Finding: All the Lovely Bookshops in London

At the beginning of this month, I spent a week in London. I’d been planning the trip since the fall, and in the midst of sketching out my itinerary, I made sure to pick out several bookshops to browse over the course of my stay. I rented a flat around the corner from the British Museum in the neighborhood of Holborn, in the borough of Camden, which put me within a four-block walking radius of several booksellers.

First was The London Review of Books shop, right on my corner, complete with its own tea shop and outdoor seating area, and home to a vast range of genres and book review quarterlies. (The London Review of Books is published fortnightly). I popped in three times over the course of the week.

In the opposite direction was the Atlantis Bookshop, an independent shop specializing in magic and the occult, tarot cards, incense, and various other related accoutrements. The shopkeeper, dressed in silky garb, with purple hair and a row of stars tattooed over her left eye, was having a conversation on the phone, and I happened to over hear a snippet: “If they had any sense at all they’d bask in your reflected glory and get on with it!”

Bookmarks, another shop in the immediate vicinity, specializes in left-leaning, social issue-focused, and occasionally radical texts. I noticed there were flyers posted in the windows for various social causes, and books by and for every racial minority, women’s issues, and so much more.

Venturing further out into London, I made a special trip west to Marylebone to find Daunt Books, perfectly catered to my taste for travel writing. If the collection alone wasn’t enough, the space itself boasts gorgeous oak architecture and an enormous vaulted skylight, making browsing their extensive selection of writing from and for every place imaginable even more cathartic with the sunlight streaming through. [Note: I experienced surprisingly good weather in London.]

On Sunday, in the midst of a trek around the East London neighborhoods of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and Spitalfields, in the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, I sought out and stumbled upon a few more shops. Making my way southwest from the Columbia Road Flower Market, I wandered down a neat little side street covered in murals and found Artwords Bookshop. With books and magazines on contemporary visual culture, fine art, graphic design, and fashion, I felt as though I discovered a treasure trove. I slowly perused their selection, pouring over books about keeping things fresh as a graphic designer and how “selfie culture” and the infiltration of photography into our everyday lives has reshaped our perception of the world around us.

Later, I found Brick Lane Bookshop, which was unfortunately much less interesting than I’d expected, amplified thanks to the crush of crowds swirling around the market tents up and down the street outside. Down the block, I checked out Rough Trade East’s selection of pop culture related titles, and a table of casual reader’s staples inside Old Spitalfields Market.

One of my last stops was the famous Notting Hill Book Shop. Never having seen the namesake movie myself (I know, I know), I at first found it odd that a small group of tourists were taking turns snapping selfies in front of the shop, but soon realized what I was I missing when I spied a wall of film paraphernalia inside. The selection was fairly ordinary, and I was soon pushed out of the way by a delivery service dropping off a dozen boxes of books.

Honorable Mentions:

The massive Forbidden Planet London Megastore had the most extensive sci-fi section I have ever witnessed. I even made a video of it for Frank so he could witness the magnitude.

The last stop on my Muggle’s Tour of London (of course I booked that!) was in the middle of Cecil Court, the inspiration for Diagon Alley. Famous on its own for book shops, I counted seven: a few antique and rare book sellers, a children’s shop with a poster of the illustrated version of Harry Potter right in the window, and Watkin’s Books, longtime seller of spell books, among other things.

So, dear readers, the moral of this travel story is this: you needn’t go far in London to find a bookshop that will cater to your tastes and fill you with whimsy.

- Chelsea

More But I’d Rather Be Reading! here.

Review: The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson

If I’m honest, the whole notion of a “children’s book” confuses me. The brevity of language employed should not decide what is age appropriate, and content should never be vetted for what is worthy for an adult as something a child doesn’t deserve. I understand that thematically and narratively there are stories that work well for, or are otherwise intended for, a specific audience, but to a declare novel “for children” rather than trusting the readers to engage with a narrative told from the perspective of a child or else for that of a child seems to me a very cynical way to approach reading and a less than respectful way to treat children and the literary development of a child.

