Shelf Awareness for Friday, November 1, 2024


Other Press: Allegro by Ariel Dorfman

St. Martin's Press: Austen at Sea by Natalie Jenner

Berkley Books: SOLVE THE CRIME with your new & old favorite sleuths! Enter the Giveaway!

Mira Books: Their Monstrous Hearts by Yigit Turhan

News

Friends to Lovers Bookstore Coming to Alexandria, Va.

Friends to Lovers: A Romance Bookstore will open this month at 103 South Saint Asaph St. in Alexandria, Va. The Washingtonian reported that owner Jamie Fortin "hopes to include a little of something for everyone. There will be at least one book or two in each major subgenre of romance." 

Jamie Fortin

Describing the store as "a community space" for all people who love romance books, she said, "You're not gonna see just white and straight romance. If you're looking for small town romance, you'll find queer and BIPOC representation. We want to make it so they're not a niche find."

Fortin told the Washingtonian that the bookstore's name has two sources: her own story with her boyfriend as well as the desire to make it clear this store is not for kids. "This is for 'when Mommy needs her wine and to go to the bookstore,' " she said. "It's clearly for adult women and not just about reading smut. It's about spending time with your friends and doing what you love." 

When Fortin moved to Alexandria in August, she decided she wanted to contribute to the community of bookstores there, having loved bookstores in D.C. "I wanted something to differentiate from other bookstores, and this felt obvious to me.... In D.C. where it's so transient, people are looking for an in-person space. We've heard of retail 'scaling back'--but niche businesses are 'scaling up' because they're looking to build community."  

Thanks to the buzz for Friends to Lovers on TikTok and Instagram, the November 14 grand opening celebration sold out in 24 hours, with 200 people registered, the Washingtonian reported.  

Fortin credited the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership mentorship program and free resources for entrepreneurs as well as Alexandria's community of women business owners as a great support system. 


Harpervia: Counterattacks at Thirty by Won-Pyung Sohn, translated by Sean Lin Halbert


Indie Bookstore-Focused Compass Rose Publishing Announces First Three Titles

Compass Rose Publishing, launched in August by a group led by author and former Congressman Robert Mrazek; author, former Congressman, and bookstore owner Steve Israel; and former American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher, has announced its first three titles: The Harvard Murders by Bob Mrazek, which will be published February 4, 2025; The Roast Penguin Chronicles: Hoosh, Scurvy Days, Sleeping with Vegetables, and Other Adventures in Antarctic Cuisine by Jason C. Anthony in March; and Where the Valley Widens: A Teacher's Journey Through the Ages by Lindsey Williams, in April.

Compass Rose describes The Harvard Murders, by one of the company's founders, this way: "Award-winning author Robert J. Mrazek takes us from Harvard Yard to the brothels of South Boston and to the Kennedy mansions in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach in this vivid re-creation of an American landscape on the brink of war.

"It's the fall of 1937, and real-life Harvard roommates Jimmy Rousmaniere and Jack Kennedy have returned to Cambridge for their sophomore year. At 19, Jimmy is a superb athlete who lives for competition and is still innocent in the ways of the world. At 20, JFK is charismatic, funny, intellectually curious, and already a natural leader. Having had the last rites read over him twice in his childhood, he now lives for the moment.

"As the college year unfolds, and a national specter of war looms in the background, an act of hideous cruelty followed by the disappearance of a beautiful young Irish immigrant sets in motion a terrifying nightmare as Jimmy and Jack are forced to confront a predator who might live in their midst."

Compass Rose calls The Roast Penguin Chronicles "a savory, eclectic stew, unlike anything ever written about Antarctica. With echoes of Anthony Bourdain and characters painted with a Monty Pythonesque brush, it explores the author's adventures over the eight seasons living and working there. Part adventure tale, part cookbook, and part engrossing history of doomed expeditions and food-fueled endurance, it is strikingly original and vividly entertaining."

