11) The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

The Summer Prince is a YA novel set in a post-apocalyptic world 400 (at least) years into the future. The setting is the pyramid city of Palmares Tres, a world of rigid class hierarchy, incredible medical technology, enforced personal appearance standards, and a few very intelligent and creative teenagers who are about to change everything. June is 17, artistic, angry and directionless. When her best friend Gil falls in love with the doomed Summer King, Enki, and Enki in turn takes an interest in June's artistic energy, the Queen and ruling Aunties race to contain what may become a meaningful threat to their status quo.

This is a city run by women where every five years a King is crowned and acts as figurehead for a year and then is sacrificed before naming the next Queen. Lifespans are generally no less than one hundred twenty years and those under thirty (wakas) are viewed with almost tangible distrust and dismay. Alaya Dawn Johnson fills this world with the energy of creation thwarted at almost every turn by conservative social mores and unquestioned expectations. Her main character comes of someone's age in the span of a year, and at the end of it I am uncertain what her old age will finally be. How does someone who grew out of youth faster than fingernails ever really age?

Johnson uses light, color, sound and the reminders of smell to fill this airy place with the reality of life. The Summer Prince is a novel that demands careful reading - no skimming here, there is too much layered in the tiers and tech and spaces between.

I mean, look at those lights! 

I remember reading this standing up in a hotel room during Winter Institute 2013. Alaya Dawn Johnson was there signing copies of her book, and I grabbed one because I thought the cover looked intriguing (this is a real). There is so much to notice here. This is a book where sex is just part of life and none of it is forced. Violence is limited; when it happens it is deadly serious but it is never gratuitous and it is never glorified. Of particular interest to me is the complexity of the government and its oppressive rule, even though it is all women - a notion that got just enough air time to land and grow in the mind of this reader. Also that sexuality is not enforced; people love and lust and befriend and boff and where it may lead to drama, it doesn't, because the characters have a ton of higher stakes nonsense to worry about.

That is something truly wonderful to me in this book - everyone (everyone) talks about art like it is serious work. They dance as language and emotion. They eat to share and experience. Those elements do not become redemptive forces as they generally do in stories about uptight business people traveling to warm climates or interacting with "colorful" people. They are simply part of the fabric of living, of the rhythms of friendship. Friends and lovers touch. Friends and lovers plot and plan and make grand gestures and fail each other. 

I would love to have read this as a teenager. To have known adventure almost entirely without guns. To have loved a story about loving and feeling and thinking and being creative and learning to see privilege and use it to bridge gaps rather than maintain distance. June's focus is so personal and uncomplicated that at 43 I'm undone by it and left wondering just what can I do to bring such delicate and deliberate work out in my own world.

Also - and this is just a bit of a thought - remember the part about the oppressive matriarchy? It happens in another book later. It doesn't happen often in books. I'm paying attention.

Banned Books and other shenanigans for Sept 27, 2016

Celebrating the Freedom to Read: September 25- October 1, 2016 - Frequently Challenged Books with Diverse Content

We Are the American Heartbreak: Langston Hughes on Race in a Rare Recording

President Obama to Award National Medals of Arts

MacArthur Grant Winner Claudia Rankine On Charlotte: “This Violence Is Not Accidental”

Banned Book Week Gets Diverse: "The majority of banned books are disproportionally from diverse authors," Olusina Debayo, project manager for the Association of American Publishers, wrote in a post on the AAP website. "[The American Library Association's] Office for Intellectual Freedom has determined that 52% of the books challenged, or banned, over the past decade are from titles that are considered diverse content."

Chris Edwards: No Regrets: After a career in advertising that spanned nearly 20 years, Chris Edwards left his post as executive v-p, group creative director, at Arnold Worldwide to write his memoir, Balls: It Takes Some to Get Some(Greenleaf Book Group, October 4), about his transgender journey.

Children’s Books Featuring Diverse Characters Are More Likely to Be Banned

Trenton Lee Stewart Accidentally Starts a Mystery on Goodreads

Book Deals: Week of September 26, 2016
In a world rights deal, teen/middle grade novelist Jason Reynolds signed with Marvel Press to write a YA novel featuring the Marvel superhero Miles Morales, who debuted in 2011 and is the first African-American and Puerto Rican character to become Spider-Man.

Jason Reynolds. Actual perfection.

10) Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom

like hello perfect afternoon

So this is a short tale of books like dominoes taking over huge swathes of my life. Roads to Santiago is a beautiful text in translation from the Dutch. The author is a poet who has lived with this troubling love for Spain for most of his adult life. The book is not a guide to the pilgrim paths or to any kind of depth of faith experience. I don't even know that you could follow any road Nooteboom takes and get to anywhere, in point of fact. In that, this is not unlike that other rambling Iberian route Journey to Portugal which I tried valiantly to mark out on a map of the country with zero success. (It was a valiant effort. There were colored pencils and copious notes.) I have memories of landscapes my eyes have never seen, and know the smell of churches whose names I cannot remember and have never spoken. Nooteboom considers history as he does the surface of a painting, or a plain, or the quality of air. 

St Francis of the many

His extended contemplations on the work of various artists, mostly Velazquez and Francisco de Zurbaran, are captivating. Particularly as I'd discovered that the St. Louis Art Museum owns one of Zurbaran's many St. Francis of Assisi paintings. There is extraordinary power in that contemplative image. Enough that one year I circled and circled around this catalog of an exhibition from the 1980s that I eventually bought. It's especially unnerving as this exhibition is one that Nooteboom mentions in his book - he went to both the New York and Paris shows. 

Sometimes the synchronicity, it is just odd.

Saw the sheep, knew I wanted it

Another afternoon, another leisurely wander around the art museum's gift shop and I saw a book about Zurbaran that was priced out of my budget. So I copied out the ISBN and went hunting at work. It took about a week for the book to get to me. Best surprise? The text was written by one Cees Nooteboom, Dutch man of letters and part-time resident of Minorca.  

These three books were my companions during a lovely trip to snowbound Hermann, MO one Valentine's Day weekend. It was glorious and cold and solitary and the food was strange and the wine was not great. The books, though. The books were startling.

But don't worry, there's more. Because, you see, I know that there are guides to the pilgrim routes to Santiago, and it's been decided that this long walk is in my future. So back to the distribution center website with me, and will you be surprised? 

So. Anyone wanna help take care of Ethel while I'm gone?

May your libraries offer such grandly quiet adventures as all those many miles of walking.

9) Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

A book about a young woman beginning college, dealing with anxiety, a bipolar father and an absent twin sister that is also about fan fiction and writing and is set at my alma mater? Okay, the alma mater part doesn't really matter to anyone else but me (her geography is excellent and accurate). Fangirl is easily the most surprising book that I read in 2013.

Cath is a freshman in college. She moves in to her dorm only to discover that her roommate is not her twin sister Wren, but a loud, cool, confident and kind of pushy woman called Reagan. Her almost instantaneous shutdown begins a year filled with frustration, possibility and self-discovery. The book's title comes from Cath's fan fiction. She and her sister (and tons of others) are in love with a multi-volume Chosen One series called Simon Snow and Cath is writing her version of the end of the series - trying to get it done before the author publishes the actual last book.

The characters are utterly knowable and their story is kind of tremendous for how quotidian everything seems from the outside. The struggles to find a place for all of the things that a person is in a world that maybe doesn't have a lot of room for those things is one that many of us have known.

Rowell's sensitivity to the issues faced by people with anxiety is welcome and real. Her characters live with mental illness in a way that does not sensationalize or romanticize. They are complex people making decisions, not always all that well, but always honestly. Even the requisite tidy ending feels earned and satisfying, rather than expected and inevitable. Not requisite at all, in point of fact.

Best book ever. Now with Fan Art!

It has been long enough since this book came out that I don't even remember who got the first galley, who read it first, who passed it on to who else - none of it. What I remember is that the Staff Pick shelf became a row of copies of Fangirl the week it was released. We were and remain, shamelessly devoted Rainbow Rowell fans. For reasons that can be summed in one phrase: ALL THE FEELS.

Cath is not a person I know from my mirror, but she is so like more than one of my best friends. I know her like I've never known another fictional character before. It helps that I also know Lincoln and Love Library and Nebraska pretty well, but mostly that's just reassuring. I trust Rowell to care about her locales, so I trust that she cares about her characters. And she does. Even the ones that I don't like - she does. I love that.

Fangirl did something else that I've never seen another book do - it inspired its author to write a work of fan fiction all of her own. It is about the characters from Simon Snow - remember? The series in Fangirl? The one Cath writes fan fiction of? That one? She wrote a whole book of it. Carry On is what it is called and it is magnificent - probably the only work of fan fiction that can ever be published. I know that there are people who see it as a novel featuring characters that were just in another novel but not fully realized, etc., but I think those people have never really considered fan fiction as a genre unto itself. Rowell clearly has. And she's got it down.