The Rithmatist is about a teenage boy named Joel, impoverished and largely unexceptional (as many teenage boys frequently must confront as they come of age), more interested in becoming a rithmatist and their ways than pursuing academic excellence. Suddenly, children have started disappearing, leaving only blood and lines of chalk behind. The missing children are rithmatists: humans with the ability to bring chalk drawings to life and do combat with these with only the aid of schooling and a piece of chalk, tasked with growing up to hold the line against wild “chalklings” (errant chalk drawings hell-bent on attacking everyone in the United Isles of America and overrunning these island nations that make up our heroes’ country). Joel manages to get involved in the investigation, but he may have bitten off more than he can chew when he comes up against evil forces he can himself do nothing to stop, without the help of a delinquent and reluctant girl named Melody and that of a disgraced professor as timid as he is brilliant. Can he solve these murders before more children are attacked? And, really, what is a rithmatist? And will Joel be able to join their ranks?

I had a lot of fun with this “children’s book.” Sanderson sets up a wonderful story that is both brisk in pace and tonally appropriate. The Rithmatist is chalk full (forgive the pun, if you will, readers) of drama and action. The main characters can be forgiven for being mostly unexceptional and mainly fodder for exposition because Sanderson’s world-building and character development skills dance for us beautifully before all is said and done. Joel and Melody play with our antagonists with precision and tenacity, really allowing us, the reader, to believe in the urgency of this story and what’s at stake. As for the antagonists, these mysterious characters hold far more promise than the protagonists insomuch as intrigue is concerned, and that’s par for the course where most of Sanderson’s works are concerned. Overall, this is a good read that does not disappoint!

- Frank

More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.

Review: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

A few months back I had a sudden urge to read Eat, Pray, Love. I found a used copy on BetterWorldBooks.com and after I finished Goodbye To All That (the catalyst for this otherwise inexplicable urge; Elizabeth Gilbert had an essay in Never Can Say Goodbye, the companion compilation), I dug in slowly.

We meet Gilbert going through a harrowing divorce and the painful deterioration of her post-divorce love affair. I was wary, not prepared to read 300+ pages of a woman complaining, but instead I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed her story. The first section is disproportionately weighed down with grief in comparison with the rest of the memoir, but once Gilbert arrived in Italy, I found myself occasionally laughing out loud, and, shock of shocks, relating to her.

My relation was not to her grief or her misery, no, it was with the absolute bliss she was looking for and managed to find in Italy. Having traveled there last year, I remembered my own bliss, and could visualize some of the places she visited and the winding, cobblestoned streets she wandered. And the food, oh the food. Salivating while reading was another new sensation for me. My favorite part from this section (in the entire story, actually) was from Gilbert and her Swedish friend’s trip to Naples:

“So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered – one for each of us – are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she’s having a metaphysical crisis about it, she’s begging me, “Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?”

When she arrived in India, I was again hesitant because I typically avoid talk of religion, and here was Gilbert about to live in a remote ashram for four months, praying, meditating, and chanting daily in an effort to become closer to God. That said, I was again surprised how much I was enjoying her journey. This particular section, while heavy in spirituality, is also heavy in character development. There was notable growth in both maturity and consciousness. Gilbert effectively broke herself down, all the way to her core, waded through her grief, and was finally in possession of the tools to build herself back up.

“Whenever something happens, I always react. But here I was – disregarding the reflex. I was doing something I’d never done before. A small thing, granted, but how often do I get to say that? And what will I be able to do tomorrow that I cannot yet do today?”

When Gilbert arrives in Bali, she, for the first time during her journey, has no set plans but to find the medicine man – Ketut Liyer – whom she met two years prior during an assignment, and to learn everything she can from him. She has nowhere to live, she’s not allowed to stay in Bali for more than a month, she does not remember where to find her medicine man other than he lives somewhere in Ubud, but somehow everything serendipitously falls into place. I won’t give away the ending, but so much happens during her four months in Bali, including even more personal growth.

I have not seen the movie adaptation starring Julia Roberts, but I now understand why so many women clamored to see the film and what inspired many to embark on their own journeys of enlightenment.

- Chelsea

More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.

Review: Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

I sustain myself on a diet rich in science fiction, and the genre is vast and much more varied than it is given credit for by people who consider it too nuanced for their taste, so you will perhaps forgive me if I say what I have to say about this book before I say why: This may very well be a modern classic.

Elizabeth Bear is a powerful voice in the realm of novels, having written more than a couple dozen thrilling and sage-worthy books with uncommon and uncanny main characters and worlds that are at once familiar and still entirely other. (Most recently, I've been impressed by her Karen Memory Adventures.)

