Only in Ireland…
A co-worker came up to me today, looking perplexed as some “items” had been left sitting on a book display, for no apparent reason.
She’d left them there in case the person who left them behind came back looking for them.
Unremarkable you say? Something that happens all the time. Well maybe, until you see what the items were (and the fact that they weren’t in a bag, which could have accidentally been left down and forgotten).
Have a look at what was left:
A crucifix, a 4 CD set of Irish Ballads….and some tinted moisturiser.
Um…..?
Who could have left these behind? And why were they carrying them around in the first place? Was there some bizarre logic to leaving them on a table covered in celeb memoirs?
We thought about it, we really did (it was kind of a slow day).
So, the crucifix: good Irish Catholic bringing it around with them in case they needed to perform an exorcism? (In case you can’t tell from the pic it was big, slightly bigger than my hand).
The ballads CD set: A republican? Also c/f crucifix. A good Irish Catholic with republican sentiments.
Ok, but the tinted moisturiser?! I was stumped by that. Until my coworker piped up “They’ve been tango-ed!” And we fell around the place laughing. (For young’uns/foreigners who know not why this was amusing, see this for your edification).
So if you know any good Irish Catholics who lost their crucifix and ballads set, and who have a fetish for looking orangey, get ‘em to post a comment and I can help hook them up with their stuff. I would be fascinated to meet the person who habitually carries such stuff around with them.
In my last post I mentioned someone noted by me as “obnoxious card guy”. I now know that I didn’t forget him, I blotted the whole experience out of my memory. Thankfully, the same co-worker that found the items of oddness today performed no such feat of willful disremembering, and so I can tell you all about him:
Late one evening (8pm closing) I was doing the 5 minutes til closing stroll around upstairs, letting people know we’d be closing in a little while, and asking them to go to the tills if they had anything they wanted to purchase. One man snapped at me saying he’d use the 5 minutes to browse, and I immediately pegged him as “one of those” (there is a certain type of passive-aggressive, or sometimes simply aggressive customer who WILL NOT leave the shop til 5 minutes after closing, just for the joy of keeping us after hours. We don’t get overtime, it’s not in the budget, so we have to eat the extra time and so obviously we do not like being kept late). I finally got him shooed down the stairs at 8.05 where he joined the queue at the till, and I went over to man the doors and let customers out the one open door. He gets to the till at 8.09pm (clock-watcher, moi?) unloads a mighty stack of books, and wants to pay by credit card. All is lovely til my co-worker at the till gets an on-screen message to call his credit card centre for authorisation. This happens a lot, random checks on cards, especially if the customer is using their card outside of the country of issue). We’re used to ringing a UK number for authorisation, but my co-worker called over to me that prefixing the number with 0044 wasn’t working. I suggested trying 001 for the US, and the customer said that yes, the card was issued in the US. None too happy about having to make a transatlantic call, we sucked it up, just to get the guy out of the shop. So my co-worker calls the card centre and starts getting interrogated. She passes the phone to the customer who immediately starts giving grief to the CSR on the end of the phone. He rants for a good 5 minutes, and I’m standing there at the door, thinking the manager is going to kill us, a transatlantic call that taked more than the usual 45 secs to get an authorisation code will not go over well. The customer is getting increasingly irate, cussing out the CSR and demanding to speak to a supervisor. Both myself and my co-worker are glaring at him, thinking he’s a right prick and wishing he’d stop being an asshat and just get the damn auth-code so we can go home. He finally gets through to a supervisor and greets him with utter sarcasm and belligerence. I start dying inside. I’m seriously tempted to go over to him and suggest he sort out his card problems on his own dime and we’ll keep the books for him overnight. But he’s yelling and I don’t want to tick him off even more, so I stand there, head against the door, willing him to cop on. Eventually the supervisor asks him for his DOB which he complains about having to give out, and then for his security code, at this the guy completely erupts, spits out the code and then says; “And all your fucking ‘extra security’ is worth bugger all since the people here now know ALL my security information!!!” Yeah. Right. Like we care. We don’t want to defraud you, we want you to get the auth code, get off the fraking phone and get the hell out of the shop so we CAN GO HOME!
Eventually he passed the phone to my co-worker, she got the code, it worked, he got his books and we got rid of him, closed off the tills and got upstairs, at 8.25pm.
Nice one, jerk : (
(By the way, that same co-worker has embarked on a madcap book-diet which means she cannot by any books for a year. I admire her moxie, and you can follow her adventures here.)
Now to things of bookishness. I recently finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided, or as it is known over here, Smile or Die, and have been hand-selling it with gusto.
The books starts with Ehrenreich’s dignosis of breast cancer some years back, and her subsequent introduction to the cult of the pink ribbon and the necessity of positive thinking. She eviscerates both, rightly (in my opinion), the pink ribbon business for its demeaning cute-ification of the very serious illness that is cancer and the positive thinking merchants for refusing to acknowledge that is is normal (and probably healthy) to feel anger and fear when handed a cancer diagnosis. She questions claims that positive thinking patients have better outcomes and finds that there is no validity to the idea at all. So why do people still push patients to “think positive”? And where else in life is the negative pushed aside as “depressing” and disregarded, even when it has merit? Where did all of this start, and how did it gain such a stranglehold in American culture?
