupy the Shorewood, Wis., site of a former Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop (Shelf Awareness, June 16, 2009), said they have "entered into an agreement with Roundy's Supermarkets to occupy the space at 4093 N. Oakland Avenue," the Business Journal of Milwaukee reported.

While Open Book bookstore's organizers expect to be in the building by October 1 and possibly open by November 1, the "store will not open unless organizers can attract enough memberships to cover start-up costs and they must do so in September," according to board member Kit Vernon.

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Queen Anne View profiled Debbie Sarow, owner of Mercer Street Books, Seattle, Wash., "the new kid on the block, in an old and widely known second-hand bookstore."

"This has been a bookshop for over 25 years," she said of the bookstore that was Twice Sold Tales and Titlewave Books in previous incarnations. Sarow also observed: "There is a question of whether or not it's a good time to start a business period. But I hope there will be more of a trend to buying second-hand things in general. People still read, and I think people like to read something tangible, rather than a Kindle."

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Marketing to the body as well as the mind, San Diego State University bookstore is now selling the MAC Cosmetics line at a new MAC stand in the store. The Daily Aztec reported that the "makeup stand is yet another unique addition made available through Aztec Shops that has, in recent months, also included lucrative partnerships with Blick Art Materials and AT&T."

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The music website For Folk's Sake asked, "Are Mumford and Sons the most right-on band ever? It might be the case. Yesterday they took to the independent bookshops of West London to record sessions for Radio 1 and to promote the chain-free stores too. What nice chaps."

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Book trailer of the day: The Wyrm King, the final book in the Spiderwick Chronicles series by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black.

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Effective immediately, the Independent Book Publishers Association, formerly called PMA, has named Florrie Binford Kichler president of its board of directors. Current president Carlene Sippola has become chairman of the board. Kichler's mandate is to build strategic partnerships and expand programs and services for the association's 3,200 members. She will work with executive director Terry Nathan, who continues to oversee the day-to-day operations of IBPA.

Kichler was president of IBPA from 2006 to 2009 and was a member of the board from 2002 to 2006.

In a statement, Nathan said that the change "means that IBPA members nationwide will have a team with complementary skills focused on achieving the goals that are important to independent publishers. Given our years of experience working together in various IBPA roles, Florrie and I will quickly be able to combine our strengths and resources for maximum effect going forward." He added that having a president and chairman "serves to position IBPA for future growth and marks a definitive step in the association's development."

Sunday morning on Fox & Friends: John Calipari, author of Bounce Back: Overcoming Setbacks to Succeed in Business and in Life (Free Press, $26, 9781416597506/1416597506).

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Sunday morning on CBS's Sunday Morning: Jessica DuLong, author of My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson (Free Press, $26, 9781416586982/1416586989).

Bryan Fuller and Bryan Singer will adapt Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs as an hourlong comedy series for NBC. Variety reported that the book, which focuses on a fictional home shopping network, "came about when both Fuller and Singer independently contacted former HSN topper Mark Bozek, who resigned in 2002 to become a film and TV producer, about collaborating on a TV project."

"I love the world of home shopping--it's such a rich world," Fuller said. "There are those great metaphors of consumerism, buying happiness, all of that chasing material thing."

Philip Kerr's novel, If the Dead Rise Not, won the €125,000 (US$179,156) RBA International Prize for Crime Writing, "the world's most lucrative crime fiction prize," according to the Guardian, which reported that Kerr said he was pleasantly surprised by the size of the award: "I recently got a prize in France which was a few bottles of wine."

Kim Addonizio is a fiction writer, poet and teacher. Her poetry collections include Tell Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and What Is This Thing Called Love. Her fifth collection of poetry, Lucifer at the Starlite, is being published by Norton this month. She lives in Oakland, Calif.

