Hello March, and welcome to a wet and cold start to spring! There's a lot going on in the world, and the world of books, so let's get right to it, shall we?
What Russia is doing to invade the Ukraine is horrible, and reminiscent of other evil dictators plowing through other countries by force, attempting to loot other lands for their own benefit. I'm glad to see that book people are standing up for the Ukrainian people, calling for an end to Russian imperialist aggression.
Book People Protest War
PEN International released a letter signed by more than 1,000 writers https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz51311666 worldwide, expressing solidarity with writers, journalists, artists and the people of Ukraine, condemning the Russian invasion and calling for an immediate end to the bloodshed.
"We, writers around the world, are appalled by the violence unleashed by Russian forces against Ukraine and urgently call for an end to the bloodshed," the letter stated. "We stand united in condemnation of a senseless war, waged by President Putin's refusal to accept the rights of Ukraine's people to debate their future allegiance and history without Moscow's interference.
"We stand united in support of writers, journalists, artists, and all the people of Ukraine, who are living through their darkest hours. We stand by you and feel your pain.
"All individuals have a right to peace, free expression, and free assembly. Putin's war is an attack on democracy and freedom not just in Ukraine, but around the world.
"We stand united in calling for peace and for an end to the propaganda that is fueling the violence. There can be no free and safe Europe without a free and independent Ukraine. Peace must prevail."
Though I am no longer a fan of JK Rowling, I am still a devotee of her work, and these movies in particular are delightful in a way I've not seen since the Harry Potter movie years. So I'm really looking forward to seeing this next month.
Movies: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Warner Bros. has released a trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz51311702, the third installment of the movie franchise based on J.K. Rowling's book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Indiewire reported that the new trailer "pits Dumbledore (Jude Law) against rebel Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) in a battle to protect the fate of mankind living alongside wizard." The Secrets of Dumbledore premieres April 15 in theaters.
Set in the 1930s, the film "centers on the lead-up to Wizarding World's involvement in World War II, with hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) entering battle against Grindewald alongside Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), Lally Hicks (Jessica Williams), Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), and Dumbledore, as they battle Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller) and more of Grindelwald's followers." Alison Sudol also stars as Queenie, with Victoria Yeates, Poppy Corby-Tuech, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, and Dave Wong rounding out the ensemble cast. At least two more films are reportedly planned for the Fantastic Beasts saga.
I'm thrilled to read that Amazon has decided to close it's "storefront" brick and mortar stores and concentrate on their food delivery and fashion industry. And I agree with Tom Nissley, Indie bookstores are much better at selling books than an Amazon AI.
Amazon Closing All Amazon Books Stores
Big news from Amazon: the company is closing all of its Amazon Book books and electronics stores, as well as all of its pop-up and "4-star" stores, a move that was first reported yesterday by Reuters. Altogether, 68 stores are involved--66 in the U.S. and two in the U.K. There are some 24 Amazon Books stores around the country.
The company said it was making the move to concentrate its bricks-and-mortar efforts on Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Amazon Go and a new venture, Amazon Style fashion and accessories stores, the first of which is set to open in Los Angeles this year, and will feature a variety of high-tech touches, including "just walk out" cashierless technology.
Amazon Books initially opened in Seattle https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz51342382 in 2015 (a story first reported by Shelf Awareness) and slowly expanded over the years. Observers noted that one of the main functions of the bookstores was to promote Prime membership as well as introduce Amazon's electronic products. The selection of books, usually displayed faceout with much room around each, was thin. Especially since the pandemic started, Prime membership has grown dramatically, to about 150 million in the U.S., possibly a saturation point, making the stores' function as a Prime signup spot moot.
The AP quoted Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, stating that Amazon's non-food stores "were designed for people to pop in and browse rather than as destinations where people would head on a mission to buy something. Ultimately, this wasn't great for driving footfall--especially in an era where people are visiting shops less."
Tom Nissley, who worked at Amazon for a decade before opening indie bookstores Phinney Books in 2014 and Madison Books in 2019, told GeekWire that Amazon's decision to close its bookstores "emphasizes that it's not what they're good at https://www.shelfawareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz51342385 and it is what we're good at." He continued, as GeekWire put it, to say that "the stores, like the company's website, should have seized on what Amazon was good at, which is being able to provide everything. Instead, Amazon's super curated, face-out approach to selling books was the opposite of that."