The rest of the book is taken up with answering those questions, and Ehrenreich proves a witty, intelligent and sometimes bemused elucidator of the phenomenon and all its mutations. I stormed through the book, laughing, frowning, getting indignant, gaping in slack-jawed amazement at the thought of motivational waterboarding and motivational spankings, and finished it up wanting to punch Deepak Chopra on the nose, or failing that, make a sacrificial bonfire of all the cosmic-ordering/manifest your will/prosperity gospel tosh in the shop. Until I realised that I’d probably be arrested, and the shop would have a vastly reduced business section, as well as little to no mind/body/spirit or divination stock. That wouldn’t be good.
I have an old joke about reading The Secret and really wanting a pizza, so I told the cosmos I really wanted that pizza. I cosmic-ordered it. I guess my local pizza place have only gotten as far as taking internet orders, as my cosmically-ordered pizza never arrived. (Note: I have never read The Secret, I think it’s a con job to make Rhonda Byrne rich, and in that, and only that will it ever succeed). What Ehrenreich succeeds in pointing out, is that too much accentuating the positive (and refusing to even hear the valid negative) can have drastic effects on more than just the person involved. That she manages to extrapolate it to the global markets crashing and the recession has some people raising skeptical eyebrows, but I guess they just don’t work in a place where “negativity” can get you fired. If you ever have, you can see how her argument works.
The book is not polemic, it’s not some screed in book form, it’s full of facts and evidence (and debunking of nonsense), most of which is presented in a calm manner. When she gets angry it is with reason, and I have to say, there were places Ehrenreich calmly laid things out where my blood-pressure was hitting the roof.
This is not just a great read, it’s an important one. Miss it, and you’ll miss out.
If nothing else, you’ll learn that healthy cynicism is just that: healthy.
New Year, new crazies….
Okay, I rescued my list of work-related weirdness from my work fleece yesterday…and I’m going to try to make a post out of it.
Here follows the highlights of the “New Year, New Loon” experience so far (unless you’re me, in which case it’s the lowlights):
We’re currently doing a very brisk trade in a book about near-death experiences, it’s called Going Home and its author has been getting great big wodges of media time (press, radio and TV). When a book is selling like the clappers we usually stack it up by the till, so when people ask (without looking around them, as they always do) if we have it – we can simply hand them a copy.
So there I am, working on the till, and a woman comes up, looks at the book and then says; “Having had my own near-death experience, I don’t think I’d be too keen on reading about anyone else’s.” A five-klaxon looper alert sounded in my brain, so I attempted to avoid a conversation by making a non-committal grunt type noise. It didn’t work. For some reason she really really wanted me to know about the white light and the tunnel and all of it (Now, full disclosure, I have seen White Noise 2 but only because Nathan Fillion and Katee Sackhoff were in it, not because I’m interested in near-death malarkey, because I’m really not.). So on and on the lady goes, while a queue builds up behind her and I try to wrap things up as politely as possible. Took a few tries, but I finally suggested she should write her own book about her experience. Told her she’d make a mint. She went away all excited. Oooops.
Next customer (who had obviously been earwigging) hands me the book he wants to buy, leans over the counter and says; “People shouldn’t be afraid of ghosts, ghosts can’t hurt them. People should be afraid of people.” Yikes. Okaaaay. Wasn’t sure whether to take that as a threat or a piece of homespun wisdom, and since he didn’t follow up with violence, I guess it was the latter. Two in a row though, harsh!
Then there was the young woman with the diary. She came up to the till looking all worried. I asked if I could help, and she held up a (half-price!) Te Neues diary with a cover that had an ink drawing of a hand holding a quill on it. I assumed she was worried about whether or not it was really half-price so I assured her that it was. Nope, that wasn’t it. She looked at it, looked at me, and asked: “Is this diary unisex?”
Urrrrrr? Well, yes, yes it is. There are no gender restrictions on anything we sell. Honest. I did point her towards some pink and purple diaries in case she was really worried about the gender identity of her stationery product. She didn’t like pink but was worried that the diary she had selected might have been a bit “masculine”. Eeeep. Okaaay. She bought it in the end though.
One afternoon recently I was busily trying to cut through cable ties on one of the tills to trouble-shoot a gift-card machine that was acting the maggot (this involved rather a lot of contortion, and popping my head up every now and then like a meerkat in case a customer needed serving) when a call came from upstairs. I answered it to find a co-worker in a bit of a tizz – someone had broken one of the locks on the main washroom door, and it wasn’t possible to open it at all. Luckily there was no-one trapped in there, but there was a customer with a baby whose nappy needed changing, and the washrooms aren’t just for customers, we use them too. The thought of having to explain every 5 minutes to irate people who need to pee that the door was broken would be enough to make the most stoic employee come down with a case of the vapours. So I ran upstairs, and was busily trying to jimmy the lock with a gift-card, while my co-worker took the lady into the staff area to change her child’s nappy. Now, we knew there was no-one trapped inside, but that would not have been clear to any customers. I’m there frantically trying to force the lock, while lamenting mentally that reading 57 gabillion crime novels doesn’t actually teach you how to to this) when I hear a loud cough behind me. I turn around to see a very cross-looking lady. Oh dear. I assume, as you would, that she is cross because she needs to use the washroom; so I shrug apologetically and say; “The door’s broken, I’m trying to open it.”
