Planogram! Or, What Books Play Well Together?
One hundred years ago, the Celia Building at 102 Park Avenue in Swarthmore–future home to Celia Bookshop–was a family shoe business. Sometimes I think about what it would have been like in there. Were the fancy women’s shoes right in front as you walked in, with little girls’ shiny Mary Janes behind them? Were the men’s two-tone wing-tips off to the right, the workbooks in the back, socks hung up by the cash register?
Now that Celia Bookshop’s bookcase selection has been finalized, I’m spending a lot of time with a pencil and a plan of the store, trying to decide which books should go where. Walk in the door and the “fiction room” will be on your left, with several cases of general fiction and a case each for various genres. Should Young Adult come first, then Romance, followed by SciFi? Should Mystery/Thriller be at the end or in the middle? Which flow is best?
Another way to ask that question is: What genres make good neighbors? Do you want your cookbooks near your gardening books? Memoir cuddled up beside Biography? Both those choices seem to make solid sense–yet I find myself dreaming about more surprising, lyrical juxtapositions.
Maybe Gardens should go next to Sports because you do them both (mostly) outside? Would Travel want to snuggle up to Romance? Should History and Society rub shoulders with Horror?
What if Poetry were next to Science Fiction? Isn’t it poetic to think about those starships sailing out to distant galaxies? Isn’t the kind of imagination needed to invent a startling, beautiful metaphor akin to the kind of invention that conceives of new orders of sentient beings and alternate social structures?
In the words of the great science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness (if you haven’t read that book, go get a copy now!), “Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
One of the great things about a bookstore: it’s a place where truth and imagination intertwine. Where they reign.
Recommendations
Here are some recommendations of recent books in a variety of genres (powerful nature writing, cozy fantasy, and political opinion) that resonate with each other in surprising ways. As usual, I’ll take a look at each book’s first lines and ask what that opening might tell us about the pages to come.
Is a River Alive?
By Robert Macfarlane
Twelve thousand years ago, a river is born.
In a hollow at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk–and flows away. Rises and flows, rises and flows: for days, then years, then decades, then centuries, watched by a midsummer day-moon and a berry-red winter sun, watched in all weathers, watched by deer who stand six feet tall at the withers, watched by the sentries of hawk and fox, watched in sleet and hail, watched by aurochs eleven feet long from muzzle to tail.
When Robert Macfarlane opens this extraordinary book by saying that a river “is born,” he does not mean “born” in the generic sense that any thing comes to be. In his word choice you can already see the answer he’s proposing to the question his book’s title asks: Is a river alive?
Macfarlane is a writer of landscapes and a lover of words. Earlier books have chronicled journeys into wild places and documented the history of words used for landscapes. In this one, he follows three rivers–one in an Ecuadorian cloud-forest, one in coastal India, and one running through the interior of what is now northeast Canada–exploring how each river is helping change the way people think about whether nature is alive.
Part of his method here is to make nature alive in his writing. Look at how, in the opening passage, he compares flint to eyes, asserts that the sun and moon are watchers. See how he uses the pronoun “who” for the deer, rather than “that.” This is in the tradition of the many indigenous languages that use “who” for animals and plants, rivers and mountains–a “language of animacy” that is everywhere in this book.
Is a River Alive? is also an adventure story. It’s also a vivid portrait of several passionate people working to save rivers. Finally, it’s also a personal exploration of how time spent on and near rivers might change a person who, like Macfarlane, comes from a region where the spring he loves best has almost run dry.
The Spellshop
Sarah Beth Durst
Kiela never thought the flames would reach the library. She was dimly aware that most of the other librarians had fled weeks ago, when the revolutionaries took the palace and defenestrated the emperor in a rather dramatic display. But surely they wouldn’t touch the library. After all, there were books here. Highly flammable, irreplaceable books.
You get a pretty good sense of what The Spellshop is about in this opening: there is danger of course: Flames! Revolutionaries! Defenestration! But mostly there are libraries, librarians, and books. The gentle, indignant humor of Keila’s “There were books here” suffuses this story of an introverted but resourceful librarian who escapes the chaos of the capital city by boat with her magical talking spider plant assistant, intending to hide out on the distant island of her birth. To save them from the fire, she takes some important spell books with her. If you see a bunch of spell books in chapter one… well, someone is going to have to use them at some point.
Durst writes the kind of cozy fantasy where you’re pretty confident things will be okay in the end. This genre seems to be growing in popularity as the world around us gets more chaotic. Will Kiera be able to hide her illegal spell books from the imperial investigator? Can she save the mer-baby with a bad case of storm sickness? Will she manage to grow enough raspberries to make enough jam to earn a living? All these questions have pretty much the same weight here, which is part of the book’s pleasure. I cared enough about Kiera to worry just a little when bad things threatened to happen, although of course I knew she’d be fine. After all, she’s a librarian.
Abundance
By Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein
You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets. A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blinks in the morning sun. Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources–towering wind turbines to the east, small nuclear power plants to the north, deep geothermal wells to the south. Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with joules dredged out of coal mines and oil pits. They mined rocks and burned them, coating their lungs in the by-products. They encased their world–your world–in a chemical heat trap. Today, that seems barbaric. You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.
The simplicity of the opening sentence here is doing a lot of work. Before journalists Klein and Thompson get into their passionate argument about why America needs to a.) get rid of outdated regulations that make it way too hard to build stuff, and b.) remake government so it supports open-ended innovation and widespread implementation of what we innovate, they paint a picture of the utopia that lies within reach if only we read their book and listen to them. Cool bedsheets and the dawn of a new day. A simple, declarative sentence that is easy to digest and that suggests that the road ahead could be simple.
I’m not suggesting that the authors believe or argue that the road ahead is simple, even if we do listen to them. But their style here does seem designed to make us feel the possibility that it might be–even as, a few sentences later, they remind us how bad things are now, using words like “dredge,” “by-products,” and “barbaric” to remind us how terrible things will remain if we don’t.
Whether you end up agreeing with the authors’ prescriptions here or not, Klein’s summary of the history of zoning, and why it matters—and how to think about the current housing affordability crisis—is well worth the cost of the hardcover.
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