Life in a Small-Town Bookstore

How sad!  The invisible hand of the marketplace has written, and it did not bode well for Hopper: my beloved Thanksgiving weekend Pennsylvania used book store ... is out of business.

Fortunately, there is another one a few miles away.  It’s not as good because, er, it’s better.  Better meaning it carries higher-end used books, used books that serious collectors might want.  Used books in cellophane packages.

But there are two shelves of new “junky”-condition paperbacks.  I’ve hard-to-find and out-of-print stuff from those shelves before.  Bought the recently-read The Hawkline Monster there last year.  So I stalked those shelves for forty-five minutes while the rest of the gang drove away to take care of some more errands.

I did have Little One with me.  We found an old but well-constructed book on gems and minerals for my budding amateur gemologist.  Me, I had a harder time.  Finally I settled on Fred Pohl’s The Day the Martians Came and Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.  Pohl because, well, he died a few months ago and I made a decision to read some of his stuff in 2014 – and his stuff is strangely hard to come by.  Strobel because, well, I had read about his book and had heard him in interviews and decided a good pro-Christian book in our increasingly anti-Christian culture would be a positive thing to experience.

My daughter and I, browsing the shelves, had the weird fortune to witness an odd interaction during those forty-five minutes.  A somewhat grizzled man came in and stalked about the back of the store, where the owner had some expensive antique-y things.  Finally, he seemed interested in what appeared to be some old model railroad fencing and stuff.  Not sure, because I’m not into model railroads, though I had a childhood friend whose father built a whole model railroad city on a pool table in their basement. 

Anyway, after much banter with the owner’s assistant, the grizzled man sighed.  “I’m really interested in this,” he said, “but $110.00 is a little too much.”

The assistant paused.  I don’t know how the scene was playing out, visually; my back was turned while I was scanning some philosophy and religion titles.  But after thirty seconds I heard the assistant ask, “What would be your offer?”

“Seventy-five.”

Immediately the store’s owner, a sixtiesh gray-haired hippy type who has sported Obama 2012 buttons on her sweatshirt in the past, cackled out from another corner of the store, “Forget it!”

The atmosphere immediately got a little oogy.  I looked over to Little One; she looked over to me. 

The grizzled man said, “Well, you could have just said ‘No.’  You didn’t have to say, ‘Forget it.’”  Another moment passed and the man spat out a sickly laugh; I wondered if they all knew each other and were now going to start making jokes or something.  But then grizzly adams cried out:  “But now I will forget it!” and stormed out, the front door bells jangling angrily.

Ah, these small-town back-woods bookstores.  The drama!  The drama!

 

Thanksgiving 2013

Also known as the sesquicentennial of Mr. Lincoln’s official proclamation of a heretofore annually celebrated Day of Thanks.  It is few years shy of my quinquagenary regarding T-Day.

Had a fairly good day yesterday.  First and foremost, I got 9 hours sleep!  Hoo-raw, that’s a rarity, and was desperately needed.  We had driven over to my folks’ in Pennsylvania the night before, so the little ones left me and the missus to sleep whilst in stalking pursuit of their grandparents.  Then, a two-hour hot bath in which I completed Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle, of which I will go into later this weekend.

Ate like a king all day: cheese and salami, veggies and artichoke dip, jumbo shrimp with hot sauce, and, of course, turkey, stuffing, mashed potaters, cranberry sauce (the wife’s contribution), culminating in a pumpkin pie bonanza (also from the hands of my wife).  Washed it all down with Sam Adam’s, of which perhaps I had a tad too much.  Must be why I felt all the conversation, especially emanating from my end, to be sparkling, dynamic, and enlightening.

Listened to a bit of Great Expectations on the portable CD player.  More on that, too, later in the week.  Me and my teenaged nephew tried to stump each other with science and mathematical paradoxes (him: “why do flames  rise when gravity should pull them down?”).  Didn’t watch the football games as closely as I would have liked, though my teams all lost, so perhaps that’s not too bad a thing.

Had to work today, unfortunately.  Ninety minute commute in and two-hour commute out.  But, hey, someone has to bring home the bacon (and unfortunately I’m on the clock).  Slow day in the office but an incredibly busy one on the sales floor. 

The rest of the week I plan to sleep, read, sleep, write, swing past one of my awesome used book stores, sleep, attend a Latin mass, sleep, watch the Sunday football games, and, yes, sleep.

Now: leftovers for dinner!

 

World of Ptavvs

© 1966 by Larry Niven


Okay! Don’t beat me up!

I bought Larry Niven’s first novel, The World of Ptavvs, this time last year and finally got to open it last week.

I didn’t like it.

Now, I’m a moderate fan of Mr. Niven’s. I am, really. Read Ringworld ’round the turn of the century and loved it, read a whole bunch of his short stories three years ago and loved most of ’em. Have his second novel, A Gift from Earth, and his award-winner, The Mote in God’s Eye on the shelf behind me and plan to read them at some point.

But Ptavvs just kicked my butt. It was a gargantuan effort of will to finish it.

Why?

The story set-up’s good. Frozen, two-billion-year-old space alien found at the bottom of the ocean, thawed out and introduced to a human telepath. Turns out alien has superior mind-control powers and is used to dominating whole societies and planetary systems. Soon the race is on between this creature, the human telepath who thinks he’s the creature he mind-melded with, and a scattering of humans to get to Neptune to find the alien’s “amplifier” which will for all intents and purposes destroy mankind’s free will forever.

Normally I enjoy this kinda thing. But for some reason I couldn’t settle into it. The human characters seemed a bit uni-dimensional. Then I had a hard time differentiating the alien, “Kzanol,” from the human telepath who thought he was the alien, “Kzanol / Greenberg,” a vagueness I think Niven intentionally cultivates. The alien jargon – thrints, tnuctips, ptavvs, kpitlithtulm oaths, whitefoods (aka bandersnatchi) – didn’t quite assimilate as easy as other jargon from other stories had. Nor did the geopolitics of the 22nd century (or should I say exo-geo-politics, as the solar system has been populated, and there is historical friction between Earth and the Asteroid Belt).

Now, I understand Niven expands and expounds upon these terms and relationships and whatnot in subsequent novels. But as a stand-alone, I found World of Ptavvs a little unfocused and forced. It’s one of those rare books I felt should have been longer, more fleshed out, at least double its too-compact size. More character development, more exposition, more history.

Or it could just be the circumstances of my life at this point in time. Had I read it thirty years ago, it may have been a shining nova of my adolescence. Who knows?

So, regretfully, I give World of Ptavvs a C. There are good ideas in the book (I liked the under-developed – at least in this novel – plot point of intelligent dolphins trying to come up with ways to muscle mankind for a ride into space). And I’ll still get to those other two Niven novels on the shelf behind me, eventually.