She sneers at me and says “Actually, I’m looking for advice on a book, if it’s not too much trouble.” (snooty disdain dripping off the end there). I boggled for a second (what if someone had been trapped in there?) and apologised, scampering off to help her, thinking it would only take a minute. Oh no. It took twenty. To add insult to injury, her attitude had me so turned around that I went flying over a footstool while looking for picture books with CDs for her. I landed sprawled on the floor. Did she ask if I was alright? NO! She kept wittering on about needing blah book (ignoring the fact that I was actually on the ground and in obvious pain) while I picked myself up, dusted myself off and found some for her. This meant going through ALL the picture books in the kid’s section and showing her anything with a CD attached (she had no intention of actually looking herself, obviously, that’s menial work, that is!). Once, due to pain and general pissed-off-ness I accidentally handed her one with a DVD rather than a CD and then she had to lecture me for 5 minutes on how I wasn’t paying attention. I WASN’T PAYING ATTENTION?! REALLY?!?!? Eventually she was satisfied she’d had enough attention and went away, while I limped off to the office to file an accident report, and then back to trying to force the door. Lovely people that come into our shop. Really lovely.
I thought she’d be the worst I’d have to deal with but then, thanks to my stupid big mouth and helpful nature, she was trumped.
A co-worker referred a customer to me because he was thinking about buying an e-reader, so I go over and chat to him a bit about his various options. He seems a bit baffled by it all, so I ask him what attracted him to the idea of an e-reader in the first place. He has written a book he tells me, and he wants to be able to carry it around with him. I explain that yes, he can do that with an e-reader, he just needs to save the file in a certain format, and he’s good to go. But can he show it to people, he wants to know. Of course! Once it’s in the e-reader, he can show it to anyone he wants. Then he starts wittering on about how he knows nothing about all this technological stuff, but his son in law told him to put the book on the internet, and if it goes in his e-reader can’t it also go on Amazon? Ohhhhh dear. I should have kept my mouth shut. I said, “You don’t want to put it on the web if you’re looking to get published.”
“Why?” he asks.
“Well, because if it’s available for free on the web, why would anyone want to buy it? Why would anyone want to publish something that can be gotten online for free?”
All pretty obvious. But no! There followed 5 minutes of him interrogating me about publishing, me pointing out that I’m only a bookseller and not an agent or a publisher, and that all I know I learned from reading agents blogs on the internet. I pointed out that he had the same access to all that information, and that he’d be better served by reading agents blogs than asking me questions. But no! I was the most helpful person he had ever met, and those 5 minutes taught him more about publishing than anything else, and when (note: “when”, bless his self-belief) his book is published, he’ll bring me a box of chocolates. Or better yet, when he’s on the Late Late Show (scratch self-belief, change to self-delusion) he’ll give me a personal shout-out. Lucky, lucky me. I eventually escaped and went back to shelving books, but he took to following me around so I had to go upstairs and hide for a bit in the Veritas section.
I went back downstairs two hours later and there he is, grinning at me; “It’s me again!” Oh, bugger, yes, it’s you again.
I explained to him that I was busy working and that I’d helped him all I could. He kept asking questions, I kept shelving books, and eventually he went away. I probably won’t get that shout-out now. Ah well..
And finally, the award for the most unobservant customer goes to: The woman who craned around a giant display-rack to ask me if we had any calendars. Guess what was in the giant display-rack? Yup. Calendars.
Wouldn’t mind, but January isn’t quite over yet, and all that stuff happened to yours truly, so it’s just a sample of the joys of retail book-selling in my area. Some days you just have to admit that your freak-magnet is turned up to eleven and go with it.
(ps – on my “don’t forget to blog about these” list, there is a notation saying “obnoxious card guy”. I do not know what this means. As obnoxious as he may well have been – he got lost in the shuffle when it came to lodging in my brain…which just goes to show that while keeping the list was smart, being non-specific was not-so-smart.)
Requiem for a good cat
This year got off to a good start, I had a pile of yummy books post-Christmas and post-birthday waiting for me to sink my reading eyes into them. I had coffee aplenty, and computer games to be playing. For me, this is the epitome of a good start to a year. My little household (me and the mogs) was happy, healthy and full of good cheer.
Since baby kitteh (variously Absalom (his proper name), Sal, Salander, Salamander, Sal-stumblebum, fuzzball etc.) joined the brood back in October, the mog-side of the household was perfectly balanced. Harvey (grumpy old cat who only likes affection from me) could sit on the back of the sofa and watch with jaded eyes as Bodie (rambunctious middle cat) and Sal wrestled, played chasing, or snuggled up together. Bodie was no longer lonely and distressing Harvey by trying to get him to play, and Sal was a little beacon of good cheer, curiosity and fearlessness.
He wasn’t just good for the other two, he would be at the door every evening when I came home from work, ready to race out into the hallway and explore. If I was just home from work, the exploration would be a quick patrol and sniff about, followed by him scampering back up to me to be picked up, cuddled and brought inside for his dinner. If I was headed down the hall for any reason, he’d come with me. Opening the door to my flat (from inside or outside) meant Sal came running.
When he got bored of scrapping with Bodie, he would come over, plonk himself down on the keyboard (his butt had some inbuilt system for rebooting the computer, it was a magical thing), purr like a chainsaw and lick my nose, knowing that I’d scoop him up and lavish attention on him til he’d had enough. He’d then park himself beside me and snooze happily, often with one paw on the mouse. This made doing anything on the computer a tad more difficult than usual, but I wasn’t about to disturb him.
