Good day to you, fellow people of the book! I meant to write a new blog post two days ago, but I'm having trouble getting to my regular daily/weekly activities because I am having to be the caregiver for my husband, who just got out of the hospital about 10 days ago after falling and breaking ribs and a shoulder blade and collapsing his lung. Since he's already on dialysis for his failed kidneys, and his diabetes and high blood pressure have gone into overdrive, I've had to help set up physical and occupational therapies, get him signed up for the handicapped access bus, and make sure he has help bathing and dressing and getting something to eat that's not filled with sodium, though of course, that's the food he likes the most. I'm also in charge of laundry, cooking, housecleaning, etc. So it's been difficult to find time for myself. Still, I did manage to read several books and dig up some interesting tidbits for ya'all. Avoid sunburn and keep reading indoors!
I remember (and miss) EBBC back when it was in Pioneer Square and the booksellers were a friendly lot. Once they moved to Cap Hill, a certain snobbishness set in, and the booksellers sneered at genre readers, like myself. Still, I wish this iconic bookstore a happy 50th anniversary, and here's hoping they'll still be around in 50 years to celebrate their 100th!
Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. Celebrates 50th Anniversary
On Saturday, Elliott Bay Book Co https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTbnrkI6ahjIB1-HQ~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTCZ_xpoMLg-gVdw, Seattle, Wash., celebrated 50 years of business with a party that invited several generations of booksellers and members of the broader book community in the region to commemorate this special milestone with current owners Tracy Taylor, Murf Hall, and Joey Burgess.
Attendees were treated to a series of reminiscences by prominent figures in the bookstore's decorated history, each charting the establishment's journey from its iconic origins in the Pioneer Square neighborhood in 1973, to its current iteration on Capitol Hill.
The evening's master of ceremonies was local drag superstar Irene "The Alien" DuBois, who was recently featured on RuPaul's Drag Race season 15. Speakers included founding owners Walter and Maggie Carr; Holly Myers, a staff member since 1980, reading a prepared statement from interim owner Peter Aaron (who could not attend); Congressional Representative Pramila Jayapal; and Rick Simonson, whose career as the events coordinator spans roughly the entirety of the store's existence.
Elliott Bay has been an influential pillar of literary engagement both locally and nationwide. It has hosted multitudes of guest speakers and authors over the course of its long-running events series, which has featured Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama; Bruce Springsteen; Dave Matthews; Anne Rice; Annie Leibovitz; Raymond Carver; and David Sedaris. The coffee shop in the hit television show Frasier was based on the original Elliott Bay Cafe.
In 2010, the bookstore relocated to its current location, a former Ford truck repair shop building, circa 1918, at 1521 10th Ave. in Capitol Hill's Pike/Pine corridor. The 20,000+-square-foot bookstore features 19-foot-tall ceilings, rows and rows of cedar shelves lined with more than 150,000 titles, and Little Oddfellows Cafe.
In June 2022 the store was purchased by Elliott Bay's longtime former general manager, Tracy Taylor, along with married team Murf Hall and Joey Burgess, of Burgess Hall Group. Under the current ownership, Elliott Bay Book Co. is one of the largest queer- and woman-owned bookstores in the U.S. --Dave Wheeler
I cannot wait to see this movie, it sound wonderful, and the cast is amazing!
Movies: Killers of the Flower Moon
Paramount and Apple have released a new trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTbwekI6ahjIBB_Tg~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTCcChpoMLg-gVdw, adapted from David Grann's 2017 book, Variety reported. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the Apple Original film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone has set its wide theatrical releasefor October 20, and will subsequently stream on Apple TV+.
The cast also includes Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Tatanka Means, Michael Abbot Jr., Pat Healy, Scott Shepard, Jason Isbell, and Sturgill Simpson. Killers of the Flower Moon was produced alongside Imperative Entertainment. Scorsese is producer along with Executive producer Leonardo DiCaprio
One thing that I noted about this section of Shelf Awareness is that older bibliophiles like myself get to have our say, which I enjoy. I, too, was a voracious reader as a kid, and we had an incomplete set of World Book Encyclopedias that I used to read for fun whenever I was between trips to the library. Even once I was in college, I remember finding reference books and periodicals and encyclopedia entries that would keep me fascinated for hours on end, much to the chagrin of the librarians.
