Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
A Saturday Morning in the Bookstore
This is re-cycled from 2011, when a pleasant
hour or two in the bookstore did not involve appointments, masks, anti-social
distancing, and anti-socials sitting at the three remaining coffee tables for
hours while on their computers:
Why are there now so many books of lists of
ten things we must do before we die? Why
not nine, or eleven? And why should pay someone for a list of experiences he
says you and I must fulfill before we shuffle off what Shakespeare is pleased
to call this mortal coil? Will my life
be meaningless if I don’t jump out of an airplane over Scotland, see a famous
statue in a Buddhist temple in Bangladesh, eat fried snake in Singapore, bicycle
through Kenya, visit some snaky island off Honduras, or flush a certain Czarist
toilet in St. Petersburg?
The history magazines are mostly about
war. One magazine I perused featured a
photograph of a Nazi general about to be executed in Italy in December of
1945. He looks distressed. Perhaps his “Top Ten Things to Do Before I
Die” list was incomplete: “#9 – murder more Italian and American prisoners.”
History magazines sometimes publish
articles about what a nice lad General Rommel was, a worthy opponent and all
that (stuff), and kind to kittens and children.
No, it just won’t do. Rommel was
a Nazi general. His career choice was to
travel to other countries and then destroy them, killing lots of people while
doing so. But then, hey, maybe he was
just trying to find himself.
A Nazi connection sells spy stories – any formula-plotted
thriller will sell if a big ol’ swish-sticker (remember the subtle obscene gesture
by the housemaid in Mrs. Miniver?) adorns the cover. Such stories always begin on a dark, narrow, bleak,
foggy, smells-of-cooking-cabbage, wartime London street where our hero (1)
stumbles across a corpse bearing Secret Papers, and then (2) finds his way to
an old building which discreetly houses a Special Branch of MI5, MI6, MI6 1/2,or
MI7 which is more Special Branchy than any other Special Branch, and in which a
mysterious Colonel Ponsonby-Snitt rules over a mysterious league of mysterious
functionaries who hold the mysterious key – there’s always a key, real or
metaphorical – which is going to win the war against jolly Rommel.
Zombies and vampires – I don’t get these
genres at all. If someone wants blood,
let him order a steak, rare. One reads
in the news that some teens – obviously not the smart ones – are in imitation
of vampire stories biting each other and swapping blood and, hence, bacteria
and viruses. Were they not listening to
parental teachings about basic hygiene and the myriads of blood-borne
diseases? Well, no. Over in the magazine section one can find
magazines devoted to tattoos and piercings.
The book retailer could efficiently combine the books on zombies,
vampires, tattoos, and piercings into one category: Disfigurement and Disease.
Books about the Tudors, especially Tudor
queens and girlfriends, are still big. A
nice side-effect is that readers also learn a little history.
Eat / Pray / Love / Drink / Vomit – How
many women who work at the fast-food joint or at Big Box get to leave all
behind and spend a year in Italy discovering themselves? Heck, most folks consider themselves lucky if
they can take the kids to Disney once or twice before the little boogers grow
up.
A recent fashion are books bearing covers
of vapid-looking girls wearing little caps with strings hanging down from them
– one infers that these books, and they are Legion, are about a beautiful but
misunderstood Hutterite / Amish / Mennonite girl who finds both Jesus and true
love in a buggy while a modest church steeple and some perfect trees pose
picturesquely in the background. But I
sure wouldn’t know, and never will.
Detective stories – Agatha Christie is
still the best. Hercule Poirot is my
hero. Well, okay, him, John Wayne,
Sergeant Schultz, and Bob Newhart.
Poetry – just keep moving; nothin’ to read
here. That which now passes for poetry is
pretty much me, me, me, my, my, my in content and free verse (which is a
contradiction) in non-structure tricked out with the shabbiest sort of rhetorical
bling. If the poet doesn’t dot the i he
must be really cool, right? There is neither passion nor intellect nor
aesthetics in contemporary poetry, only squalid self-pity flung like a
temper-tantrum onto the page.
Westerns – the selection is smaller than it
used to be. A current trend is to
publish the books that were made into films, which is a great idea. Anyone who thinks John Wayne was one-dimensional
has never seen The Searchers, John
Ford’s brilliant examination of racism and redemption.
Harry Potter appears to be hiding, at least
until the next movie comes out. The
first book in the series was mildly interesting, but then the next forty or
fifty were only the first book repackaged – cute kids scream at each other and
then fight Him / He Who Must Not Be Named and then some minor character gets
killed and then the cute kids reconcile with teary eyes and we learn about
friendship being The Most Important Thing.
Yawn.
Time for coffee.
-30-
