What You Want
Beth and I spend a lot of time talking about what Celia Bookshop is going to be like when it opens on Park Avenue in Swarthmore next fall. People want to know what our vision is: inviting, cozy, beautiful, friendly–a place to find community and where books and people find one another. But we’re also trying to find out what you want. What books? What events? What nonbook items? What services? What vibe?
As the store’s book buyer, I’ve been busy all winter filling up a spreadsheet with the nearly 10,000 individual titles that will make up our initial inventory! Many new stores outsource this task to the big book wholesaler, Ingram. You tell them a few things about your store and they suggest a ROSI–a Recommended Opening Store Inventory–which you order from them. You can look it over and edit it, but using a ROSI still means building your store’s foundation on someone else’s idea of what you should be. We decided it was important to do that work ourselves.
And so the enormous spreadsheet! This many-tentacled creature is always open in some tab in my browser, so that if I hear about a great new book coming out soon–or remember an old favorite I can’t wait to introduce to new readers–I can hurry to my computer and put it in.
Last month we asked you to fill out a survey telling us what genres of books you’re most excited to browse. 78% of you told us “general fiction”--which maybe isn’t a huge surprise–but also, it’s kind of a surprise! That’s a lot of you!
The second biggest vote getter was memoir, at 65%. Then biography at 51%. Classics and cookbooks tied at 47%. Children’s picture books came in at 41%, with middle-grade books at 28% and YA at 20%.
31% of you said you were interested in poetry, which delights me. My mother was a poet, and that genre is close to my heart.
Literature in translation interests 20% of you. Travel guides: 27%. True crime: 8%. Meditation: 10%.
Earlier this month, our Zoom room for Ben Yagoda’s book talk about Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English was crowded, but despite that we’re hearing that you mostly want in-person events. 78% of you said you’d come out to hear authors read their work. 55% of you expressed interest in fiction book clubs, and almost 30% in nonfiction book clubs. 43% of you are excited about events that pair books and booze.
One of the things I was most curious to learn was how many of you were drawn to silent reading events, where everyone brings a book and sits quietly among others, minds all in separate worlds. A full quarter of you thought that sounded like fun! A New York City group called Reading Rhythms occasionally holds a huge silent reading event in Times Square. Here in Swarthmore, we might meet up in the grassy amphitheater of our own Central Park.
I look forward to sitting together with you some some warm summer evening, all of us with books in our hands, reading.
In the meantime, here are a few books I read recently and loved that you can buy on our website, either in paper, as an ebook, or as an audiobook. 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.
Gliff
By Ali Smith
My mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn’t recognize her. I thought she was just a woman working at the hotel. She had her hair scraped back off her face and tied in a ponytail and she was wearing clothes so not quite right for her shape that it took me that moment to work out they were her sister’s work clothes, the uniform they made the women and girls here wear, white shirt, long black pinafore/apron skirt thing.
Why does this short novel about two siblings navigating a strange, surveillance-heavy, near-future life in the UK–and about a horse!–begin with this odd description of their mother, who never shows up again except in flashbacks? And why does author Ali Smith alternate short, straightforward sentences like “My mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us” with long, not-quite-run-on ones full of odd phrases like “clothes so not quite right for her shape” (try reading that outloud!) and “long black pinafore/apron skirt thing”?
Ali Smith has always been interested in using different modes and styles of language to portray characters, evoke emotions, and create vivid pictures of landscapes and houses. In this book, the opening subtly but immediately sets up a sense of dislocation. It’s as though this new, shifting world the children inhabit is not quite capable of being described by ordinary language. The narrator must therefore put words together in new ways to try to convey the texture of living in a place where red lines are mysteriously painted around places and people the state wants to get rid of, and those classified as “unverifiables” slip in and out of the shadows.
“Gliff” is the name that Rose, one of the siblings, gives to a horse they rescue and that rescues them. It is also a word the other sibling, Briar–who loves words–becomes obsessed with because it can mean so many things, including, even, “a substitute word for any word.” Briar is learning that language can be gorgeously dynamic and fluid, and this knowledge–consoling and inspiring–informs their own decisions about how to survive.
Haunt Sweet Home
By Sarah Pinsker
TRANSCRIPT
HAUNT SWEET HOME EPISODE 717-ACT V
JEREMY (speaking while driving)
I needed sleep after a hard day of renovations on the Fergusons’ new home, but I was still curious about who or what was haunting them. Why not make a late-night visit and see for myself? It was time to check out their library ghost.
A lot of novels weave in podcast or TV show transcripts these days. Sarah Pinsker's use of excerpts like this one, which opens her delightful, short fantasy novel, brings humor and some welcome silliness to the story of Mara, an aimless young woman who joins the night crew of her cousin’s home-renovation-and-ghost-investigation reality TV show. The contrast between the somewhat serious (“needed sleep after a hard day of renovations”) and the mostly ridiculous (“I was still curious about who or what was haunting them”) runs deliciously through the book.
What’s less evident in this opening is the way Pinsker can also be profound when it comes to exploring family mythology, the confusion of one’s early twenties, and the deeply mysterious place that art comes from. The combination of fun and substance makes this a book that will appeal to a variety of readers. After all, aren’t many of us curious about who or what haunts us?
Mothers and Sons
By Adam Haslett
Once Jared’s car has vanished down the driveway into the darkness, there is nothing to do but turn and face the rectory. The only light on is the bulb above the front door, as if my mother and sister have already gone to bed. But that can’t be, it’s too early. My sister must be out, like I have been, fleeing this house of the dead. It’s summer–August–but I’m shivering.
Darkness, silence, aloneness in the midst of relationships. Shivering in summer and intimations of sleep when no one is sleeping. Right from the first paragraph, Adam Haslett (Swarthmore College class of 1992) sets the mood for the story of Peter, an idealistic gay New York immigration lawyer, and his mother Ann, a former Episcopalian priest who left the priesthood–and Peter’s father–to open a retreat center for women with her lover, Clare.
Something has created a rift between these two, making them unable to reach each other. Maybe it has to do with this Jared person–whoever he is. Jared’s name does not reappear for many pages after this opening, but Haslett has made us curious about who he is and why he matters, and making readers curious is one of the novelist’s main jobs.
The stories of the undocumented immigrants Peter represents, threaded through the novel, are some of its most compelling parts. I also loved his sister Liz, a brash, loyal, cosplay convention organizer who always brings energy to the page as she tries to drag her brother out of his rut and reconnect the family. I cared deeply about all Haslett’s messy, flawed, sometimes infuriating characters and was glad that–if he started the book at “this house of the dead,” by the end the author had led them, page by page, toward houses brimming with life.
Also—in honor of opening day—we’ve assembled a list of great baseball books for you. Enjoy!
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