Nissley added, "I always wondered if they would try to do something like Powell's or something where, 'Yep, we're Amazon. We have everything. And now we have it right here.' I'm sure the cost would have been immense."
Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, commented: "The closing of Amazon's physical bookstores proves that there is more to a successful bookstore than the transaction of selling books. Amazon learned the hard way that what independent bookstores do is special, and it's hard. Especially when faced with an unfair competitor. Hopefully, these closures bring the book business one small step closer to a level playing field. In the long-term, breaking up and regulating Amazon is the only way to achieve that goal."
When in grad school in Cambridge, MA, I worked for a blind woman for whom Books on Tape was a lifeline. It was her main form of entertainment, when she wasn't listening to the news on TV. I would often sit and listen with her, and we'd both get misty eyed over James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small series. So we both owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mr Hecht. RIP.
Obituary Note: Duvall Hecht
Duvall Hecht https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz51342414, a pilot, Olympian rower, banker and entrepreneur who, in 1975, "sold his 1965 Porsche, hired a college drama coach and created what would become volume No. 1 in the soon-to-be-massive Books on Tape catalogue, a recording of George's Plimpton's football tale, Paper Lion," died February 10, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 91.
"It never once seemed like a wacky idea to me," he said in 2001, shortly after selling his startup to Random House for an estimated $20 million.Hecht competed in the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, and four years later won gold in Melbourne, Australia. While in the Marines during the mid-1950s, he became a fighter jet pilot and, after his discharge, a Pan Am pilot, which he found to be little better than being a bus driver, according to his wife, Ann Marie Rousseau.
As a commuting investment banker in downtown L.A., "he sought alternatives to the radio. For a while, he set up a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the passenger seat and listened to books that had been recorded for people who were blind. When cassette tapes first arrived on the scene, he turned to those as a possibility, but could find only motivational recordings," the Times wrote.
The rest is history. After recording Paper Lion, he began placing ads in newspapers around the U.S. and within five years sales were approaching $2 million and he had tens of thousands of customers for his audiobooks. Customers would rent book tapes for 30 days, and since Hecht didn't charge a deposit, they were on an honor system to return them.
After selling the company, he pursued a new career as a long-haul truck driver, a dream he'd had since he was 16. Rousseau said she would sometimes accompany him on his cross-country trips and marveled at how much he enjoyed the open road. "And on those trips, of course, we would listen to Books on Tape."
"We have weavers and sculptors who rent from us https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/uz3642037Biz51342415," Hecht told the Wall Street Journal in 1986. "There's even an undertaker who listens with a tiny earpiece during funerals." Most of his customers were overachievers, Hecht noted, people "crazy with frustration because they're two hours behind the wheel and all that time is going down the sewer.”
He once observed: "Listening is just returning literature to its original form, before Gutenberg got into the act."
Tiny Tales by Alexander McCall Smith is a delightful svelte tome of very short (some only two pages long) stories that all have a funny or positive or bittersweet spin. Some are laugh out loud funny, while others carry the sweet ache of a story well told, with an ending that, if not happy, is at least satisfying. Here's the blurb: It is often said that the best things in life come in small
packages; anyone in search of proof need look no further than the
stories in this collection from the acclaimed author of the No. 1
Ladies' Detective Agency series: brief, utterly engaging tales that
offer lasting surprise and delight, accompanied by charming
illustrations by Iain McIntosh.
In Tiny Tales, Alexander
McCall Smith explores romance, ambition, kindness, and happiness in
thirty short stories accompanied by thirty witty cartoons designed by
Iain McIntosh, McCall Smith’s longtime creative collaborator. Here we
meet the first Australian pope, who hopes to finally find some peace and
quiet back home in Perth; a psychotherapist turned motorcycle racetrack
manager; and an aspiring opera singer who gets her unlikely break
onstage. And, of course, we spend time in McCall Smith’s beloved
Scotland, where we are introduced to progressive Vikings, a group of
housemates with complex romantic entanglements, and a couple of
globe-trotting dentists. These tales and illustrations depict the full
scope of human experience and reveal the rich tapestry of life—painted
in miniature.