And Where the Valley Widens is about "the life affirming and uplifting journey of an idealistic young music teacher whose heart, passion and persistence endures the challenges of nurturing students from elementary school to high school graduation. Navigating obstacles from the everyday to a catastrophic flood that tests the character and resolve of an entire community, she discovers a joy and hope that transcends teaching. Written with the wholesome flavor of James Herriott's All Creatures Great and Small."

Oren Teicher called The Harvard Murders "interesting, intriguing, and I think that like the other two titles on the list, it will appeal to an indie bookstore audience."

Already 160 indie bookstores have signed on to Compass Rose's unusual Bookstore Staff Appreciation Rewards Program, under which an indie that signs up and makes an effort to sell Compass Rose books gets a stipend that each store can give to an employee of its choice in recognition of their contributions to the success of the store. The first stipend of $50 for each bookstore will go out in January, and the second six months later.


GLOW: Bloomsbury YA: They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran


Books Across Borders Fellow Spencer Ruchti Reports on Frankfurt

Spencer Ruchti is the author events manager for Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash., and the co-founder of the Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation with Justin Walls. He attended the Frankfurt Book Fair thanks to a fellowship from Books Across Borders, a nonprofit organization that aims to connect booksellers to the international world of publishing. Here is his report:

Spencer Ruchti (l.) with Europa Editions' Michael Reynolds, founder of Books Across Borders.

Even when I didn't speak the language, let alone share a common border, literature was enough. At one of the largest book fairs in the world, I could talk enthusiastically with booksellers from Spain about Sara Mesa or Enrique Vila-Matas, trade stories about Mircea Cărtărescu with a Romanian bookseller, or share my admiration for the late Dubravka Ugrešić with a publisher from Amsterdam. I met a Dutch bookseller, the founder of a Black-owned bookstore in Rotterdam, who loved and admired Astrid Roemer, whose books I knew thanks to Two Lines Press. My German was poor, but everyone I met had authors (and their books) in common.

More than 114,000 trade attendees and 150 countries were represented at the Frankfurter Buchmesse this year, where editors, scouts, agents, and experts in foreign rights took meetings ad nauseam, with hardly a minute to spare for the restroom. In the German hall, I overheard publishing professionals discussing the rise of English-language imports in the European market. Thanks in large part to social media, European consumers, particularly in Germany, have flocked to U.K. editions of commercial titles rather than reading in translation. Booksellers have adapted by dedicating more square footage to English-language books. The fear, of course, is that young readers in some European countries are neglecting their region's language and rich tradition of literature.

I found not one, but two of my fellow Seattleites in attendance--Washington State's former poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna and my friend Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Book Company. After hours, I met a retiring German editor who about visiting one of his American authors, James Lee Burke, at the author's home in Missoula, Mont. His one regret was that they never went flyfishing. At a late-night dance party hosted by Canongate Books, I (literally) brushed elbows with current and former publishing executives and editors of some of my favorite nonprofit publishers. All were equalized on the dance floor, in part because we were all terrible dancers.

During the fair, Julie Belgrado, director of the European & International Booksellers Federation (EIBF), unveiled findings from a new report, Study on Consumer Behavior: Book-buying Trends, Reading Habits, and Customer Needs , that surveyed 9,500 consumers in 19 countries. (For the Shelf Awareness report on the study, click here.)

Among the findings: 31% of U.S. adults consider reading a hobby, compared to an average 34% internationally, and 51% of Americans say they shop at bookstores because of the "enjoyable atmosphere," compared to only 40% internationally. Belgrado emphasized key takeaways from the study: we need more data about reading as a hobby. Governments and trade associations should do more to invest in early childhood reading and fight for literacy efforts in policymaking.

Spencer Ruchti (r.) with the three booksellers who participated in the Frankfurt edition of the RISE Booksellers Exchange Programme: (from l.) Lexie Eatock, Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, Australia; Gabrielle West, McLeods Booksellers, Rotorua, New Zealand; and Isabella Creţan, Cărturesti, Timisoara, Romania.

