On Spoilers

I'm not quite ready to review the last Potter book (notice how I haven't quite lived up to my other self-imposed reviews. Must structure time better...). However, this time last week the issue of spoilers came close to rivalling, if not overshadowing, the book's impending release.

Fans asked that people keep the details to themselves. J.K. Rowling asked that people let those who have waited ten years for this book find out how it ends on their own. Bookstores, newspapers and online newsletters made pledges that they'd avoid spoilers. And yet, when it came down to keeping that promise or getting the scoop, many chose the scoop. Most often, in the follow-up apologies sparked by the fans' outcry, the contrition has an asterisk - "We're-sorry-but..."

"We're sorry, but we didn't think any of what we said was a real spoiler."

"We're sorry, but why are you even reading reviews if you don't want to know what happens?"

"We're sorry, but this is news."

The parties in question seem genuinely surprised that anyone got offended, including at least one industry publication which sent out its newsletter with Harry's fate in a headline and quickly sent another message warning people not to open the first one.

And of course, all over the internet, people are gleefully spoiling the books - threads on forums with plot twists in the titles, sneakier ones where the subject seems innocent, but the message inside holds the revelations. What's the point of it? I suppose the cynical answer is simply that some people are jerks. What I really need to do is rephrase the question.

Why is it that this series in particular draws such maliciousness?

Is the amount of people looking to ruin the ending for others disproportionately large, or does it just seem like there are more because of all the hype and because the series is so successful?

I don't remember anything like this happening when Stephen King finally released The Dark Tower VII. I never felt like I had to hide myself away from message boards and media in the days and weeks leading up to its laydown. Granted, the audience for the Dark Tower books is very different - you probably wouldn't want your ten-year-old doing a book report on it. (I read The Gunslinger for the first time when I was twelve. My mother was afraid one of my teachers would see me reading it and take it away.)

When the season finale of Battlestar Galactica aired, I was away from home and the hotel didn't get Sci-Fi. It was only a day's wait for iTunes to make the episode available, but I wasn't worried that anyone would post the names of the Final Five on any websites I frequent - at least, they wouldn't post them without hiding them behind spoiler warnings. I know that, again, the audiences are very different between Battlestar and Harry.

Are there any better examples? Did this happen with the last Lemony Snicket book? What other series might have the same potential for asshattery in the future?

Still mulling this over. Thoughts and theories welcome while I better flesh out my own.

Cue Queue*

All right, so the list is a wee bit overdue. I have so. many. books. on my shelves (still not organized) that I've finally decided to suck it up and pick five - the three that always seem on top of my mental "I'll get around to it" list, one lent to me that has to get passed on in a timely manner, and one that's currently being buzzed about - sure, I have five years of catching up to do, but by the time 2012 rolls around, I don't want to say I skipped the books that were hot in 2007...

1. Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rackhoff. I'm slightly cheating here, as I'm already about halfway through it.

2. King Rat by China Mieville. I started it a long time ago and had to put it down for other things, but I know I was enjoying it.

3. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. We had a book club at work several years ago. It met three times and then never again, although the books and the people were excellent. The first book we read was Murakami's Underground, a non-fiction examination of the 1995 sarin gas attacks in Tokyo's subways. I ride the trains to work every day. It was a sobering, chilling book, especially in the wake of September 11th. Murakami's coverage made me a fan.

4. On Writing by Stephen King. I own it. I've read passages of it. I can tell you any number of points he makes in the book. I've never read it cover-to-cover. King is one of my favorite authors - I was remarking the other day that I haven't reread The Stand in far too long. I hang my head in shame.

5. The Kite Runner by Kalid Hosseini. I mentioned it in the "hot books I haven't read" post, and it just came out in paperback.

So, there's my next month's worth of reading. Well, I'll read more books than the ones on the list, but those are the ones I'm promising to write about. Keeping it simple to start. My literary preferences are probably pretty easy to figure out, although I'll try to mix it up a bit, read outside of my genre every now and then.

I'll let you know what's good and what sucks.

*the gamers that read this are wincing.

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.

Progress, of a sort

I have this habit of making a list of all the things I want to accomplish, trying to attack all of them at once, and getting (unsurprisingly) overwhelmed. ("Let's paint the kitchen! And hang curtains in the living room! And clean out the garage! And bring about world peace! Let's do it on Saturday!") This ambition (foolhardiness?) doesn't mean that at some point I up and abandon all of the projects, but it does mean that I'm likely to procrastinate on one or all, and let one or all of them slip by the wayside for a while.

Until I pick them up again in another moment of frantic energy and I-think-I-can optimism.