Super Book Buyers and Book Lovers
Not long after devouring the BooknetCanada stats, I found a Guardian q&a https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTbwekI6ahjIBAkGA~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTCcChpoMLg-gVdw with Richard Ford, author most recently of Be Mine. Something he said helped narrow my focus. I suspect that many, if not most, of us have one book from childhood that remains imprinted in our memories, or even, if we're lucky, still sits in a place of honor on our bookshelves.
Ford said his favorite book growing up was The World Book Encyclopedia:
"My parents bought this for me when I was eight and doing dismally in school, one red-leatherette volume for each gold-embossed letter of the alphabet. Polio, the Boer war, Abraham Lincoln, basketball: entries were short, informative and often happily had photographs."
This sparked my memory of a particularly evocative sentence in Frank McCourt's bestselling memoir Angela's Ashes, where he recounts a singular boyhood moment that SBBs of all nations can relate to: "There are bars of Pears soap and a thick book called Pears' Encyclopedia, which keeps me up day and night because it tells you everything about everything and that's all I want to know." Every Super Book Buyer has an origin story, and every book counts. --Robert Gray
I'm so very glad that Montana bookstores and authors and others are suing to remove this horrible "anti-drag" law, which is really just a law based on prejudice against LGBTQ people.There's absolutely nothing "lewd" or "salacious" about drag queens/Trans women reading books to kids! They're not putting on a strip show for heaven's sake, they're just reading out loud!
Bookstore, Author, Others Sue to Block Montana's 'Anti-Drag' Law
Montana Book Company https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTdn-8I6ahjKhhyHg~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTD56npoMLg-gVdw, Helena, Mont., is among a dozen plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed last Thursday against Montana's "anti-drag" law, passed in May. The law bans people dressed in drag from reading to children in public schools or libraries, and prohibits businesses and state-funded entities from allowing minors to see so-called "sexually oriented performances."
Calling the law unconstitutional, an abridgement of free speech, and "motivated by anti LGBTQ+ animus," the suit seeks a temporary injunction as well as damages for one of the plaintiffs, Adria Jawort, an author, transgender woman, and member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, whose appearance to speak at the Butte-Silver Bow Library on June 2 was cancelled because, as a librarian said, the new law made it "too much of a risk to have a transgender person in the library."
The defendants are Montana's Attorney General, the Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the chief executive of the city and county of Butte-Silver Bow. The plaintiffs' law firm is Upper Seven Law in Helena.
The suit describes plaintiff Montana Book Company as "an independent LGBTQ+-owned bookstore [that] aims to create an open and inclusive community space for marginalized populations in Montana. The Montana Book Company has hosted and plans to continue to host age-appropriate drag shows open to the public."
Bookstore co-owner Chelsia Rice said, "Drag has long been an important artistic and cultural expression. This law wrongly targets the constitutionally protected speech of performers, artists, authors, and other Montanans." Coincidentally, the suit was filed on Montana Book Company's fifth anniversary.
Under the law, she is considered "a 'drag queen' or 'drag king' participating in 'drag story hour' at such times. Thus, she faces criminal penalties, lawsuits, and revocation of her teaching certificate."
The suit calls the law "a Frankenstein's monster" that "prohibits drag performers from leading story hours in schools and libraries, which is an unconstitutional content- and viewpoint-based restriction on free speech. But that's not all: the bill bans reading to a child in a library in a superhero costume, conducting classroom activities dressed as Ms. Frizzle, inviting a Disney princess impersonator into the classroom, and staging a production of Shakespeare's As You Like It. These restrictions apply regardless of a person's gender identity and sex."