For a panel titled "Booksellers of the Future: Ideas and Projects for the Training of European Booksellers," the EIBF's policy assistant Lorenzo Dall'Omo moderated a conversation between experts on vocational schools for booksellers in Germany and Italy. During these two- to three-year trade programs, booksellers-in-training are taught inventory purchasing, accounting, cash flow, marketing and inventory management, and the benefits (tangible or intangible) of hosting author readings and how to make them profitable. These programs work in conjunction with a Chamber of Commerce or other government entity, depending on the country. Booksellers also visit wholesalers and learn about consumer habits and trends in a dynamic industry--lately, this includes an introduction to the sway of influencers on reading culture (16-24-year-olds are the fastest growing demographic of readers in Europe), and how AI may one day assist booksellers with accounting, returns, and drafting purchase orders for daily reorders. (As one German official said, regarding both influencers and AI: "Eventually our enemies become our resources.") In communities abroad, booksellers are cultural figures who initiate events and meetings amongst cultural dignitaries.

Independent booksellers largely don't attend international trade shows, for reasons that might make sense at first glance. We have no title rights to buy or sell. Both the sales data and lived experience we have to offer are fractured and inconsistent, hyper-local to a single region, city, or neighborhood. But as Will Evans, founder of Deep Vellum Bookstore & Publishing, once told the New York Times, "Seeing the local as part of the international is something that is unique to what we're doing.... The more local we get, the more it allows us to branch out and bring the world to us." Organizations like Books Across Borders and RISE Bookselling in the EU are making efforts to bring more booksellers into the conversation, with the knowledge that booksellers are some of the few workers in the book publication circuit who interface daily with readers. This alone, I believe, makes booksellers worthy of participating in the international complex of literature.


Amazon: Third-Quarter Sales Rise 11%; Net Income Jumps 54.5%

Net sales at Amazon in the third quarter ended September 30 rose 11%, to $158.9 billion, and net income rose 54.5%, to $15.3 billion. Both results were above analysts' expectations, leading to a rise in Amazon stock in after-hours trading of 5%, to about $170 a share.

Amazon's North American sales increased 9%, to $95.5 billion, while international sales rose 12%, to $35.9 billion. Sales for Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud services division, rose 19%, to $27.5 billion.

Amazon predicted that net sales in the fourth quarter will be between $181.5 billion and $188.5 billion, or up 7%-11%, compared to fourth quarter 2023. Operating income is expected to be between $16 billion and $20 billion, compared to $13.2 billion in fourth quarter 2023.

In a conference call, as reported by Business Insider, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy noted that the customer base is "looking for deals" and "price conscious," all of which helped fuel the company's 11% growth in net sales.

CFO Brian Olsavsky added that customers are increasingly buying cheaper household items, like "health, beauty, and personal care as well as nonperishable grocery.... We see that when customers purchase these types of items from us, they build bigger baskets, shop more frequently, and spend more on Amazon."

The company is investing heavily in AI. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, Amazon "plans to spend around $75 billion on [capital expenditures] this year and more next year as part of a push to build generative AI services.

" 'The faster we grow demand, the faster we have to invest capital in data centers, network gear and hardware,' Jassy said on a conference call after results. 'We invest in all that upfront in advance of when we can monetize it.' "

The Journal also noted that Amazon "has created special teams to drive generative AI innovation and has released a flurry of services, including an AI shopping assistant on its app named Rufus. To make way for its AI pivot, Jassy has looked to cut costs in other divisions."


Heather Moore Promoted to Exec. Director of Marketing at Sourcebooks Kids

Heather Moore has been promoted to executive director of marketing at Sourcebooks Kids. She is a 22-year Sourcebooks veteran and a graduate of the Denver Publishing Institute, who, the company said, "has been instrumental in the publisher's growth over the past two decades, and leading the charge in the success of its children's business" and has overseen the successful growth of Sourcebooks Kids and Sourcebooks Fire.

Heather Moore

In addition, when Sourcebooks bought Callisto Publishing in 2023, she developed a marketing program for Callisto books and authors, focusing on building backlist and driving sales. In her new role, Moore will lead Sourcebooks' new international marketing strategy while continuing to drive success for the children's business.

