I find myself in complete agreement with Emily Wilson's blog excerpt, taken from Shelf Awareness:
'17 Things I Love
About Independent Bookstores'
On her blog Books,
the Universe and Everything
Emily Wilson paid
tribute "to the things I love about independent
bookstores":
"There are
many noble reasons to shop at independent bookstores.
Supporting local
businesses, good for the economy, etc. etc. etc. But
the main reason I
buy all of my books at indie bookstores is a very
selfish reason: I
love being in bookstores. Indie bookstores are some of
my favorite places
on the planet. I love walking into a bookstore and
wondering what new
interest or author I'll discover. I love being able
to pop into
BookCourt on my walk home from work and quickly grab a book
from a favorite
author the very day it's released. I love browsing the
four floors of
Strand for hours on a Saturday afternoon, emerging with a
giant stack of
books. I love visiting local bookstores in the places I
travel. I love
being surrounded by people who love books and reading as
much as I do. If I
don't help support them, how can I expect them to
stay open for me
to come in and wander around?
"I wrote this
post as a celebration of the many things I love about
independent
bookstores and to salute some of my favorites. So, here's a
list of 17 things
I love about independent bookstores. There are many
more than 17
things to appreciate, but these are the things that matter
most to me."
I want to read the Rosie Project, but I have so many books in my TBR stacks that
I can't possibly buy more books until my birthday in December. Meanwhile, though, this book is on my wish list, as is "Mrs Poe", "Mastering the Art of French Eating" and "Clockwork Princess" the third book in the steampunk trilogy that I am currently reading.
Simon &
Schuster celebrated the release of The Rosie Project by Graeme
Simsion by
commandeering Luke's Lobster's NautiMobile during the lunch
rush in midtown
Manhattan to give away free lobster rolls and a copy of
the book to the
first 100 patrons. Simsion, just in from his native
Australia, signed
each copy and chatted with readers (and eaters). His
novel stars a
brilliant yet socially inept and lovelorn professor whose
life is a model of
scientific efficiency that is so calibrated that he
eats the same meal,
at the same place, on the same day every week.
Tuesday,
fittingly, is lobster day.
Three books that I've just read are: Swimming in the Moon by Pamela Schoenwaldt, Clockwork Angel and Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare, who also wrote the Mortal Instruments series, which I've read and enjoyed, though it was supposedly a YA series meant for teenagers. Clare clearly writes for adult audiences as well, as far as I can tell, she makes her books so enticing and her storytelling so engaging that, like the Harry Potter books by JK Rowling, they are bound to be beloved of anyone who likes fairy tales, legends, myths and fantasy stories, not to mention paranormal romances.
Anyway, Swimming in the Moon, which was packaged like chick lit, is actually a fairly serious novel about a young Italian immigrant and her mentally deranged mother who travel to America and attempt to find their way in the new world. Lucia, who is clever with numbers, has little trouble finding accounting jobs, but because she is a woman she is not paid decently, and struggles to keep herself and her mother going, while her mother, who seems to be a manic depressive, bipolar and/or sociopathic runs off and joins a vaudeville troupe as the "Naples Nightengale." Though Teresa has an excellent singing voice, she's also nuts, so she tends to ruin most of her jobs by being mean, paranoid, greedy and spending money on frippery instead of sending money to her daughter to help her pay rent and allow Lucia to stay in school and graduate from high school, which was no small feat for a young woman in the early years of the 20th century.
The author tries to get readers to sympathize with Teresa, by repeatedly flashing back to when she was raped by the master of the household in Italy (where she was a servant), which resulted in the birth of Lucia. Teresa tries to get a famous opera composer to recognize her singing talent, but he humiliates her in the street by saying that she is too old to be properly trained for the opera, and this sets Teresa off for a lifetime of seeing this composer in every audience, judging her and finding her unacceptable. Though rape and humiliation are horrible events, to be sure, I still found myself thinking that Teresa would have become a madwoman even if these things had never happened to her...she was of fragile mind and huge ego, combined with a cruel narcissistic nature that seemed ripe for tipping her over into insanity. I also disliked the way that she treated her hardworking daughter, who is always left to clean up her mother's messes, and who eventually must take care of her mother, who has become a wretched crazy woman, unable to control her temper or to do anything but wreak havoc on the people who live in the household where her daughter rents a drafty apartment.