In addition, the law "limits First Amendment activities of artists, businesses, and entities that receive state funds. Displaying or disseminating obscene materials and performances has long been illegal in Montana," but the law "creates new, confusing restrictions on 'sexually oriented performances'--with a definition that, inter alia: allows the display of human cleavage but not prosthetic cleavage; restricts 'stripping,' regardless of whether nudity results; and may--this is unclear--prevent allowing minors to view 'any simulation of sexual activity,... salacious dancing, [or] any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of human genitals.' " Unlike the state's obscenity statute, the law "does not incorporate the Miller test--the classic definition of obscenity--which safeguards artistic expression, political speech, and science. Worse still, an entity that receives any state funds--e.g., any art museum or independent theater--cannot display a live or prerecorded performance with essentially any sexual content, regardless of artistic merit and even if the audience is limited to adults."
And the law's penalties are "as confusing as they are draconian," the suit stated. "Everyone involved in putting on a 'drag' (read: costumed) story hour or so-called 'sexually oriented performance' can be sued within ten years of the event by a minor who attends the performance--even if the minor and their guardian consented at the time--with statutory damages and attorney's fees assured to the plaintiff." If the violator is "a library, school, teacher, school or library administrator, [an] 'entity that receives any form of funding from the state,' or employee of such an entity, they shall be fined $5,000. Moreover, teachers and other school personnel will be suspended for a year; upon a second offense, they will lose their certificates. And if the violator is a business that serves alcohol, it will be fined between $1,000 and $10,000 per violation and ultimately lose its business license."
I've been wanting to get my hands on a copy of this book, it sounds wonderful, and I'm even more excited about it since it's a Reese Witherspoon book club pick.
Reese's July Book Club Pick: Yellowface
The July pick of Reese's Book Club is Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Morrow). Reese Witherspoon wrote https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTdwr8I6ahjKh51Gg~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTD8P3poMLg-gVdw, "This contemporary psychological thriller follows Juniper Song--a bestselling author who is not who she's pretending to be. She didn't write the book she claims she penned, and she is not Asian American. Clear your schedule because the moment you start reading you won't be able to put it down. This story circles themes like the dark side of book publishing, social media culture and so much more.... When you finish it, you'll want to talk about it immediately."
RIP to the man who wrote the Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Obituary Note: Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTek74I6ahjKkojGA~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTDJL2poMLg-gVdw, "a Communist Party outcast who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers' paradise of his native Czechoslovakia," died July 11, the New York Times reported. He was 94. Kundera's "run of popular books began with The Joke, which was published to acclaim in 1967, around the time of the Prague Spring, then banned with a vengeance after Soviet-led troops crushed that experiment in 'Socialism with a human face' a few months later." He completed his final novel, The Festival of Insignificance, in 2015, when he was in his mid-80s and living in Paris.
His most enduringly popular novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), was an instant success, reprinted over the years in at least two dozen languages. It was also adapted into a 1988 film starring Daniel Day Lewis.
The Times noted that Kundera "could be especially pitiless in his use of female characters; so much so that the British feminist Joan Smith, in her 1989 book Misogynies, observed that 'hostility is the common factor in all Kundera's writing about women.' Other critics reckoned that exposing men's horrible behavior was at least part of his intent. Still, even the stronger women in Kundera's books tended to be objectified, and the less fortunate were sometimes victimized in disturbing detail."
Kundera told The Paris Review in 1983: "My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being."
After playwright Vaclav Havel helped lead the successful Velvet Revolution in 1989, and then served as president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, Kundera's books became legal in his homeland for the first time in 20 years, but "many Czechs saw him as someone who had abandoned his compatriots and taken the easy way out," the Times noted, adding that there was scant demand for them or sympathy for him there. By one estimate only 10,000 copies of The Unbearable Lightness of Being sold.
When Communism ended in 1989, Kundera had been living in France for 14 years with his wife, Vera Hrabankova, first as a university teacher in Rennes and then in Paris. Czechoslovakia revoked his citizenship in 1979, and he became a French citizen two years later.
The last book he wrote in Czech before switching to French was Immortality (1990). His next works were Slowness (1995), Identity (1998), and Ignorance (2000). Kundera was often nominated, but never selected, for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
"Enigmatic and private, and more than a little grumpy about the clatter and clutter of modern Western society," Kundera was largely out of the public eye from 2000 until the announcement in 2014 that he had created yet another novel, The Festival of Insignificance, the Times noted. In the book, he wrote: "We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously."