Sourcebooks publisher and CEO Dominique Raccah said, "This is all about making a difference for our authors, their books, and young readers. Heather embraces our books change lives mission with both heart and strategy. She's helped us build investments in marketing that have allowed us to create incredible impact for our authors. Heather's leadership is integral as we continue to grow, and I can't wait to see the difference this is going to make for young readers everywhere."

Moore said, "I am so grateful for this opportunity to help our amazing kids and YA authors reach new heights and build on the incredible success we've created at Sourcebooks. For me, it's always been about connecting young readers with meaningful stories, and doing that work at Sourcebooks, my creative home for over 20 years. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."


Notes

The Novel Neighbor on Monopoly St. Louis Edition

Roll those dice! The Novel Neighbor, St. Louis, Mo., is part of the Monopoly St. Louis edition that was released last week in St. Louis and nationally. The Novel Neighbor is on the board in an orange square, and "Community Chest" cards include these messages: "You attended a book club and made new friends at the Novel Neighbor. Collect 100" and "You supported the Novel Neighbor's nonprofit, the Noble Neighbor, and helped bring a favorite author and free books to an St.L. school. Collect 10 from every player."

 


Open Book with David Steinberger Features 'the Mysterious Otto Penzler'

 

The latest Open Book with David Steinberger podcast, appropriately released on Halloween, is called "the Mysterious Otto Penzler" and features Otto Penzler, publisher of Mysterious Press and owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He's widely considered to be the father of crime fiction in the U.S., bringing critical and popular appreciation of the genre to the forefront. The podcast is available here.


Media and Movies

TV: Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light

MASTERPIECE on PBS has released a trailer for the highly anticipated Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the final novel in Hilary Mantel's award-winning trilogy. The series will air on MASTERPIECE Sunday nights from March 23 to April 20, 2025, as well as being available to stream online with the PBS App and by accessing PBS Passport as a station member.

Mark Rylance returns as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII, alongside Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Wolsey and Kate Phillips as Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour. Also reprising their roles from Wolf Hall series one are Lilit Lesser, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Joss Porter, James Larkin, Richard Dillane, Will Keen, and Hannah Steele. Joining the sequel's cast are Alex Jennings to play Stephen Gardiner, Harriet Walter as Lady Margaret Pole, and Timothy Spall as the Duke of Norfolk, among others.



Books & Authors

Awards: B&N Book of the Year Finalists

Barnes & Noble has selected 13 finalists for the 2024 Book of the Year, the titles B&N booksellers "find truly outstanding and in which they have felt the most pride in recommending to readers." The finalists, which include five novels, six nonfiction books, one middle-grade title, and one picture book, will be voted on by all B&N booksellers and announced the week of November 15.

"Our booksellers have nominated a shortlist that is chock-full of great novels, timely reads and beautiful books," said B&N senior director of books Shannon DeVito. "The final 13 that comprise this year's collection reflect the year of publishing we've had--from brilliant writing and immersive looks at niche history to style icons and award-winning authors. These books are a wonderfully varied mix and we're thrilled to celebrate them this year."

The finalists:
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
Swift River by Essie Chambers
Taylor Swift Style: Fashion Through the Eras by Sarah Chapelle
Why I Cook by Tom Colicchio
Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs by Luis Elizondo
James by Percival Everett
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Women by Kristin Hannah
The Dictionary Story by Oliver Jeffers, illustrated by Sam Winston
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan


Reading with... Thérèse Soukar Chehade

photo: Jason Threlfall

Thérèse Soukar Chehade  was born in Lebanon and immigrated to the United States in 1983. Her first novel, Loom, won the 2011 Arab American Award in the fiction category. Her second novel, We Walked On (Regal House Publishing), is set during the Lebanese civil war and immerses readers in the landscape of war, weaving political unrest into everyday life.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

We Walked On portrays a people devastated by the Lebanese civil war in the mid-1970s, and the beauty they reclaim from the ruins.

On your nightstand now:

The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell describes the siege of a fictitious Indian town during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 through the perspective of the British occupants. The formal and wry style heightens the impending turmoil. I read and loved Troubles by the same author, so this was an easy pick for me.