This five-year-plan for opening a bookstore makes it at least a little easier to deal with. I have five years to clean up finances and save money, five years to cobble together a business plan and learn all I can about...well, everything. Still, it's daunting. Most likely, it's a case of Winter Blues talking (I know, it's April, but right now, I can see snow coming down outside), or a bit of self-doubt rearing its head, but I find myself wondering how much of it is just a pretty dream.

Now, that's not me being defeatist. I will still go through with it - it's way too early to walk away from, and truly, the idea of giving up hasn't crossed my mind. Wanting something like this for ten or fifteen years means it's a pretty hard dream to shake. I'm just saying that there's this little part of me that wonders if I have the stuff.

I'm pretty sure I do. I know that bookselling isn't all warm and fuzzy connecting people with books, or intriguing conversations with brilliant customers. There's credit and accounting, stacks upon stacks upon stacks of catalogs and trying to pick out which books are going to be sleepers, and which you really can skip even though your sales rep says you need at least three (no, really, you can skip it.)

Bookselling is hard. I know that, and I'm ready for it. It's funny, I feel ready for the future, even though I'm aware that I certainly don't know everything about running a store.

What I'm bemoaning is the now. The waiting. Knowing that I'm not ready, really, to start thinking about small business loans (not in the sense of filling out and handing in the paperwork, that is) and setting up accounts with publishers, and deciding what kind of shelving I need, or what inventory system I'll go with. All I can do right this second is read the books I bought on small businesses, and save money where I can. Paying off bills is a long, slow process. I know I'm getting there, but watching month to month feels useless.

Ah, well. Patience and virtues and all.

I should think instead of actual tangible things I've done, and start considering them as progress, no matter how insignificant they seem to me.

So, look out, I'm going to give this a try.

-Earlier this year, I paid off two credit card bills. Two down, two to go.

-I actually cracked the covers of one of the small business books and started reading. Now, the first chapter devotes a lot of time to people who don't know what kind of business they want to run, and helping them figure that out.

Chapter two is a brief look at money - finding out where you stand now, personally, and ways to fund starting a business. I'm fairly certain it will go into more detail later on in the book, but one exercise I know I need to do in there is the worksheet of income vs. expenses. I'm putting that off for the moment because I know looking at those numbers is going to depress me and discourage me. I'd like to be on better footing before I actually do that. I know I'll have to do it soon enough, just...not right now. I do still have time, and I'm aware that I need to save more. That'll have to be good enough for today.

Chapter three gets into mission statements and business plans. I'll be going over that in the next couple of days, and posting my rambling reactions to them. Somehow I doubt rejected mission statements will be a source of high comedy (or any entertainment, really), but again, it will feel like I've done something.

Four years, eight months to go.

Oh, Murphy, You've Done It Again.

This is exactly the kind of thing I need to join and get involved with. When I saw the link, and read about the first gathering, I started making plans to go. The booksellers involved in this are names I've known for a long time - they've always been heavily involved in the bookselling community and own/have worked at incredibly successful indie stores.

"I shall go," thought I, "and glean knowledge from giants."

Then I realized I'm away that week.

If there are any good cloning programs out there, someone let me know.

For now, I'll have to hope that the first is a success so there'll be a second.

Too Long

Just realized it's been a month since any kind of post on here, and even though there isn't a whole ton to report, I was aiming for something a bit more regular.

Of course, this is the time of year when most New Year's Resolutions have fallen by the wayside. It's probably helpful that Lent falls around now - so those of us who gave up our resolutions can use the forty days while we're waiting for the bunny and the dying on the cross to happen (not to mention the rock rolling away from the tomb) to pick back up on the things we've let lapse.

Or something. I haven't given anything up for Lent this year. I figure, instead of dropping bad habits, it might be better to pick up good ones. (And come on, am I really going to go forty days without swearing? coffee? Chocolate's always a wash - the best damned candy of all only comes out this time of year. Cadbury Mini Eggs, o heaven, o stars...)

So, better habits, then. Continued thinking and planning about the future-store. Writing, writing, writing. Possibly poking at my resume, since I'm not entirely convinced I'll still be here in a year (hooray for my incestuous industry. We're #5, which means #1-4 are always eyeing us and our distributees like vultures).

At the very least, for positive things, I was able to pay off two bills at the beginning of the month. Neither of which were very big, but both being gone will let me throw some extra cash towards the larger ones. Faster those are gone (or more manageable, anyway), the sooner I can start saving more towards the grand opening party.

Which, even though it could fall in January, will have Cadbury Mini Eggs.