Ancestral Night is itself a chase novel, a format classically built to entertain and keep the story as well as the audience focused as settings whiz by and characters sprint in and out, or else match stride with our heroes and villains, and it's a thrilling story! Set sometime-in-the-future, mankind has taken its place in the stars with other sentient races in a complex but seemingly generous collective (the Senarche) that permits the closest approximate to individual freedoms while maintaining necessary social responsibilities met or exceeded. Our narrator is one Haimey Dz, an engineer aboard a tugboat spaceship with a genetically-engineered-to-be-hot ace pilot named Connla and a lovable AI called Singer. They salvage space scraps for fuel, food, and money, far from the central seat of the Senarche, but close enough that they can still rely upon it for protection as well as purpose. One day, Haimey and her fellow crew score a salvage that is more dangerous than it even initially appeared! Now Haimey has an ancient alien parasite embedded in her arm and there's pirates after her and oh, hey, they did not even get the salvage they needed for food and fuel but there are pirates after them now and they have no idea how they're going to extricate themselves from this situation and still make enough money to survive as they have been. But nothing is as simple as it seems, and Haimey and friends soon find themselves swept up in the plottings of a mad rad pirate queen that will shake out everything Haimey has ever known to be who she is and, yeah, may or may not call into question the fate of the galaxy! 

Without saying too much about the plot of the novel, Ancestral Night does a brilliant job of narrating what would otherwise be a sprawling epic simultaneously verbose and void of character development as archetype and memes that consume the story for cheap emotional thrills and superficial attachments to immediate characters. There is a lot of heart in this novel, and my twitter feed is drowning in quotes I could not help but, perhaps, quixotically overshare. But you would too! Reading lines such as

• “We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A series of choices we have to make over, and over, and over again.”
• “Do we have to call it something?” “It's like an ent,” I said.
• “Anyway, one of the first things you learn in space is not to thrash. If you have nothing constructive to do, the most constructive thing you can do is often nothing at all. In a mindful sense, I mean. Thrashing is the thing that gets people killed. Not sitting still.”
• “Epiphanies are wonderful. I'm really grateful that our brains do so much processing outside the line of sight of our consciousnesses. Can you imagine how downright boring thinking would be if you had to go through all that stuff line by line?”
• “Busywork, they used to call it. There's absolutely no value to it. Economic value, or personal. There's value in work you enjoy, or that serves a need. There's no value in work for its own sake. It's just . . . churn. Anxiety. Doing stuff to be doing stuff (...)”

really encourages sharing. And let's not forget that this is a science fiction novel, and a stellar one at that! Gravity is a theme here, as well as a plot element. There's enough theoretical physics as well as immediately-comprehensible science in this novel to keep this from being another escapist fiction work. I found myself setting aside this novel a number of times to parse through encyclopedic explanations of things like black holes, current hypotheses on dark matter, solid-state electronics, spacewalks, the effects of lack of gravity on muscle mass and bone density, and, truly, maybe a few dozen other maybe-random things that helped enrich my knowledge base as well as give me better context for the things Bear tells us through Haimey and the others. Heck, we're given a very thorough and alien depiction of a giant mantis extraterrestrial cop, and very real psychological responses to that alien's actions and behaviors and somehow, as a reader, the focus is still on what is happening next. Which is a super-cool feat in any book, let alone a science fiction novel. A lot happens in this book, and this hardcover first edition clocks in at almost 500 pages, but it is a delight to read and has more than most novels' share of laughs and shocks. 

Now, I said this novel is a modern classic in the science fiction genre, and I stand by that, but as anyone who has ever read Dune or Lord of the Rings or a Cosmere novel or Neverwhere, it is difficult to explain why. Sometimes, we come a cross a book that is both intelligent and generous in its affection for the reader as well as everything the writer wanted to say, and we pore through its pages, awed by the scale of its plot and breadth of characters (in this case, all of outer space, with cats and space dragons and ancient sentient reference centers inhabiting stars and weaponized gravity), and become aware that we are holding something truly timeless and wonderful. We realize this, and we push our minds and hearts further into the pages before us because knowing we may have a classic in our hands is special.

- Frank

More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.

Finding: Yourself Unable to Read?

Illustration by Kate Beaton www.harkavagrant.com

Greetings and salutations, readers!

Have you ever started to read something and then, almost suddenly, you realize you have absolutely no patience to finish reading that thing? Maybe you start skipping words and sentences, only to dismiss paragraphs and ignore entire pages, as your gaze reaches the edges of the papers you're holding in your hands, and suddenly you realize you've been woolgathering and, no, dang it we do not have the space to raise a dog, we are not that close, and besides, Keanu, you are between blockbuster roles and. . . Oh. Where was I? Oh!