The Price of the Ticket by James Baldwin is a voluminous and brilliant collection of the author's reflections on race in America. The writing is characteristically superb, and many of the themes are sadly as relevant today as when he wrote them.

I Don't Want This Poem to End by Mahmoud Darwish. The collection was posthumously published in translation in 2017. The Palestinian poet was dubbed the poet of resistance, nostalgia, and return. I'm reading these poems slowly and relishing the lyrical and haunted language.

Native Tongue, Stranger Talk by Michelle Hartman focuses on writers who either choose to write in a language other than their native tongue or are compelled to do so by external circumstances. I am often asked by readers about writing in English rather than my native Arabic or even French, a language I grew up speaking, and this book helps me think through the implications of my choice.

The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry examines physical suffering through several lenses, including torture and warfare. The excerpts I read are brilliant, and I look forward to reading the book.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I loved Marcel Pagnol's La Gloire de mon père (My Father's Glory) and Le Château de ma mère (My Mother's Castle), the first two tomes in a series of four novels about his boyhood memories in southern France and summer vacations in Provence. I found his stories very relatable because I used to spend my summer holidays at my grandmother's house in my ancestral town in northern Lebanon. At the end of La Gloire de ma mère, Pagnol evokes the death of his mother five years later, then that of his own brother Paul, and finally his friend Lili, who was killed in action during World War I. That struck a chord with me since my own childhood was cut short by loss when the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, and I lost my father a year later.

Your top five authors:

This could be the most difficult question on this list. Who has only five favorite authors? Here are the ones who sprang to mind, in no particular order.

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse remains a favorite to this day. I read the novel as a newcomer to the U.S., when my English was still far from proficient, and I had to look up a lot of words. But the images and feelings transcended the language barrier, and Woolf's prose captivated my senses. I believe the novel influenced my decision to write in English. Since then I've gone on to read all of Woolf's work.

Elias Khoury is easily my favorite Lebanese writer. He was a novelist, public intellectual, journalist, and cultural critic. His writing almost always explores political themes in the Arab world. The first novel I read by him, Little Mountain, about the Lebanese Civil War, struck me as a perfect synergy of form and meaning, with the fractured prose reflecting the destructiveness of war.

I first fell in love with Lucia Berlin through her short story collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women. Her writing covers a wide emotional spectrum and burrows into human behaviors and aspirations with clarity and pathos.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She was a visual artist, poet, novelist, and essayist, and wrote in both French and English. This rich personal history has resulted in a complex and fascinating body of work that has a wide cultural and geographical scope.

Natalia Ginzburg, who began her literary career in the 1940s, drew me in with her focus on the ordinary as it is threatened by war. She creates intimate worlds within a bigger ethical and political framework in a world devastated by fascism.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Right now, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness by Anne Boyer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Boyer wrote it after she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 41. The Undying blends personal experience and thoughts on art and literature with a critique of the medical industry. I read the book after dealing with a mysterious illness that eventually resolved on its own and finding the medical establishment frustratingly disjointed and bureaucratic. Boyer is consistently brilliant, and reading it made me feel less alone at a difficult time in my life.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I can't speak Portuguese, but I've always been curious about Brazil, and when I saw this book about Ouro Preto in Southeast Brazil, where my friend is from, I couldn't resist.

Book you hid from your parents:

Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan. I found the erotic novel under my older sister's pillow and read it secretly while she was out. Years later, as an adult, I tried to watch the movie but became bored and gave up halfway through.

Book that changed your life:

This might be cheating, but I'm mentioning books that influenced me at various stages of my life. These books raised my awareness about the impact of politics on our daily lives and the plights of different oppressed groups. In my early teens, André Malraux's The Human Condition about the early days of the Chinese Revolution exposed me to class struggle. In high school, I read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and realized that, like the character, I was bored with the mundane and sought life elsewhere, to paraphrase Milan Kundera's title. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex contextualized my personal experience within a gendered framework. A few years later, Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury brought the Palestinian experience to life on a visceral level.

Favorite line from a book:

"I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words--I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg." --Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Five books you'll never part with:

Time by Etel Adnan--a poetry collection full of wonder that demands to be read slowly and thoughtfully.