Meanwhile, Lucia wants to have a life, is in love with a German Jewish greengrocer who has been told that he can't marry her because she is an Italian Catholic, and is trying to help organize unions to get better working conditions and better wages for women in the garment factories that are sprouting up all over America, or in her case, Cleveland Ohio. Every time Lucia seems to be getting ahead enough to get her diploma, or have enough money for necessities, her mother pulls some nasty tantrum or other and ends up spoiling things for her daughter. It is only in the end, when certain things happen (I won't spoil the ending for readers) that we finally are able to see Lucia happy, doing what she loves. Though I understand that the author wants to point up the horrible hours, wages and working conditions of factories in turn of the century America, and the plight of immigrants, who had to learn English and pay exorbitant rates for housing and food and even for the sewing machines and thread they used to create clothing for the factories, I found that there was so much ranting and explaining of these things that it bogged down the plot, often bringing it to a standstill. Also, I felt that Lucia was nearly a martyred saint, taking care of such a cruel mother who never really treated her daughter fairly or kindly at all. I couldn't understand why Lucia wouldn't just send her back to Italy or put her in an institution, since she was obviously so crazy I don't think she would have noticed if her daughter was missing or that someone else was caring for her. I found myself not liking Lucia or Teresa very much, and I grew bored by the political/socialist stuff in the novel after the first few times it was mentioned.
I'd give this book a B-, but barely, because I only read it to the end because it wasn't too long and I wanted to see if the protagonist ever managed to have a life. I would recommend this to those who are interested in immigrant stories from early 20th century America.
Clockwork Angel, book one of the Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare, is similar to the Mortal Instruments series by Clare, in that it is about a young woman being thrown into the Shadowhunters society rather abruptly, and learning to find where she fits in while also falling in love, of course, with a handsome shadowhunter who is, for some reason, unavailable to her. Though this series is set in the late 19th century in London England, Tessa Gray doesn't differ too much from Clary, who was destined to become a Shadowhunter because her mother and father were Nephilim, with the blood of angels in their veins. Tessa discovers through torture by some nasty demonic creatures, that she is a shapeshifter, but though most shapeshifters are warlocks, she has none of the markings of demonic DNA, so she is something of an anomaly. And where Clary had her Jace, who she thought was her brother (and therefore she couldn't allow herself to be in love with him), Tessa has Will, a shadowhunter who, unbeknownst to her, is under a curse that will kill anyone who loves him. Yet the demons in the Infernal Devices series are aided by clockwork automatons, creatures made of machine and flesh, who are created to kill the shadowhunters by an insane mundane bent on revenge. I am almost finished with Clockwork Prince, book two of the series, and I can hardly wait to get my hands on the third book, Clockwork Princess, so that I can find out more about Victorian-era shadowhunters and London before the turn of the century. Clare's young protagonists tend to obsess too much about boys that they can't have, and in that irritating Twilight manner of frustrated, besotted teenagers, I sometimes lose patience with Tessa and want to shake her shoulders and tell her to 'cowboy up' and get on with it, for heavens sake. To be fair, I felt the same several times about Clary, who was always having to be rescued or getting herself into seemingly impossible situations that she wasn't prepared to handle out of sheer stubborn stupidity. Still, both Tessa and Clary prevail under the most trying of circumstances, and they do grow up and become effective eventually, so there isn't the anti-feminist ending of either girl marrying and becoming pregnant by the final page of the book, which is what often happens in romance novels or paranormal romance novels. I'd give this series at B+ and recommend it to all readers who enjoyed the Mortal Instruments series or who are looking for good paranormal YA romance and adventure, certainly far superior to the horrible Twilight series.
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