We had a little pop-up reading group for a few months reading through Rowell's bibliography. It's five books long, at the time it was four. I've never shared that kind of enthusiasm for an author and her works before or since. There were six of us (out of a staff of 17) who were in the book group. We got to go to tea with her once. It was intense and awkward and I kind of want to do it again. We can chat problems in pop culture.

Also the collector's edition (pictured above) has fan art for the endpapers - fan art of Cath (a fictional character) writing fan fiction about Simon and Baz (fictional characters from a fictional series of novels). Fan art of fictional fan fiction of fictional fiction. And then Rainbow Rowell wrote fan fiction of the fictional fiction. (also make outs. epic. perfect. exceptional. make outs.)

ALL.
THE.
FEELS.

Quickly before I keep working before work

In my dreams MPA is always adding to itself. The buildings grow floors or towers, turrets and depths like terraces add themselves to Jones Bowl.

Chicago, likewise, is becoming something more than itself, something my imagination has taken for its own and is encrusting with history not of me, but of somewhere extraordinary.

There are castles clinging to skyscrapers like barnacles of history and arrow slots, highways spiraling through towers made of sooty stone and windows no one looks out of but for me, and I know their stories. In my dreams I can tell you when the castle was built, why it clings for life to the buildings that have planted themselves on its undersides. I offer tales of the oldest bricks in the highway towers with my former schoolmates, we are tour guides to this impossible landscape.

There is always the sensation that this history is nothing added. Rather, I am learning to pull away the veils of ignorance and finally to see them - to describe their stories and so to acknowledge them as real.

Between lace-work, Cosmos and lots of book talk yesterday, the world of my dreams reminds me that it is has never stopped working, even when I was too tired to notice.

Time to catch up.

#40days40books list in posted order

Here is the list of #40days40boooks - updated as they are added

2012
1) The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers
2) Extra Virginity by Tom Mueller
3) The Other Side of the Tiber by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
4) Super Natural Every Day by Heidi Swanson
5) Press Here by Herve Tullet
6) Jan Morris

2013
7) The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher
8) A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
9) Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
10) Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom
11) The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
12) Timmy Failure by Stephan Pastis
13) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
14) One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Suess

2014
15) Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
16) Olives by A.E. Stallings
17) All About Love by bell hooks
18) Monasteries and Monastic Orders: 2000 Years of Christian Art and Architecture by Kristina Krger
19) The Odyssey by Homer (translated by everyone)
20) #nomoreladynovels
21) Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay & Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny
22) Shh We Have a Plan! by Chris Haughton

2015
23) Me, My Hair, and I edited by Elizabeth Benedict and Hair Story by Ayana D. Byrd and Lori Tharps
24) Trace by Lauret Savoy
25) Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
26) Love, InshAllah edited by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi
27) Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon
28) Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis
29) How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
30) An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine & A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa & Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett & Eggshells by Caitriona Lally
31) The unrepresented bookseller

2016
32) The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
33) Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano
34) Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth by A.C. Bradley
35) The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin
36) Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
37) The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
38) To the River by Olivia Laing
39) The Singular Pilgrim by Rosemary Mahoney
40) The Books I Kicked Out of My House - by me

#40days40books The influential ones from #5yearsofbookselling

Sometime around September 16th, it occurred to me that I had about 40 days left to work at Left Bank Books. 40 days is a good amount of time to build something, start something, or celebrate something.

I've been a bookseller for nearly 5 years. I will leave 2 weeks shy of my anniversary. Books have always been a huge part of my daily life, and being around them all the time has only enhanced that relationship.

It made sense, then, to make a list celebrating the 40 books that were most influential or meaningful or catalytic during the last five years. The list is chronological according to the year in which I read them, which is sometimes the year of their publication, frequently not. There are new books, used books, sets of books by one author, my undying and as yet unexplained love for The Odyssey (which will get some air time), and very occasionally something less like a book and more like a monologue. You can search my blog for #40days40books for the whole list, but I'll also have an entry that's just the books in order.

I've a newsletter planned that I'll send out the link to when it's all set up. It will be about the life of living with books from childhood into adulthood, and will likely happen 3 times a month, because I like odd numbers. Storytime and the people who've made a magical time of the week are so important. The newsletter is a way to continue that magic, and maybe find new places for it to grow!

St. Louis is my home and I am not ready or willing yet to leave it. Leaving the bookstore allows me to rest up for the next thing.  

I would love help celebrating the books that you've found at your local independent bookstores! The ones that changed your life, or introduced you to a new world, the one your beloved used to propose, the first book in your child's library - all of them! I will share them here and/or in my little newsletter, whatever you choose.

Thanks for everything, St. Louis and thanks for making me feel at home, Left Bank Books! It's been a half-decade worth celebrating!