On your nightstand now:

Oh God, I counted 67 books. (I have a nightstand on each side of my bed.) I can't seem to read one at a time anymore.  At the tops of various piles are a biography of Diane Arbus, two books of poetry by Dean Young, Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Augusten Burroughs's Dry. I'm on a memoir jag. Tell me true stories; don't make shit up! This is entirely unlike me--I love fiction and poetry. So I feel as though I've gone to the dark side.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first in C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles. I read them all, but the first one was like discovering dark chocolate or good sex. I kept looking for the magic door in our house that would let me escape from my family; the closest I got was my parents' closet, where I went to hide from my crazy, violent older brother. I can still clearly picture the electric buffer my dad used for his shoes.

Your top five authors:  

Denis Johnson and Lorrie Moore, for their sentences. And Johnson's descriptions of drug use have the power to rearrange your brain chemistry. Dean Young is currently the only poet I can stand to read. By now he probably thinks I'm stalking him, because I keep telling people this. Dean Young I love you! I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a while back and couldn't stop thinking about it, so I'm hoping to get to Remains of the Day soon. I'd never read David Sedaris until recently, when a piece in the New Yorker convinced me he was going to become one of my new favorite writers.

Book you've faked reading:

Insert name of classic here. I have, as somebody once said of (I think) Gore Vidal, "all the deficiencies of the autodidact." I'm stupendously ill-read.

Book you're an evangelist for:  

Any book that is passionate, gorgeously written and afterwards haunting. If a book isn't all those things, it is, as Willa Cather said, a cereal box. I want to eat real books.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The first book of poetry I ever bought, Denise Levertov's Life in the Forest. I had discovered the power of poetry but had no idea whom to read, and in this little bookstore in Boston, there was an image of a woman's transparent body among the trees, and it called to me.

Book that changed your life:

Kathy Acker's The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula. It was so far out. It made me realize that I could write whatever I wanted, that there shouldn't be any limits to the exploration of human experience.

Favorite line from a book:  

"The residents of Beverly Home made God look like a senseless maniac."--From a story by Denis Johnson. This line really speaks to me since my mother's in assisted living.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Defeating the It--that made a big impression on me. Defeating it with love.

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"The only rules I accept are the rules of grammar," proclaims Marine, the captivating narrator of Jacques Poulin's equally captivating short novel. Grammar aside, Marine is a person who welcomes the chaos of serendipity unconditionally. Visiting the gravesite of her mother and grandmother in a Quebec City cemetery, she is greeted by a man as he exits the nearby library. Is Marine creeped out by encountering an elderly stranger in a graveyard? Not on your life.

As it so happens, the man is Jack Waterman, a Quebec author. Since Marine had been considering translating Waterman's novel of the Oregon Trail into English, this meeting between strangers is fortuitous, with a touch of Kismet. Waterman agrees to let Marine translate his work; he also rents her a chalet on the Ile d'Orleans, outside Quebec City.

And so begins Marine and Waterman's complex dance as author and translator, set-in-his-ways curmudgeon and young woman adrift, two isolated souls aligning through a shared love of language. Her favorite T-shirt sports the Armand Gatti manifesto: "Mastering words is subversive and insolent." When they shop at Value Village for clothes more suitable than their usual grubby garb to make an official appearance, Waterman quotes Ernest Hemingway's "Wearing underwear is as formal as I ever hope to get." Tone, style and the mot juste define their mutual creed.

Words are sacred, but neither of them ignores other kinds of messages from the universe. A cat shows up at Ile d'Orleans, abandoned, with an ominous note tucked under the collar that identifies it as Famine. Because certain occurrences, like certain sequences of words, are no accident and demand one's full attention, Marine is compelled to resolve the mystery that note sets in motion. She enlists Waterman in her project, and they make a delightful team of amateur detectives. Sleuthing is yet another way they as artists reach out to strangers--to connect through their hearts. That they try to ease pain and suffering around them is the most important thing to them; if they should succeed, then all the better.