When Sal first arrived there was a problem with his eyes, so I made an appointment with the vet to get them checked out (they were scurfy and irritated looking, conjunctivitis), I popped him in a cat carrier with his favourite toys and a big chunky cardigan and ambled off out the door. We’d made it to the gate when the carrier started juddering in my hand. I lifted the cage to eye level, expecting to see him beating up his cuddly toy and instead was confronted by the sight of him attemtping to chew the inner lid of the carrier while his body convulsed. I tried talking to him, but he didn’t respond. I knew it wasn’t panic, since panicky cats will hyperventilate…it looked more distressing than I can describe, and lasted about two minutes (but felt like ten), by which time I’d put the carrier on the ground, opened it and was stroking him, trying desperately to soothe him. A kindly passer-by in an SUV stopped, seeing me bawling like a baby, and offered a ride to the vets.
Once we got there (Oh thank you kind stranger in your big gas-guzzler!), I opened the carrier again, discovered he’d soiled himself and there were flecks of foam around his mouth. The vet said it was a fit (I’d figured that out) and could have been caused by any number of things. As Sal was a wild cat, chances were he had FIV (I already have one FIV+ cat, so that didn’t worry me unduly) and that the fit could have been caused by his first shots. I was to keep an eye on him and contact them if it happened again.
Given that it could have been caused by the shots, I decided against getting him his booster, and kept a close eye on him. There was one mini-fit a fortnight later, I called the vets and they said not to worry. Bring him in if it happened again. Okay.
No more fits, all clear, Sal was growing like a madman and was already bigger than Bodie, who had a year on him in age. He had huge paws, Sal, he was going to be a monster fluff-ball of a cat.
One Sunday afternoon, during the snow, I was at home (unexpectedly, I got what amounted to a snow-day since there was no point in having full staff at work when the customers were all staying home) and the day had passed as normal. Sal and Bodie had been wrestling, cuddles had been dispensed, and Sal had spent 45 minutes in the kitchen beating up a cat treat he disapproved of, well more like playing ice-hockey with it, whatever it didn’t pass muster and had to be punished. Bored of that, he ambled into the bedroom for a snooze. Fifteen minutes later, I heard a thump and Bodie ran to the bedroom door and started whining. Poor Sal was having a fit, and had fallen from the bed to the floor. I scooped him up and petted him, whispering to him and waiting for the fit to pass. It didn’t. 5 minutes later, I called a neighbour who came round and held him while I called the vet. Only once in the 15 minutes between the fit starting and us getting to the vet did Sal come out of it, and that was to cry for me as Margaret (my lovely neighbour) was holding him.
At the vet, they decided to admit him, loaded him up with Valium and let me have a quick cuddle with him, before telling me to go home, and promising to call with any news. I left, holding an empty cat-carrier, crying like a baby and with my heart in my boots. I kept telling myself everything would be okay, but in my heart of hearts I knew that fit was too severe, he seemed to be getting little to no respite, and his little heart had never stopped racing.
Sure enough, the phone rang at 6.15am the next morning, and it was the vet to tell me that Sal hadn’t made it. He said he’d intended ringing me earlier to ask permission to put him to sleep, but they wanted to stabilise him first. Poor little guy couldn’t be stabilised. They had been working on him for over 15 hours….and a very big part of me feels terrible that he suffered so long. I would have let him go rather than think of him fighting for so long, but I wasn’t thinking straight in the vets the previous day, I just kept saying “He’s only a baby”, because he was, and because I felt it was all so unfair.
Heartbroken as I was, the other two mogs were bewildered, Bodie would run around crying for Sal (he’s normally a very taciturn cat) and Harvey refused to eat anything for a whole day. Everytime I opened the hall door, I would look down for Sal, and that he wasn’t there hurt like a kick in the gut. Even now, a fortnight later, I come home from work and look down, expecting to see his cheeky face peering up at me before sneaking into the hall.
I miss him, and that’s ok, because as someone pointed out, he had 3 very good months here that he would not have had in the wild, and I got to enjoy having him around. And I did, every minute of it – and for that reason alone, the pleasure of having had him around, I can cope with the sorrow of him not being here anymore.
And now you can see why I haven’t posted in a while…. I’m sure I’ll get my book brain back any day now.
Best of ‘09
Yes, yes I know it’s late. It will also be brief, since I’m hugging a portable heater while typing (It gets cold in basements when it’s below zero outside!!!) and flu-bestricken so the old brain isn’t working too well either.
Without further ado:
Best Books of 2009 (Non Crime Fiction)
1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – Because there was not one thing about it I did not love. I rabbited on about it pre-Booker here, and will add nothing save for the advice that if you have not yet read it, do so!
2. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore – Because some of her sentences take my breath away, because the story developed in ways I didn’t expect, and because Tassie is a great character.
3. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood – Inventive as ever, witty as ever, forward-thinking as ever – just not as good (for my money) as Oryx and Crake to which it is a sequel of sorts.
4. Handling the Dead by John Ajvide Lindqvist – For putting a new spin on zombie-stories, for creating people with problems that are relatable, and managing to elicit both laughter and tears.
5. Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham – not getting enough notice, this one. It’s fun, witty and smart, and should have been the noughties answer to Bridget Jones (if Bridget Jones were menopausal and American)….someone in marketing needs their butt kicking methinks.
Best Crime Books of 2009 (yikes this was hard to narrow down!)
1.Dark Places by Gillian Flynn – still in hardback at the moment, and hard to come by, this was the stand-out crime novel of the year. Nothing hackneyed about it, nothing predictable, an anti-heroine worth ten Lisbeth Salanders, and writing to die for.
2. The Twelve by Stuart Neville – near-impossible to believe this was a debut. The supernatural meets the ex-paramilitary in spectacular (and chilling) fashion, in the most vividly realised Belfast I have ever read.
3. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson – for the court scenes alone it deserves a spot on the list. They make all the (many) flaws evaporate in a scene that Grisham would probably give his writing arm for. Bliss.
4. Genesis by Karin Slaughter – for making it ok that she killed off someone all her readers were fond of, by making the leads from her two series work together, and for proving that giving even the smallest characters backstory is not a bad thing if you do it as well as she does. It is rather gruesome though – be warned!
5. Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan – This is true Dublin noir, real-feeling, gritty as hell and as unfair as life itself. Anyone looking for insight into the underbelly of the Fair City should start here.
Top Kids/Young Adult Books of 2009
1. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. I loved the Hunger Games, was wondering what she could possibly do in a sequel. More fool me, as the sequel blew the original out of the water. Kid, teen, adult, I don’t care – this screams “Read me!!!” (and is currently being hand-sold to beat the band by every bookseller I know).
2. Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow – Take that Stephenie Meyer!!! Dru is a feisty, independent, yet sometimes vulnerable teen who finds herself all alone after her Dad turns into something that goes bump in the night (or rather scritch-scratch, moan, in the night). For every woman looking to buy Twilight for her daughter/daughter’s friend/niece/godchild/granddaughter, buy sparkly-vampire anti-feminist claptrap if you must, but make sure they read this too. It’s a million times better.
3. Betrayals by Lili St. Crow – the second book in the Strange Angels series sees more going on that you’d expect, and if the setting of a school for vampires and werewolves makes you think “Hogwarts”, then you’re baying at the wrong moon. This blazed on to the NYT children’s bestseller lists late last year, and deserves to stay there for a good long time. As with the first book – it’s the perfect antidote to Twilight idiocy.
4. Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean – Short, yes, fun, most definitely. Kids love having this read to them, and with good reason. The illustrations are amazing and the story is fodder of the best sort for the imagination. Lovely.
5. Beautiful Dead: Jonas by Eden Maguire – for doing something different with narrative verve and real-seeming characters you can’t help but care about.
Top Non-Fiction book of 2009
Going Rouge: Sarah Palin an American Nightmare edited by Richard Kim and Betsey Reid – a collection of articles about Palin that prove her own book (Going Rogue) to be a mind-melting work of staggering bullsh*t. And it’s funny too.
Turkey of the Year (all categories)
This year the “Dear God! Get it away from me before I puke!” award goes to More Than it Hurts You by Darrin Strauss, grossly manipulative, and just plain icky, I couldn’t even finish it. There has to be a better way to tell a story about Munchausens by proxy. I’m sure the writers for House MD will manage that in an episode sometimes soon. I’ll wait for that, thanks all the same.
Also, because I r geek:
Best Single-player game of 2009
Dragon Age: Origins. Yum. Interactive storytelling at it’s best. It has made me laugh, cry, and given me the willies non-stop since I installed it.
Best MMO of 2009
Fallen Earth Yes, I am a proud Wastelander, and this game punches well above the weight of the small independent company behind it. Aion was just too grindy and linear (despite the pretty) whereas FE has a sandbox style world I love to explore, and the best crafting I have ever seen in a MMO. Things like those matter to this geek.
Now, as regards 2010, here are some things to look forward to:
Fiction
The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, which is excellent from start to finish, about a man with a near-perfect life who is afflicted by an illness that makes him constantly walk away from it all. This is one you’ll be hearing a lot about. Due in February.
Non-Fiction
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar. Schenkar wrote my favourite biography of all time (Truly Wilde – about Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece) so I’m intrigued at what she’ll manage to do with the unprecedented access she was given to Highsmith’s friends, papers and diaries. By all accounts Highsmith was not a very nice woman, but with Schenkar steering things it’ll be a joy to read regardless. I’ve ordered a copy of this from the US, it’s being pubbed here sometime in Spring (I think).
Crime Fiction
Tainted, Black Run, Time of Death (or whatever they finally agree on) by Alex Barclay. In March, allegedly. The second Ren Bryce book holds the possibility of a run in with the gloriously evil Domenica from the first book, with Ren struggling under a cloud of suspicion when her psychiatrist is found murdered. Nothing is ever easy for poor Ren, now it would appear she’s lost her safety net too. Can’t wait.
I should also point out that Dark Places by Gillian Flynn is due out in paperback in summer, so look out for it then!
Spec-Fic
Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan. Want. Can’t tell you what it’s about as I’ve been avoiding spoilers like the plague, but this is one I’ve been waiting for for a good long while.
Phew! There you go.
I need more coffee stat!
But is it ethical??
Didn’t get a chance over the Christmas break to update here with some of the doozies we had as customers, so here’s a round-up:
Customer: I’m looking for X Book…
Bookseller: I’m sorry, that’s out of print.
Customer: So you can order it for me then?
Bookseller: Er, no. They’re not printing it anymore.
Customer: Oh, just order me an old one then.
Bookseller: *headdesk*
Customer: Do you have anything to do with all those religious books back there?
Bookseller: Um? Not personally, no.
Customer: There’s an awful lot of them.
Bookseller (probably thinking customer had a point): All our buying is done through our head office.
Customer: And the angel books?
Bookseller: Them too.
Customer: I find them upsetting. My sister was in to all those angel books….and now she’s dead.
Bookseller: *silent eep*
[This customer has come to be known as the guy whose sister was "killed by angels!!!!!"]