I LOVED the movie with Gene Wilder from the 70s, and I can tell from the movie trailer that this version of a prequel will be just as beloved and iconic. It's also debuting a few days after my birthday, so I have a reason to go to the theater to celebrate!
Movies: Wonka
Warner Bros. has released the official trailer for Wonka https://www.shelfawareness.com/ct/x/pjJscFTek74I6ahjKkogSQ~k1yJoKXv-hs8x6iTDJL2poMLg-gVdw, based on the eccentric chocolatier created by Roald Dahl in his classic children's novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The "musical fantasy film follows the adventures of a young Willy Wonka, including how he met the Oompa-Loompas," Variety reported.
Along with Timothy Chalamet as Willy Wonka, the film stars Olivia Colman, Sally Hawkins, Keegan-Michael Key, Matthew Baynton, Matt Lucas, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Natasha Rothwell, Simon Farnaby, Paterson Joseph, Tom Davis, Rakhee Thakrar, Justin Edwards, Colin O'Brien, Ellie White, Freya Parker, and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. Wonka will hit theaters December 15.
One, Two, Three by Laurie Frankel was the July pick for my library book group.This enchanting and fascinating contemporary lit novel read like a YA "finding yourself" romance, and yet it still had many points that would draw in an adult audience. Frankel, who was one of the Seattle 7 Writer's Group (along with Garth Stein and Erica Bauermeister and Jennie Shortridge, all published famed writers) has taken the story of a town poisoned by industrial chemicals, and the mother and triplets who are all trying to sue for the damage that this has done to the town and to their own bodies, and turned it into a triumph, ala Silkwood or Erin Brockovich. Here's the blurb: In a town where nothing ever changes, suddenly everything does...
Everyone
knows everyone in the tiny town of Bourne, but the Mitchell triplets
are especially beloved. Mirabel is the smartest person anyone knows, and
no one doubts it just because she can’t speak. Monday is the town’s
purveyor of books now that the library’s closed―tell her the book you
think you want, and she’ll pull the one you actually do from the
microwave or her sock drawer. Mab’s job is hardest of all: get good
grades, get into college, get out of Bourne.
For a few weeks
seventeen years ago, Bourne was national news when its water turned
green. The girls have come of age watching their mother’s endless fight
for justice. But just when it seems life might go on the same forever,
the first moving truck anyone’s seen in years pulls up and unloads new
residents and old secrets. Soon, the Mitchell sisters are taking on a
system stacked against them and uncovering mysteries buried longer than
they’ve been alive. Because it's hard to let go of the past when the
past won't let go of you.
Three unforgettable narrators join
together here to tell a spellbinding story with wit, wonder, and deep
affection. As she did in This Is How It Always Is,
Laurie Frankel has written a
laugh-out-loud-on-one-page-grab-a-tissue-the-next novel, as only she
can, about how expanding our notions of normal makes the world a better
place for everyone and how when days are darkest, it’s our daughters who
will save us all.
Frankel's prose is smooth as silk, and helps along her elegant plot to it's somewhat bizarre ending. My only problem with this book was that two of the three sisters fall in love with the evil chemical plant CEO's son almost immediately, and suddenly they both go from being rational teenagers to dunderheads who will do or say anything for a boy they barely know. It's like invasion of the body snatchers, on a much smaller scale. Since I have been a teenage girl (a looooong time ago), I found the way the girls acted to be utterly unbelievable and sexist. I never lost my mind over a boy when I was a teenager. However, a man in my book group who actually is raising pre-teens on the verge of puberty, noted that his daughters lose their minds over crushes on boys every day. So apparently I'm an anomaly. Anyway, I did enjoy the novel, for the most part, and would give it a B+ and recommend it to anyone looking for a more serious YA book that has diverse disabled protagonists.
A Fatal Illusion by Anna Lee Huber is the 11th novel in her Lady Darby mystery series. I've read most of the series, but I noticed that as time goes on, Huber's writing gets more fiddly and overblown with descriptions of everything from the landscape to the actions of parliament. Here's the blurb:
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