The absurd thing is that you know you have all the time you want to take to read this! But, darn it if this is not the most daunting task before you, even if it is keeping you from having to reheat your leftovers before slipping in to the coma that is post-work-pre-sleep self-care.

Here you are with an entire afternoon to stretch in this sunbeam and find out exactly what's going to try killing the momentum of these charming main characters, only to realize it's your attention span that’s lining them up for the slaughter! What a bummer.

We all have been through this, some of us have been coping with it for years. I have a couple of thoughts on fixing this problem, and I hope you'll indulge me because I have made it work (made myself get back into what I’ve been reading) time and again, and I'm actually about to put one or two of these ideas into practice right now so that I can finish off Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker, Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook, and Goodbye to All That, edited by Sari Botton (reviewed here by Chelsea) before my local library sets its mildewing carpets after me one of these nights. Please observe the following as individual ways to kick yourself back into high gear, and don’t hesitate to combine these tactics!:

1) A change of scenery! Nothing drags the doldrums by the hair, kicking and screaming, and launches it out the door quite like leaving wherever you are, with your desired reading, and going elsewhere, anywhere, whocareswhere!

2) Your posture! You may not be sitting in a way that's good for your spine and buttocks or neck and eyes. Where's the light? Get that on the pages, out of your eyes, sit or lay out so you aren't all tangled up and distracted by your temporary vessel on this journey through the mortal plane!

3) There is a war on, yes, like, all the time. You're not trying to do anything about it. You're reading, baby! Do one thing at a time. Turn off the streaming video platform, stop searching for things to add to your already-cumbersome playlist of weird noise you thought was good last week (when your armpit hair was the right level of not-itchy), and get back to those words!

4) You do not have to try to impress anyone with what you're reading, and, conversely, no one has to be put off by what you're reading. Just read the thing. Anyone who has any remark that could interrupt your time reading is not doing enough reading to be worth your notice or mention.

I hope one or all of these things helps you as much as they do me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm happy to share this with you all, But I'd Rather Be Reading!

- Frank

Review: Goodbye to All That edited by Sari Botton

This is my first stab at a book review. I consume New York City-specific historical non-fiction like water (not often enough, and I find myself constantly thirsting for more), and though most of what I read is neighborhood-oriented, I occasionally like to step outside of that norm and read stories written by others who have experienced this city more recently and from an array of varying perspectives. A few years ago, I read Never Can Say Goodbye, also edited by Sari Botton, a collection of essays by twenty-seven men and women who came to New York City and found, through every trial and tribulation, every set-back and triumph, they just could not imagine leaving. I was still green at that time, still a transplant from New England trying to find my footing, and I was enthralled and inspired reading tales of others who persevered in the face of so much failure.

Now, nearly four and a half years in, I can confidently say that I’ve found my place here. I, myself, cannot imagine leaving New York City in the foreseeable future, so, for a change of pace (after reading an in-depth history of the Bowery dating from the early Dutch settlement to the present), I read Goodbye to All That, stories by twenty-eight women writing their own versions of Joan Didion’s eponymous 1968 essay about loving and leaving New York. Some of these writers simply fell out of love with the city and moved on, others ran, nearly screaming, from the concrete jungle, and a select few were pulled away only to claw their way back.

I felt a joyful smile creep across my mouth each time one of these women mentioned one of my own East Village haunts, a bookshop I frequent, or the Upper West Side Jewish deli where I buy my half-sour pickles. I felt myself relating to some of their frustrations and delighting in their successes – it’s not often I have the opportunity to cheer on an author. Fellow transplants came impassioned with romantic ideas of what the city should be like, with big dreams and big hearts. The city became not only their home, but also this kind of living organism, constantly changing, always there and available until it wasn’t, and even then, they stayed.