Granada by Radwa Ashour--the first in a trilogy, the novel is set during the conquest of the Emirate of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. Thanks to Ashour's skilled storytelling, the medieval Muslim Emirate is brought to life for the readers just as it is about to be destroyed by the forces of history. It inspired me to visit Granada, a city I came to love.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov--the devil lands in Soviet Moscow and wreaks havoc. Magical realism meets dark comedy to produce a dazzling, exhilarating tale written by a cleverly subversive mind. I've read it at least half a dozen times throughout the years.

Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

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

A Heart So White by Javier Marías. I loved the long, Proustian sentences and the bold but always fascinating digressions into themes of betrayal, memory, violence, truth, and translation. Definitely worth another read.


Book Review

Review: Vantage Point

Vantage Point by Sara Sligar (MCD, $29 hardcover, 400p., 9780374282295, January 14, 2025)

An ancient family curse roars back to life in Sara Sligar's superbly dark second novel, Vantage Point. It features siblings from an old-money Maine dynasty that has withstood terrible misfortunes and the modern-day calamity threatening to capsize them once and for all. Sligar's brilliantly crafted thriller delivers a hefty dose of horror-tinged suspense while expertly navigating contemporary themes such as online violations of privacy and the head-spinning speed with which artificial intelligence can manipulate people's lives.

Orphaned years earlier in their teens, Teddy and Clara are heirs to the famed Wieland fortune. Teddy is the steady older brother who has rescued Clara from self-destruction too many times to count. He often confuses his commanding authority over his family with love; she maintains an illusion of control through binge and purge sessions that have compromised her health. Clara's heart-wrenching struggle with disordered eating is portrayed with compassionate, devastating realism. Set on Vantage Point, the majestic cliffside island estate the siblings inherited from their parents, the story opens in the present day with Teddy launching his Senate campaign. He is blessed with dashing good looks and contentedly married to Clara's childhood best friend, Jess, a woman troubled by her own past.

Vantage Point is narrated by Clara and Jess in alternating chapters, a prism through which their interlocking stories collide and flow. Unlike Clara, Teddy and Jess don't believe in the long-dormant family curse, a long run of freakish fatal accidents starting in 1902 and occurring in the month of April. Sligar (Take Me Apart) documents these incidents in entertaining Wikipedia entries scattered throughout the book.

Back in the present day, the calendar marches into spring and the Internet blows up with compromising videos of Clara. Teddy's scandal-free political campaign is suddenly in disarray as more salacious recordings surface. Whether or not the videos are real or "deepfakes," the damage is done. Meanwhile, Clara is haunted by bizarre visions that seem horrifyingly real. Is her illness interfering with her mind, or is there something more nefarious at play? And if it's the dreaded curse, which family member is it after?

Sligar's fiendishly clever plot portends a terrifying future where, thanks to technology, reality is whatever we choose to make it. In a literary parable for our unsettling times, Vantage Point delivers an immersive, urgent drama reminding readers that sometimes it's the ones who seem the most broken that are the strongest. --Shahina Piyarali

Shelf Talker: Set on a cliffside Maine estate, this superbly suspenseful novel features a wealthy but cursed family haunted by eating disorders, an Internet scandal, and bizarre visions that portend a terrifying future.


Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: Music for Bookselling

What kind of music do you listen to when you're reading? That's one question. My quick answer would be composers like Max Richter, whose lit credentials include the soundtracks to TV series based on Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers and Elena Ferrante's novels (My Brilliant Friend), or sometimes medieval choral music--something that accompanies the reading experience rather than distracts from it. 

My serious musically-inclined friends would be appalled if I said that part out loud. The music is the experience, they would insist. It's not background noise. And they would, of course, be right, which is why I tend not to tell them about my music/reading habit. And I've never read a book during a live concert, so there's that. 

