Odd and Unusual!

We've created a new, highly selective little section in the bookshop called Odd and Unusual. (You can find it under the sign of the yellow and blue eyed cat...). If you're an odd and unusual person yourself, or have aspirations in that direction, you might have some fun with the books we're adding to these shelves!

 
Gracing our Odd and Unusual shelves at the moment are books like A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization by J.C. McKeown and Weird Life: The Search for Life that is Very, Very Different from Our Own by David Toomey.


And I've just added one of my favorite odd and unusually good novels to this section. The book is titled The Raw Shark Texts, by a young British writer named Steven Hall, published back in 2007. To tell you about the book, I can't do any better than to crib from a review of the book from the Washington Post by Tyler Knox, who clearly enjoyed the shark as much as I did:

"The star of Steven Hall's rousingly inventive The Raw Shark Texts is its villain -- always a good sign in a thriller. Raymond Chandler famously said, "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." Hall one-ups Chandler by sending in a shark. But not just any shark, a conceptual shark called a Ludovician, which swims in a current of words and ideas and feeds on memory and sense of self. Every time the Ludovician makes an appearance, Hall's novel jolts to life.

Eric Sanderson gasps awake one day to find his memory missing. As Eric struggles to forge a bland and static life, a series of letters, apparently from his self before the memory loss, the so-called First Eric, warns him of the conceptual shark that, with a vengeance as unmotivated as Iago's, is determined to eat Eric's memory over and over....Second Eric doesn't buy it until he spies the figure of a shark within the white noise of his television...

It isn't long before Eric is on the run, dodging the memory eater and searching for the strange Dr. Fidorous, who might just be able to get the damn shark off his tail. At this point the novel takes on the cloak of your typical thriller: a man on the run, aided by a great-looking waif with a killer smile and a bomb in her pocket. Oh, yeah, and there's a cat....More compelling are the journals written by First Eric, the raw texts of the title, that give glimpses of Eric's romance with Clio, the love of his life, who was killed in a tragic accident off the coast of Greece.


...Even as Hall takes great delight in showing off the details of his world with all kinds of loopy names and textual tricks -- including one terrific visual sequence where the terrifying nature of the shark is made real -- his methods almost always serve the purpose of the story. And for a first novelist, Hall has a nice way of hiding telling details until the end of a sentence or a scene, like the stinger at the end of a scorpion's tail.

It's all a lot of fun, yet there is also a surprising emotional resonance in seeing Second Eric, like Beckett's Krapp with his tapes, reading and rereading First Eric's journals as he obsesses over the experiences that the Ludovician has chomped out of his head. And to hear Second Eric's voice take on the snap of his predecessor's is especially satisfying.

Best of all, there is the shark itself, wily and relentless, with its chilling eye and gaping maw, hungry for memory.."

--Tom Campbell

Does Reading Have a Future? A noted Canadian Philosopher Gazes into the Future

This little essay is indeed written by a philosopher, so be advised there are references to folks like Heidegger, Habermas, and Eagleton. But the author, Mark Kingwell, ends up in the right place--the right place given where I live and work--so I found this to be an entertaining read:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Does+reading+have+future+noted+Canadian+philosopher+gazes+into+future/8433300/story.html

--Tom Campbell

One reason to shop local

Support the businesses that support your community

3 TIMES more of your money stays here when you shop at a locally owned, independent business, so 

Shop Local!

The Regulator will donate 10% of our sales on Saturday, May 11 to Durham's non-profit independent business alliance:

Clyde (PapaDaddy) Edgerton on the Bassinet and Crib

From PapaDaddy's Book for New Fathers:

For the first few months, before using the crib, you'll be using a bassinet. I'm suggesting you keep this in your and your wife's bedroom, assuming you use the same bedroom. Some experts declare that the baby should sleep with you, some say in another room. If you go with the bassinet idea, most people buy expensive white wicker ones with little handles and a satin pillow and all that, or they inherit one. Caleb and Cindy realized that a little baby can't half see and couldn't care less, so why not use an ice cooler--with the top thrown away. Not the Styrofoam kind. The hard kind--like a Coleman.

When the baby is about three months old and you need a crib to replace the cooler (a crib is much bigger than a bassinet), you will be so sleep deprived you will not recognize your baby and will be falling down a lot.

**! Assemble the crib before the baby is born.

The crib comes in a big cardboard box with staples so deep you will need pliers and a flashlight to get these staples out. Most of the instructions for crib assembly come from foreign countries and say things like "Assemble Part B into upper part of Part B with plier." I assembled our crib in our living room over a number of days, and when at 4 a.m. on the last day of assembly--having just heard the morning paper slap onto the driveway--I started rolling the thing to the child's room, I found it would not fit through the hall door. Put the crib together in the room where the baby will sleep.

Clyde will read from his new book, PapaDaddy's Book for New Fathers: Advice to Dads of All Ages, Thursday night (May 9) at 7:00. A good time is guaranteed for everyone who is or ever was a dad, a mom, or a child...

Working in an amazon warehouse

Sounds like its a little different from working at The Regulator..

“The feedback we’re getting is it’s like being in a slave camp."


From Britain's Financial Times:

Amazon Unpacked

By Sarah O’Connor

The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html#slide0

Julian Barnes on the future of books

This from the wonderful preface, "A Life with Books," which fronts Julian Barnes' recent book of essays: Through the Window :

           

"John Updike, towards the end of his life, became pessimistic about the future of the printed book:

            For who, in that unthinkable future

            When I am dead, will read?  The printed page

            Was just a half-millennium’s brief wonder...

            I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books.  There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were.  Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.  Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.  Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically.  Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same... Books will have to earn their keep---and so will bookshops.  Books will have to become more desirable:  not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about re-reading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside.  I have no Luddite prejudice against new technology; it’s just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.  My father’s school (book) prizes are nowadays on my shelves, ninety years after he first won them.  I’d rather read Goldsmith’s poems in this form than online."

"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art." Boy, does that sum up a lot in just nine words. And as a fan of physical books, I think that "books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information" says a whole lot as well.

Julian Barnes is a wonderful writer--elegant yet to the point, and intensely humane. I'm just finishing his last novel, The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, and I'm wondering why I've never read any of his work until a week ago. But I intend to rapidly make up for lost time.

Tom Campbell

Looks like we struck a nerve with that last post

But it is sad but true that physical bookstores are very often used as "showrooms" by people wanting to browse books before ordering them on-line. This phenomenon is so important to amazon's sales that the books they have begun to publish themselves have not done well--because they are not on display in physical bookstores.

We did not, however, want to make everyone using a smart phone in our store feel unwelcome. Hey, we use the things ourselves! But given how widespread "showrooming" has become, we felt a need to point out that browsing local but ordering on-line is not a development we are thrilled with.

As for buying books for your kindle: we sell e-books that can be read on pretty much every device but a kindle. And that is because of amazon's policies, not ours. Amazon locks the kindle down to their site and their e-books. Of course there is a way you can hack your kindle and side-load e-books from non-amazon sources onto it. But you didn't hear that from us...