I won't be the one to give away the ending. I will reveal that, alone in the chalet one evening, Marine looks up the meaning of the word refuge. She finds: "Small structure high in the mountains where climbers can spend the night." With her signature directness, she reflects, "In my opinion that was the best definition of a novel." Readers will find true refuge here in her touching story of friendship, hope and love.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: A short novel that is brimming with satisfying tales of friendship, hope and love between two unlikely and enchanting characters.

I was planning to write this week's column about the anticipatory frenzy building for next Tuesday's release of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. After all, isn't everybody writing about it? And you have to love a book that generates conversation even among people who never talk about books. I wondered, however, what I could possibly add to the chatter that hadn't already been covered ad nauseam.

Then something unexpected happened, which made me aware once again of that curious, often irresistible force capable of diverting a reader's attention from the planned to the unexpected journey.

So here is my Dan Brown column.

On Tuesday morning, a strange noise, sounding like a tank, woke me. Maybe, I thought in a sleepy haze, it was a hostile takeover of our little Vermont valley by vacationing flatlanders reluctant to leave after the long holiday weekend.

From the second floor bedroom window, I saw--at the end of our lawn and less than 50 yards away--a steam shovel trundling down the center of the Battenkill River, its twin tracks clanking and spewing water. While canoes and kayaks and tubes regularly float by, this was a first. With its diesel exhaust wafting on the cool morning breeze, the machine began digging beneath the surface of the river, extracting gravel, moving fallen trees and rearranging boulders. I soon learned that the project involved shoring up the riverbank to prevent erosion and deepening the channel.

But one of the first things that crossed my mind was the question of whether these machines are stilled called steam shovels. So I looked that up online and discovered the correct term is "power shovel," though concessions are made for the fact that most people still use the original term.

As a reader and former boy-child, however, all this immediately sparked memories of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Some quick research led to the discovery that Caldecott-winning children's author and illustrator Virginia Lee Burton wrote Mike in 1939, and that August 30, 2009 had been the centennial of her birth.

A belated happy 100th birthday, Virginia.

Later in the morning I bought a copy of Mike at my local independent bookstore (I'll send it to the first person who e-mails me today) because I just couldn't resist revisiting this classic.

'Mike Mulligan had a steam shovel, a beautiful red steam shovel. Her name was Mary Anne," I read. "He always said that she could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week, but he had never been quite sure that this was true."

I know the feeling.

As good a steam shovel as Mary Anne was, she inevitably fell victim to progress: "Then along came the new gasoline shovels and the electric shovels and the new Diesel motor shovels and took all the jobs away from the steam shovels."

An old and new story if ever there was one.

I found the following on Anderson's publisher-generated website: "I literally draw my books first and write the texts after--sort of 'cart before the horse.' Whenever I can, I substitute picture for word."

Quite suddenly, this reference to pictures and words reminded me not of Dan Brown or the Mona Lisa, which might have nudged me back on topic, but of memoirist and biographer James Lord, who died August 23.

I had been planning to add an obituary note in Shelf Awareness soon because one of the many books he wrote is a favorite of mine. In A Giacometti Portrait, Lord recounts his experience sitting for the artist. I bought a copy in 2001 after seeing the Giacometti retrospective at MoMA, lost it, and just picked up another one recently to reread. It is bookmarked with my exhibition ticket for 11/19/01 at 10:30 a.m.

According to Lord, "If Giacometti cannot feel that something exists truly for the first time, then it will not really exist for him at all. From this almost childlike and obsessive response to the nature and the appearance of reality springs the true originality of vision."

"Well, at least I have the courage not to be prudent," Giacometti told Lord during one of their sessions. "I dare to give that one final brush stroke which abolishes everything."

At the end of Mike Mulligan, "everybody was happy."

The steam shovel is still grinding away at the Battenkill's riverbed today.

All this happened because I couldn’t decide what to write about Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. Maybe that's just the ongoing, unsolvable mystery of a reader's life.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)