Customer: Why do you sell these books? (pointing at the Bunny Suicides)
Bookseller: Because they’re very popular?
Customer: I find them insensitive in the extreme. (clutching the hand of her five year old daughter)
Bookseller: I’m sorry you feel that way.
Customer: Is it ethical for you to cover up the original price on the book with your price stickers?
Bookseller: Um? The price on the book is in sterling, our labels have the euro price.
Customer: But we can’t see the original price unless we peel off that label.
Bookseller: Eh? (unaware she was dealing with a conspiracy freak).
Customer: It’s unethical is what it is.
Bookseller: It’s company policy.
Customer: But is it ethical???
Bookseller: I’m an employee of the company….
Customer: But is your company ethical?
Bookseller: You expect me to answer that?
Customer: (after having found another bookseller to corner) This (gesticulating at barcode sticker) is unethical.
Bookseller 2 (unaware of previous conversation): It’s standard bookselling practice to cover the original sterling price so people aren’t confused.
Customer: But is it ethical?
Bookseller 2 (confidently): Absolutely.
Customer: I don’t think so.
Bookseller 3 (who had been ear-wigging): The company sets the price on the book, that’s standard practice. They can set any price.
Bookseller 2 (wanting to kick bookseller 3): We set prices according to a quarterly exchange rate, it’s completely transparent.
Customer: Not to me.
Bookseller 2: There’s also 20% off all books at the moment, so you’d be getting it for less than the sterling price anyway.
Customer: Oh, I’m not buying it.
Bookseller 2: Okay then.
Customer: (stares expectantly at Bookseller 2)
Bookseller 2: Next customer please.
Also, the busier the shop is the more people there are who cannot read the signs on the bathroom door, or at customer services. I would like to have a little machine with two buttons on it, pressing the first would have it say “The key to the bathroom is available from the coffee shop” (like the sign says), pressing the second would have it say: “The tills are downstairs, thank you.” (like two signs say). Maybe three buttons actually, pressing the third would cause the silly non-sign reading customer’s head to explode. Like in Scanners, only with less mess.
And one from today;
Customer: I would like to buy a book but it is not reduced in the sale.
Bookseller (me): All books are reduced in the sale.
Customer: This one isn’t.
Me: Are you sure? Could you bring me the book?
Customer: It isn’t reduced.
Me: Do you mean it doesn’t have a sticker on it?
Customer: Yes, no sticker, no reduction (stubbornly).
Me: There’s 20% off all books at the moment. They don’t have to have stickers.
Customer: It is not reduced! (angrily)
Me: I can promise you, if you bring the book to me, and I scan it, it will be reduced.
Customer: You’re lying to me now. Do you think I’m an idiot? (storms out of shop).
Me: Well. You’re not very bright are you?
(I still don’t know what book she was after, but it would have been 20% off anyway – and because she didn’t believe me, she missed out.)
Sundry stuff….
Ooops, I seem to have fallen off the blogging wagon lately.
To make up for it, here follows an epic post on good books, odd customers and sundry other items of interest I came across in the past few weeks.
Firstly the good books:
I just finished reading Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs, having dragged the reading of it out over a fortnight or so, in order to savour it all the more. This is a good thing. It never ceases to amaze me how some short story writers can carry all the best points of that form (amazing thumbnail descriptions, imagery that makes you stop and go “woah!”, beaultifully (and unpretentiously) crafted sentences etc.) into the longer novel form.
Moore did it well in Anagrams and she does it here again. The book is the story of one Tassie Keltjin, the quasi-jewish (self-described) daughter of farmers who has left home to go to college. It follows her through a love affair and child-minding for a couple who adopt a mixed-race child, ostensibly very simple, but manages to do a whole lot more with it than that description would seem to allow.
The novel is set post 9/11, and derails itself slightly by letting that in on the plot rather than allowing it to set a mood that highlights the disconnectedness of people, but since evertything is so beautifully told, I’m inclined to forgive Moore for it. Especially since nothing goes quite how you’d expect it to, there are moments where the people and events stagger the reader as much as they do Tassie, the fulcrum around which everything turns (interestingly, Tassie is at an age where she thinks everything revolves around her anyway, so there’s an added layer there).
I don’t want to give anything away about the plot, but I will say, for anyone who likes lovely yummy meaty prose, this is what you are looking for.
On the lovely writing front, I also just finished Michel Faber’s The Courage Consort, and loved it too. It’s more novella than novel and follows the trvails of a group of singers sequestered together in a big house in Belgium rehearsing for a performance of an experimental acapella piece (which (the music) sounds horrific, which may or may not be beside the point). Faber is a master of scene-setting, and like Moore, he has a short-story writer’s ability to create whole people out of the smallest descriptions.None of his characters are of the stock variety, and the book is one you pick up and are quickly lost in, oblivious to hours flitting by. Can’t ask for more than that really.
On to the odd customers:
Christmas shopping time has been slower to take off this year than in others, with the result that people are doing a lot of close-to-the-wire shopping. This leads to a number of interesting exchanges, which we’re all pretty used to now.
For example:
Customer: I heard about this book on the radio a few weeks ago and thought it would be a great present for X. Do you have the book?
Bookseller: I’ll check for you, what’s the book called?
Customer: I don’t know.
Bookseller: Do you know who wrote it?
Customer (beginning to realise there may be a problem): No. I heard about it on the radio. (baleful look)
Bookseller: Okay, what was the book about?
Customer: Um, not sure really. But I knew X would like it.