I've read several other novels by AMS, and I enjoyed most of them. Smith's a master prose stylist who manages to create engaging characters and interesting places for them to inhabit effortlessly. His plots are precise and insightful...there's nary a plot hole to be found. Yet I've detected more than once a slight vein of misogyny throughout his work, as if he's able to laugh and point to the foibles of women as ridiculous, yet many of the men in his books skate by judgement and prejudice completely, though they're no prizes themselves. But its only a whisper and a dab, here and there, and thus easily ignored. I fell in love with these stories and read the book all the way through within about 4.5 hours. It deserves an A, and a recommendation to anyone who needs a book to read on an airplane, or before bedtime or in a doctor's waiting room. Just a word of warning, these short stories are like potato chips, in that you won't want to stop at reading just one.
Love & Saffron by Kim Fay is an epistolary book that is as warm and sweet and delicious as cake or bread fresh from the oven. The book's subtitle is "A novel of friendship, food and love," and it lives up to every accolade on the back cover blurbs. Here's the official blurb: In the vein of the classic 84, Charing Cross Road, this witty and tender novel follows two women in 1960s America as they discover that food really does connect us all, and that friendship and laughter are the best medicine.
When
twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter--as well as a
gift of saffron--to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing
friendship begins. Joan lives in Los Angeles and is just starting out as
a writer for the newspaper food pages. Imogen lives on Camano Island
outside Seattle, writing a monthly column for a Pacific
Northwest magazine, and while she can hunt elk and dig for clams, she’s
never tasted fresh garlic--exotic fare in the Northwest of the sixties.
As the two women commune through their letters, they build a closeness
that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination
of President Kennedy, and the unexpected in their own lives.
Food
and a good life—they can’t be separated. It is a discovery the women
share, not only with each other, but with the men in their lives.
Because of her correspondence with Joan, Imogen’s decades-long marriage
blossoms into something new and exciting, and in turn, Joan learns that
true love does not always come in the form we expect it to. Into this
beautiful, intimate world comes the ultimate test of Joan and Imogen’s
friendship—a test that summons their unconditional trust in each other.
A brief respite from our chaotic world, Love & Saffron is
a gem of a novel, a reminder that food and friendship are the antidote
to most any heartache, and that human connection will always be worth
creating.
The prose is fantastic, it reads like two classic authors letting their hair down and corresponding, with a tenderness and care that is heartrending. The plot is straightforward and clear, until the twist at the end, which left me in tears. Having corresponded with my mother and friends (and corporate entities) since childhood, I could understand why these two character's letters became a lifeline of friendship and a bond between two women of different eras. I'd give it an A+, and I can't recommend it enough, to anyone and everyone who enjoys correspondence and is curious about life during the early 60s.
Crystal Magic: Clearwater Witches #1 by Madeline Freeman was a YA fantasy novel that I got for a cheap price due to being an Amazon Prime member. Though it was a fast read, there were times when I could feel the plot flag and drag, and the prose, though decent, just couldn't close up the plot holes. Here's the blurb: Krissa Barnette has a secret.
When she’s upset, she can hear what other people are thinking. And when she’s overwhelmed, things explode.
A
move to Clearwater, Michigan, gives her the chance to reinvent herself,
but a fresh start is further away than she realizes. Her abilities
magnify—making her a target for Crystal Jamison and the town’s circle of
witches.
Even with new friends at her side, Krissa can’t ignore
the witches’ magnetic pull—especially when a strange illness rips
through the town.
If Krissa doesn’t push her fears aside, she
could lose more than control. Learning to wield magic could consume her.
Ignoring her gift could destroy the world.
