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August 12, 2008

Comments

lisa_emily

I hope they make it- I saw mighty sad when Cody's (Berkeley) closed their doors for good.

lisa_emily

was- not saw...damn dyslexia

Beth

I heard the Wordsmith segment on NPR and it led me to this blog. I hope Wordsmith makes it.

Jack Pendarvis

I was kind of surprised to discover I was reading at a "fundraiser." But Wordsmiths is a good bookstore staffed with extremely nice people and I do want them to stay in business, of course. I also want to let everyone know that I'm reading at Atlanta's Highland Inn the night before. That's an event for A Cappella Books, ten minutes up the road from Wordsmiths. They need to stay in business, too! But they are calling it a "book signing." In my ideal world, you will come give your book money to A Cappella on Thursday night, and your fundraiser money to Wordsmiths on Friday night. Of course, in the real world, I usually get an audience of two people, so perhaps the matter is moot.

Susan Messer

I heard the NPR piece, too, and I really liked what you said, Mark. Since then, I've been thinking about your idea, that we might see the book business as in a different, less rational category. Kind of like health care. What a relief to hear someone voice ideas like that.

Russ Marshalek

I can't tell you how much I appreciated NPR's words, and yours, Mark.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."