Bookseller: Can you recall which radio program you heard it on? I could check the website for the show.
Customer: No…I don’t remember. (desperately and getting irritated) Do you have it or not.
Bookseller: (takes deep breath) Can you remember which radio station it was on?
Customer: (knows they’re in trouble and doesn’t like it) No. I listen to several. Do you have the book?
Bookseller: (calmly) I can’t answer that I’m afraid. I have no way of finding out what the book is, so I don’t know whether we have it or not. I can show you some of the more popular books this Christmas and we could see if anything rings a bell?
Customer: Oh, okay….
or:
Customer: I need 5 copies of (insert surprise hit book here).
Bookseller: We’ve sold out on that I’m afraid.
Customer: Oh, is it very popular?
Bookseller: Yes, it is. We should be getting some more copies in over the next couple of days. Would you like me to put 5 copies aside for you and call you when they come in?
Customer: No, I’ll just go somewhere else and get it.
(20 minutes later)
Customer: Hi, er, actually, could you put those books aside for me?
(This one is funny because when a book becomes a surprise Christmas hit, it is near-impossible to find it anywhere, unless you luck into walking into a shop when they’ve just taken delivery of it. Lots of customers have done the above dance with us this year. Mostly about Zest, which flies out of the shop quicker than you’d think possible).
Then there is the parade of people looking for out of print books, or the customer who has been given a list of books someone wants, except they want them all in hardback and the books are in print over a decade. Out of print people are always disappointed, but cheered by being sent off to Abe or Biblio to hunt down second-hand copies, Hardback guy was also sent there, since there was a chance he’d be able to source them there, hardback editions generally go out of print after a year or so…but some of the stuff he was looking for should be available from someone at either site (albeit with a hefty price-tag, a hardback of 1990’s back-list Stephen King is never going to be cheap). Of course for all the customers who are cheered by the chance of being able to find what they’re looking for online there are a bunch of others who will tell you that they do not “have any internets” and give you the evils as if you’re purposefully trying to stand between them and the books they want.
One thing has struck me this year though, and it seems to be a product of the recession. People do have less to spend, but they seem to be more sure of what they want to spend it on. They’re also more willing to listen to reccomendations, and less likely to quibble over everything. In contrast to Christmases past, we’re getting far more thanks for any help we provide than people complaining about random irrelevancies. Being thanked a dozen times a day is an odd feeling when you work in retail, but a most welcome one. It would seem that tightening purse-strings have reminded people that retail staff are people too, which is an unexpected side-benefit of the recession.
Lastly on random things:
I saw Avatar yesterday and learned two things.
1: I played too much WoW.
2: So did James Cameron. Really.
(Spoilers to follow)
In Avatar, the central characters avatar is one of the Na’vi, a tall, blue, big-eyed creater with large hands and feet, who is trying to become part of a tribe who live in a forest filled with glowy plants, the centrepiece of which is a giant tree called home tree.
He learns to become a hunter, gets a horse-type mount, then gets a flying mount (from a place where there are big floaty chunks of mountains in the air), and is then accepted into the tribe.
Eventually, to prove his worth and loyalty he gets an even more epic flying mount. Then there is a big battle.
In WoW you can play as a night elf, be blue and a hunter, and you run around in a start zone that is all pinky-purple with lush greenery, oh and in all night elf towns there is a big hollowed-out tree that all the important people live in. In order to get better at being a hunter you have to practice a lot (level up) and eventually you get to have a mount (night elves ride nightsabers, but even that gets covered in the movie). Once you level up a certain amount, you get a flying mount. Cough. And you get that in Outland, where there is a whole zone full of floaty mountains in the sky (it’s called Nagrand in WoW). If you grind gold, you can then have an epic flying mount, and if you grind faction rep you can get yourself a rare epic mount. Once you hit level cap, you can pootle around doing dailies, or you can go take part in big battles (raids).
Watching the film with my jaded WoW-players mindset, I was waiting for him to get his flying mount, his epic flapper, and then to have grinded enough rep to get let into a guild and start raiding, eventually becoming a raid-leader. And whaddya know….
I may have been more impressed with the visuals etc, if I hadn’t already seen them in a game. And not the Avatar game. But a game where you have an avatar.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
Luckily, the Na’vi story-line isn’t all that’s going on in the film, or I would have felt seriously let-down. The sign-posting of all the “twists” should be apparent to anyone from miles off, and the script really is clunky. However, 3D is always good, and Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez rock. Sam Worthington is grand (if bland), and the Duke Nukem-style military baddie is lots of fun.
I just don’t think the movie is good enough to change movie-making forever, but then again, I didn’t think Titanic was all that great, and look how well that did. If it wins Best Picture at the Oscars I’ll be most upset, that honour should go to James Cameron’s ex-wife Katherine Bigelow for the gritty brilliance that is the Hurt Locker.
/end epic post.
I have gone green…
….and no, that’s not an eco-resolution, nor is it a cause for concern.
In Nanowrimo parlance it means I’ve crossed the 50k line. If you click on the Nanowrimo 2009 tab just above, you should see evidence of my word-count on the little calendar tracker. I cam home from work yesterday determined to finish, and logged a count-check of 49,383 around 11pm last night, then kept going til 1.25 am where I checked again and discovered I had 53k. It’s nice when that happens. Despite the fact that it’s too early to “validate and win” (that starts tomorrow) I’ve been copying and pasting into the validator anyway – so I get no nasty surprises from it having a different word-count to google docs or open office.