This book reminded me of a cross between early Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the girl on the cover looks a lot like a young Sara Michelle Geller) and any CW female-lead show that involves witches, vampires or magic of any kind. The story is always the same. Young woman with powers beyond her ken is an outcast at her high school because she's "weird" and "different" but she lacks the self confidence to actually DO anything to become stronger or more accepted until she encounters a guy who likes her and a band of fellow outcasts who become her friends. Yet she doesn't know if she can trust them with the truth about who she really is, and thus spends a lot of time whining about her parents who are either dead, not a part of her life, divorced so that only one parent is caring for her, or hopelessly negligent and clueless, (or suffocating and old fashioned, so they don't understand anything about the modern world and try to isolate their child from real life). Yes, there are few decent examples of parents in the YA world, which in my opinion is laziness on the part of the writer, because they have to fall back on this hackneyed trope instead of writing about young adults who had good parents who help the protagonist find her way through the labyrinth of hormones and high school. This author falls down the rabbit hole of teenagers messing with magical forces they don't understand, which leads to time travel and of course serious consequences for their actions. The ending of the book was just a set up for the next volume, which I don't plan on reading. So I'd give book 1 a C+ and recommend it to devotees of the CW.
Sons of Ymre: Erik, by Lilith Saintcrow is the start of a new series that looked, from the outset, to be like another "Watchers" series. Unfortunately, it was set up with a lot of misogyny and violence, with the lead female character being kidnapped and kept in the dark by her captors, so the whole book comes off as a serial killer/rapist fantasy, where the so-called "good guys" are not too far from the monsters they kill who are hunting the lead female character. I was shocked the Saintcrow could write such an unconscionable novel that panders to "Incel" like men who see women as chattel or prizes to be won, not as people with agency. Here's the blurb:
Long ago, there was a mad god who almost destroyed the world. And he is still out there, waiting…
On a cold winter's evening, Liv Stellack escapes a bad date…and walks straight into nightmare. Kidnapped and held without ransom, she's ready to use every trick in the book to escape. But her captors aren't criminals, they're Sons of Ymre, hunters of the unclean things living in the cracks of sanity and dreams—and Liv is a valuable tool in their war against the Mad God.
Erik knows the beautiful woman they've rescued can't possibly understand the danger she's in, or the fact that she's being held for her own protection. Some things can't be explained, only shown; he and his fellow Sons have to keep their precious potential alive long enough for the days to lengthen so she can be transported to another temple and learn how to fight an evil older than recorded history.
But treachery lives in the Mad God's chosen, and it's soon obvious that one of the Sons can't be trusted. Fleeing for their lives, Liv and Erik must make an uneasy alliance, depending on each other to reach tenuous safety.
That is, if the monsters don't get them first…
So while Erik is imprisoning Liv "for her own protection" he's also not telling her the truth about what the Sons of Ymre have planned for her, including tossing her into a magic flame well (and hoping she survives) and then requiring her to be "sealed" which is just another word for forcing her to have sex with one of the Sons so that she won't run away but will be bonded to them and their cause no matter what. This means that Liv is required to give up her whole life as a paralegal with friends and family to magically soothe and heal the Sons when they get beat up by monsters and when they go crazy from the Mad God's whispering in their heads (the latter is something they choose to become invested in, unlike Liv, who isn't given a choice). The point is made that the monsters will torture and eat her unless she has the Sons magical protection, but when one of them goes rogue and captures her it's evident that she's got a target on her back no matter who she's with. Therefore it seems she should be given a choice of how to live or die and whether or not she wants to have sex with one of her kidnappers.This whole novel creeped me out, and made me mad at the same time. It's hard enough for women to have agency in the real world, let alone a female author romantisizing kidnapping/rape and violence against women, while pushing the lead female into a traditional "healing/mothering/savior" role and making her seem powerless and stupid for having a modern job with ambition beyond being a heterosexual wife and stay at home mother. Even when Liv tries to save herself, the point is repeatedly made that she's a tiny little woman who is ultra feminine and weighs so little she can be carried by a big, strong man like a little baby! Infantilizing women has been traditionally the way men were able to force women into patriarchal roles, ie making them stupid, small and weak like children so they can't help themselves but must be ruled over by men. Ugh. SHAME ON YOU Lilith Saintcrow! With all the kick-ass heroines you've created in the past, you should know better. I'd give this book a D, and not recommend it to anyone.
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