But one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Coe, recently told the Guardian that he "takes himself off to a classical concert when he's stuck with his writing. Some authors walk it out, or nap to get around a mental brick wall, but for Coe, who at 63 is publishing his 15th novel, the experience of 'sitting there for two or three hours with your thoughts wandering, but in a disciplined way because the music is guiding them' can help resolve the toughest of literary puzzles. The process works particularly well, he adds mildly, at those concerts 'where you're not really into the music.' "

More than half of my work life was spent in music-infused retail environments, beginning with a supermarket job in the 1970s. To this day, I retain a distinct, spine-tingling memory of the butcher's band saw whining in counterpoint to Muzak. This is perhaps one reason why '60s flower children like myself remain a little bewildered. How could we psychologically process a catatonic string arrangement of "The Age of Aquarius," accompanied by steel cutting through flesh and bone?

Booksellers have a different relationship with music. Many, perhaps even most, bookshops have music playing in the background on the sales floor. Sometimes they host live performances by local musicians. 

By the 1990s, when I became a bookseller, there were logical retail grounds for inflicting piped music on bookstore customers in the form of increased CD sales. Playing a select rotation of CDs--soft jazz or classical or folk, minimal words--not only fostered a certain aural calm, it also consistently sparked patron's interest, despite moments of confusion:

Customer: "What's that playing? Do you have the CD in stock?"
Me (listening closely for the first time in hours, having instinctively learned how to not hear the endless music loop): "That? It's... Let me check. (quick glance at CD cases by stereo) It's George Winston's Forest."
Customer: "I think it's beautiful. Don't you?"
Me: "Um, sure... Let me show you where to find it."
(Customer follows, whistling an unrecognizable tune in the spirit of George Winston.)

During the holiday season, we sold buckets of seasonally-appropriate CDs, thanks to a lush wave of piped Yuletide tunes, ranging from solemn to jolly, punctuated at regular intervals by our PA system's semi-desperate calls for assistance at the customer service stations. Now that was an odd bit of accompaniment to carols: "Oh, Holy night, the... 'We need help at the front service desk, please!' ...of our dear Savior's birth."

Music is still in the air at most bookstores I visit now, and I like the fact that not every shop feels compelled to play only quiet stuff, the piped music equivalent of library shushing. While few bookstores would get away with cranking the volume to 11, the range of music played in-store expanded admirably, even as CD sales lost their bookstore lives. 

Music has many bookshop applications. On social media, #BookTok rules. At this year's TikTok Book Awards U.K. and Ireland, Melissa McFarlane, operations manager at TikTok U.K. & Nordics, said: "This year's longlist was a true celebration of what makes the BookTok ecosystem unique, from romantasy epics to our much-loved local book shops.... It has been humbling to see the impact this community of book lovers is having not only on the sales and discovery of books, but the lives of new authors and young readers. We cannot wait to see what the future has in store for literature fans everywhere!"

But bookstore videos on every platform almost require a soundtrack, whether the subject is a bookseller cat (Ratty Books, Jeffersonville, N.Y.), finding your soulmate, '80s style (Bookish, Modesto, Calif.), a rainy day (Black Cat Books & Oddities, Medina, Ohio), or enhancing your Halloween spirit with "Bad Reputation" (Bleak House Books, Honeoye Falls, N.Y.). 

And speaking of Joan Jett, the Booksmiths, Danbury, Conn., posted a pre-work musical observation on Instagram: "Even before work, Saw this on my way into work. Be yourself. Yeah. I was blasting Joan Jett and rocking it out with myself. I love this song 🎵." 

Where else am I hearing bookstore music lately? Well, to showcase events at Loyalty Bookstore, Washington, D.C., and Belmont Bookshop, Belmont, N.C.

The most popular option, logically enough, is to use music to accompany book recommendations. Among the stores doing so recently were the Pretty Posy, Overland Park, Kan., Ink & Paper Bookstore, Cazenovia, N.Y., Urban Reads Bookstore, Baltimore, Md., the Family Bookshop, Deland, Fla., Chapter Book Lounge, Noblesville, Ind., and Betty's Books, Webster Groves, Mo.

What does the future hold? Who knows, but I bet it will have something to do with Artificial Intelligence (not a big stretch as predictions go). Do I hear somebody queuing up "Daisy" from 2001: A Space Odyssey?

--Robert Gray, contributing editor

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