Lilacs: A digression

My bridesmaids held a trivia contest at my wedding shower. It was a game of "How well do you know the bride?" and they set up a list of twenty or so questions about me. I don't remember very many of them - did they ask what my favorite book was? Anything about music? I don't even remember who won. But there's one question I always remember at this time of year.

After everyone had filled out their responses, the bridesmaids plunked me down in a chair facing the room and asked me for the answers. I was a bit flustered by this day full of people fawning all over me, and there I had something like fifty relatives staring.

They wanted to know what my favorite flower was.

I forgot. And, in a panic to say something, I blurted out "Calla lillies." They were what I wanted in my bouquet, and I do like them. I heard my mother-in-law squeal at getting it right.

My dad sat at his table, grinning and shaking his head. (It was a co-ed shower - most of my friends are male. Thank god for my bridesmaids and my mom insisting it was okay to invite the guys.)

"Not a Calla lilly?" I said.

"You know what your favorite flower is," he said.

Still, I drew a blank.

"What do we have growing right beside the house?" he asked. "What kind of bush?"

It dawned on me. "He's right," I said, "It's lilacs. Purple ones."

I don't know why I love them so much. Whether it was a little girl obsession with anything purple, or whether it was simply their scent that attracted me to them, they've remained my favorite part of spring over the years. Partly, they remind me of home - my parents still have the bush of purple lilacs beside the house, and another bush of white ones in the far back corner of their yard.

I know they make my dad think of his own mother, who also loved them. She died in May, when I was small. His last call to her was on the way to go see her in the hospital. He told her he was bringing her lilacs. She was gone when he arrived.

We have a bush here, at our house. It takes me by surprise every year - suddenly there's this burst of color in the back yard, and there they are. I noticed it Saturday morning, while sweeping pine needles, and put the broom down to go see. They're not fully open yet, but it didn't stop me from cupping one in my hands and inhaling its scent. I'll take a cutting soon, when they're fully bloomed, and set it on my desk.

Certain things signal the seasons for me. It can't be Christmas until I hear the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" on the radio. Fall doesn't have a song or a flower, but a feeling in the air - a change in temperature, the earlier fading of daylight - one day it's summer, the next, something in the breeze tells me to dig out the jackets and give up sandals.

Spring's not real for me until the lilacs bloom - even though they don't come until it's nearly summer. The equinox is at least a month gone by then. Leaves are coming back on the trees. They just don't seem as green until there's that burst of purple to go with them.

The lilacs are here. Spring has arrived at last.

Still here, still planning

Now that the nice weather is finally rolling in, I might see productivity increase. I got hit hard with a case of the winter blues that pretty much lasted into and through April. I don't usually get them; I don't know why this year was different. I can't really call it any sort of real depression (not that I'd even know how to diagnose it), just... a general feeling of being down.

It didn't help that winter stayed through April, and just when it should have started getting sunny and warm, instead it was cold and rainy for what felt like weeks on end. We had a few bouts of nice weather, but the best of those came when I was stuck inside at sales conference for four days - in rooms with no windows, or when there were windows, the views were of other buildings.

I was sad without a reason to be, and it got all the more frustrating because every time I tried to put my finger on why, the best I could come up with was clouds-and-rain. How do you say to friends who have much more tangible problems, "Listen to me bitch - I'm sad because the weather sucks?" You don't. Or I don't, anyway. I'm reluctant to cry Seasonal Affective Disorder - like I said, this isn't a recurring thing. Whatever it was, though, it killed my desire to get moving on things - planning, writing... hell, I haven't read nearly as many books as usual.

Enough of the woe-is-me. This is about bookselling.

I've recently done a whole flurry of housecleaning - call it the spring cleaning I've been postponing for a few springs. In the room I call my study (which feels kind of pretentious, but "office" doesn't quite fit), I have three huge bookshelves. Two I sanded and stained myself last year, one's a Wal-Mart-special sort of deal. I transferred books from smaller shelves to them, but I'm only just getting around to the books that sat in bags, or on various piles on the floor.

My big accomplishment last week was getting them out of bags and off the floor, but they're not yet sorted on the shelves. As a matter of fact, looking at them makes my inner-bookseller cringe. Things stacked, not in any sort of order, spines turned towards the backs of the shelves. I need to take an evening and go through them - what to keep, what to give away, what to sell.

I know there are books in there that I bought with excitement and never got around to - one of the curses of my job is having so little time to read other publishers' books. At my desk, I have a journal of sorts with titles of books I want to read. Some I've purchased, some I'm telling myself I need to wait on until I have time to catch up.

Part of being a good bookseller is not just knowing what's hot right now, but also being well-versed in older titles. Frontlist's great, but how many frontlist titles make the transition to successful backlist? If a customer comes in and buys The Book Everyone's Reading This Month, what can you suggest that they read after? Sure, there are always books trying to cash in on the success of what's popular - not necessarily copycats, but books published to tie-in, or ride the other bestsellers' coattails. Take a look at how many pirate-themed books are out this summer.

But when someone's read all of those, and wants recommendations, a bookseller needs to be able to fall back on her knowledge of what's come before. I figure I have about five years' worth of lost time to make up for. I could spout backlist titles from this company, but what have I missed from outside while most of my reading has been within the same ISBN families?

I haven't read The Kite Runner. Or The Secret Life of Bees. Or The Dive from Clausen's Pier. Sure, I've made time for new Harry Potter books, and A Feast for Crows. I read Cell but not Lisey's Story. Would I have read any of those first three, were I working in a bookstore? I don't know. But at the very least I'd have a better grasp on them than simply knowing their titles.

The plan is this: at least one book a week from outside of my company, starting with the things on my shelves I've been putting off, and working through the journal of stuff to read. Continuing to books I've missed. I'll review them here, and I reserve the right to say "This sucked. I don't know what everyone was thinking."

I'll digress a moment and explain that last sentence. One of my pet peeves about some of the review sites out there is that they love everything. Not a single "the plot was weak." Not a hint of "The dialogue tags ripped me out of the story." Just praise, praise, praise, because (I suspect) publishers are swamping them with advanced copies, and who wants to piss off the publisher and stop receiving books?

So. Here, I'll let you know what I'm thinking about old books and new, as I read them. While book reviews aren't really getting me closer to owning a store of my own, they're at least tangential to the purpose of this blog. Because, really, what right do I have to call myself a bookseller if I don't know anything about the books I'm selling?

I'll post a list of titles in the queue when I've stared at the shelves and chosen some.

Sunlight. Warmth. Getting back into the swing of things. Clock's a-ticking.