“That’s the thing about New York: no one ever wants to leave. Throngs of hopeful protagonists arrive with their dreams and diminutive bank accounts. It’s only in disaster movies that you see anyone wanting to get out, and it’s because a meteor is coming or aliens are attacking.” – Liza Monroy, A War Zone for Anyone Looking for Love

I found that the natives had a radically different take on the city than the ardent transplants, often reflecting on the city with contempt. In Rebecca Wolff’s essay entitled So Long, Suckers, she details, with absolutely no attempt at affection for her birthplace (she calls it a giant sinking pile of crap), the observations she made of what happens to people, native and otherwise, who try to stay in the city:

“In New York City these days I see loads and loads of formerly brilliant people … who have “stayed too long at the Fair,” to use Joan’s wistful archaic turn of phrase, who are baffled and internally conflicted as to why they can’t admit that New York sucks so hard. Why they can’t draw the proper conclusion. That if they are to work all the time in order to pay super-high rents that make it impossible for them to do their art, if they never have a chance to see the people they came here to see, who are less brilliant now that they are muffled by the smog of wrongness that hangs over New York … if they are living somewhere that is giving them less than they are giving to it, then they should leave.”

Natives and transplants alike, no one was immune to eventual disillusionment. Their rents were too high, they couldn’t find their footing, the (in most cases) literary world kept smacking them down, personal relationships began or went up in flames, and, in some cases, it just made more sense to leave than it did to stay. Reading these varied experiences of the city I’m living in have made me question what it will look like one day if or when I decide to leave this city. I’m not ready yet, I don’t feel that I’ve stayed too long at the Fair, and I can honestly say I have no idea where I would go. I’ve been saying for a few years now that if I moved back to the woods of New Hampshire I would die of boredom – to leave a place where I can have anything at any hour to a place with absolutely nothing? I think not.

I recommend this collection of essays to anyone yearning for a different perspective of New York City. I’d fathom a guess it may be hard to relate to for a reader that has not experienced the city, but the stories have enough broad strokes to make them accessible to any audience. The diverse viewpoints make for a fun and interesting read, and since most stories are only ten pages or so, the collection moves at a very comfortable pace.

- Chelsea

More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.

Review: Soul Music by Sir Terry Pratchett

This one definitely ranks as one of my favorite Discworld novels. I won't pretend I have anything less than fondness for Terry Pratchett. His legacy is his tremendous contribution to satirical fiction, the intelligently-written fantasy, and dozens of novels with too many fully-realized characters to count off the top of anyone's head. Widely known for his Discworld novels, the man left our Roundworld much too soon (isn't that always the way?) and left us with a treasure trove of excellent and hilarious books, including the soon-to-screens-everywhere Good Omens (written with Neil Gaiman.)

Now, for some Soul Music: an irreverently reverent and pedal-to-the-metal take on rock'n'roll and the age old question of What Gives Anyone the Right to Decide What's Fair When Bad People Get to Be Bad and Good People Don't Get Good? There’s so much craft and clarity to Sir Terry’s work, especially as you begin what always becomes a bizarrely intricate plot with more players than you can shake a stick at. (You've got favorites like The Librarian and Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler here along with Death and his granddaughter Susan, and Death of Rats, and, oh man, you think I kept track? No. You don't have to.) You are in for a treat, whenever you open a Discworld novel, and Soul Music is no exception.

A Plotted Summary?
Imp de Celyn (is he an elf?) wants to be a musician in the big city, but the music industry tells him and his pals NO. But guess what? A mysterious shop has not-at-all-conspicuously appeared out of nowhere to sell him a magic guitar that starts him off on the journey of Music With Rocks In! Meanwhile, Death has decided to abscond. Who should search him out but Susan, the granddaughter Death doesn't know she is! Susan soon grapples with the same question her father, Death's former apprentice, once did: why should she be swinging the scythe? Susan sets out to challenge fate and mortality itself, and finds herself saving the life of Imp just as the dude that rocks sets off on his defiant journey to be a musician. Will the mortal plane come undone? Why are the wizards of Unseen University suddenly so unruly as... well, this, this time? And what is Music With Rocks In? Terry takes us on a fantastic whirlwind adventure across the Disc that stumps even Lord Vetinari.

In Review:
I have been taking my time finishing my first read-through the entire series so I can say that for sure, given the disease that took him from this ‘verse and that of the Disc’s, but when I find myself utterly enthralled by a book like this? Sir Terry and his Discworld are necessary and incredible: Susan and her grandfather, Death, are written with such love and depth, they read real as real. And there is a masterful display of plotting here, in a story with so many characters and Things Happening, but you don’t get exhausted or confused by it all at all. I found myself grinning ear to ear whenever I wasn't laughing aloud, nodding and grunting in appreciation and agreement, turning pages like my fingers were on the fret of a guitar. This is such a fun and intelligent book! 4.5/5

- Frank

More But I'd Rather Be Reading! here.