Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Julia Glass, The World Over (out next week)
Curtis Sittenfeld, The Man of My Dreams (out tomorrow)
Anne Tyler, Digging to America
These are the number of holds on those books at the Town Library:
Bechdel - 9
Glass - 25
Sittenfeld - 60
Tyler - 229
You might say that I am pathetically mainstream. You might also say that I wish I was the kind of person with the money and attitude to go to the bookstore and buy whatever I want to read, regardless of whether it's only in hardcover. You might be right, on both counts.
These are the books I got at the Town Library:
John Darnton, The Darwin Conspiracy
Jane Urquhart, A Map of Glass
Which means we may eventually get to the long-promised and equally long-postponed post on all things Victorian and novelistic. Or maybe not.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
I feel that I am channeling the voice of the devil, but if you ordered all those books from Amazon & got the super-saver shipping option you would have them in 10 days & it would probably only set you back sixty-ish dollars.... which is not nothing, but it might be worth the gratification, you could read the books in a frenzy over Memorial Day weekend!
By the way, look up Tyler Cowen's article "The Death of the Independent Bookstore" published today in Slate. He's all for the library, but has an extremely sexist slant on the people who go there.
This is making me think of a small business idea: the rent-a-book store (they had one in Wisconsin). The store buys several copies of the new Curtis Sittenfeld and rents them to readers -- you pay (in WI) 6 bucks to rent and then get three bucks credit when you bring the book back to apply to your next book rental.
I want to read all those, except the Sittenfeld, but never buy new books in hardcover. Especially since once they're out in paperback, you can find hardback copies for super-cheap, a lot of times.
This is also why all the book reviews I do for personal reasons (not as my job) are always of books everyone else has already read!
I was just pining over the Anne Tyler book today in the bookstore. My sister-in-law who really should be a novelist and saves money in every way possible buys hardback books as a way to support authors (though probably it just supports the publishing houses which might also be a good thing.)
I think the rent-a-book idea is totally due for a comeback--either in the form of something like Netflix only for books (that would be amazing), or else like the old-fashioned circulating library. B/c basically you don't NEED to own the new Curtis Sittenfeld, it's just that you want to read it right away! I think $6 is about right--about half the price of a trade paperback, say, or a third the price of an Amazon-discounted hardcover. For a long time I had a no-hardcover-purchase rule that was rarely broken, but I find myself now with some disposable income & no family & I have given in to the lure of the "read it right when it comes out" thing....
I love the idea of reviving the rent-a-book. And you could do it by mail, like Netflix does...have a queue, the whole model is basically in place, isn't it?
I can't bring myself to buy hardcover books even though I know many authors who have given me good reason to. The thing in Sunday's NYT on the death of the book culture (not the printed book, quite) gave me pause, too: can we rethink intellectual property so authors can make money without disadvantaging readers?
Netflix for books exists: it's Booksfree ( www.booksfree.com ). It's for paperbacks only, so I wait until a book I want is in paper, but I maintain a full queue (100 books), and I always have something from it. Unlike Netflix, they don't necessarily send you the book at the top of your list, so I guess their availability is more variable. This makes it harder to plan, say, one light and fluffy book and one heavier, beautiful but sad book. But still, I love it. It saves me SO much shelf space for books I would only read once, it comes in the mail so it couldn't be more convenient, and it has some books my library doesn't.
Post a Comment