I then spent a few minutes on nanomail before sloping off to bed and sleeping for a full twelve hours. That much sleep is almost unheard of for me. I think writing at that rate must take a heck of a toll on your system.
What I did realise last night was that not being able to write when I expect to makes me very grumpy indeed. I had been due to start in work at 2pm (after having lunch with my lovely aunt Annette), and so had intended to have a bit of a lie-in, get a few hours writing done and cut into the final 45k+ stretch. Instead, I was called into work early (and insufficiently caffeinated) and was out of sorts all day. It came as a bit of a shock when I realised where the grumpishness was coming from.
Well, actually, more than a bit of a shock.
I would hate to think I was in danger of developing any sort of “speshul snowflake” traits, so here and in the public setting of the interwebz, I do hereby apologise to my workmates (and former workmates who called in to say hi) yesterday, for being a grump. I may have explained why I was grumptastic above, but it’s still no justification. I’m sorry folks.
Thankfully, I was together enough to be perktastic, rather than grumpilicious with customers, as is required. BUt the contrast must have been pretty big for workpals to keep asking me if I was okay. I cringe in retrospect.
(And please, if I ever utter the phrase “bevelling my sentences” with a straight face, someone push me off the balcony, or brain me with that big Phaidon Architecture book in the glowy-green carry-case, I assure you, I will (eventually) be grateful for it.)
Today I plan to spend a while back-filling in plot threads and then I’ll set to writing the ending. Because I may have broken 50k but the darn thing still isn’t finished. Pressure is off now though, I have words enough for my winners badge, and this (and a mammoth amount of snoozage) gives me a happy.
So, fellow work-bods, I hereby give you license to poke fun at me for having been grumpy all day tomorrow. I earned it.
Off to replenish my caffeinated beverage now and get some more words down.
Nano…
is seriously interfering with my blogging time.
So before I start this evening’s tranche of wordsmithery, here’s a post. So you know I’m “still alive, thanks God” (and thank you to the wonderful Mohammed for the phrase that will never die, at least among Irish archaelogy-types).
I’m typing this with a kitten wedged between my back and the chair (don’t ask me why, he likes to lie there), and another moggy eyeing my mouse like it’s the real flesh and blood type, and not a piece of computer hardware (geeky aside, when did microsoft start calling them “human interface devices”? It sounds like something out of a Cronenberg flick).
Ah, kitten has just climbed over my shoulder and is now attempting to eat my fingers while I type. This does not bode well for an evening’s nanoing.
To business. Those following my confusion in an earlier post re: the new Alex Barclay book, here’s some of the answer – the book will be out in March 2010 and the title is not as yet finalised. Okey dokey? When the title is finalised I’ll post it, if I remember.
Appearances to the contrary, I have been reading.
I just finished (and I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and I absolutely loved it. It’s hip, smart, laugh out loud funny and genuinely affecting. It also makes geekery seem kinda cool. The prose is a mix of geeky slang, sci-fi/fantasy/RPG references and Dominican Spanish slang. Somehow it all comes together in a voice (or, well, voices) that is utterly compelling and wholly originial. It’s not often I use the phrase “original” so you should know I mean it. Because I am a nerd, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything in the Spanish slang that I couldn’t figure out, so I found the following link invaluable (also helps with Dominican history, “nerdy” references (*blush* I needed no help with those) and some other things that may cause “huh?” moments while reading. If you plan to read the book, bookmark this and it’ll see you right. It’s not for nothing that people win the Pulitzer for fiction, and this book is a prime example of a deserving win.
The story is about three generations of a family that become part of the Dominican diaspora to the U.S. as a result of the reign of Trujillo (“the dictatingest dictator”) and never manages to feel like a family saga, despite being one. In terms of magical realism (there’s an argument to be used for this book kind of fitting that category) it knocks Allende’s early stuff (which I loved at the time: Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna especially), into a cocked hat. The titular Oscar (the Wao is a corruption of “Wilde” his college roomates inflict on him) and his sister Lola represent one generation, their mother Belicia another, and her parents (a doctor and a nurse) the earliest. The narration of the book is shared between Yunior (a friend of sorts to Oscar, and Lola) and Lola herself. Their voices manage to be completely different while sharing a common inflection – thanks to Oscar. The whole book is a feat of story-telling verve and narrative nun-chuckery. I defy anyone not to enjoy it. If you don’t, you lose 8 charisma points in my book. And if you don’t understand what that means, read the book to find out.
I’m currently reading Betrayals, the second in Lili St. Crow’s (otherwise known as Lilith Saintcrow) Strange Angels series. I’m enjoying this as much as I did the first one, and will write more on it when I’ve finished it. I will note that it doesn’t hurt to read the book while listening to the Kristin Hersh album Strange Angels, not sure if that’s where the series title came from, but it’s an association I like.
Okay, that’s your lot as far as book-nerdage for today goes, I will away now and write some new words.
Phew!
Sleeping on it worked, I’m on course to break 30k today.
POV has flipped back to third person (slightly snarkily) omniscient. Words flowing again.
I has a happy.
In other, unrelated news, I seem to have misplaced my Bejeweled Blitz mojo, which is a VERY GOOD THING since it means I won’t be tempted to install it on my iPhone no matter how many big blaring ads they throw at me on facebook.
I SHALL RESIST oh you wonderful PopCap games app designers.
And yes, thank you all for noticing, I do need to get out more.
Just after November and Nano are finished.
Besides, it’s raining out there!
: )
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