There’s a funny scene in P.G. Wodehouse’s classic Joy In The Morning, in which Bertie Wooster tries to find a copy of Spinoza in a bookshop.  On asking the bookshop employee, he’s met with blank incomprehension.

`You do not mean “The Spinning Wheel”?’

`No.’

`It would not be “The Poisoned Pin”?’

`It would not.’

`Or “With Gun and Camera in Little Known Borneo”?’ he queried, trying a long shot.
`Spinoza,’ I repeated firmly. That was my story, and I intended to stick to it.
He sighed a bit, like one who feels that the situation has got beyond him.

I think of this story a lot when dealing with the staff in bookshops.  To be honest, I’ve never had much use for them.  These days I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m looking for in the way of books.  I’ve got my magazines and newspapers and websites that give me tips.  Sometimes I just want to browse and I’m pretty sure that I can read a blurb unaided.  I need someone to scan my selection and take my money, but that’s about the extent of it.

Sure, the presence of staff can help you out with identifying the location of a book—particularly something that’s difficult to classify.  Even this isn’t strictly necessary in some branches of Borders, with their library-style computer terminals.

Getting advice and recommendations, though, is another matter.  There are thousands and thousands of books in the world—who’s to say that the taste of a random person in a bookstore is anything like yours?  How can they be expected to be even aware of the kind of book you might be after?

For all that, I have a certain affection for the “Staff recommendations” that some shops attach on cardboard under the shelves.  At the very least, it’s interesting to see how they line up with my favourite books.  I get a small feeling of companionship with the staff when I see a glowing referral for the works of Kazuo Ishiguro or Vikram Seth or Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.

There’s an element of snobbery at work.  I’m inclined to think that I’m the expert when it comes to the kind of book that I’ll enjoy.  Maybe I’m underrating the taste and discernment of the average bookshop clerk.

My feeling of superiority did take a beating recently while in the George St, Sydney branch of Dymocks and was looking for the next volume of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time.  Now, I never expected to get through the first volume and it sat unread on my shelves for five years.  The fact that I read it and enjoyed it still astonishes me.  I picture the kind of people who read and enjoy Proust as being grey-haired and wise-looking—English professors at the end of a long and distinguished career.

So picture my surprise when a young-looking employee with an American accent came up behind me and intoned, “Ahh, Marcel Proust.  That was my favourite volume.”

“Oh yeah?” I responded, only half processing what he had said to me.

“Yeah.  I really enjoyed the next one, The Guermantes Way, too but I thought it went downhill after that.  You know, he only edited the first couple of volumes in his lifetime.  The rest were done by his brother or something.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  A guy about my brother’s age had apparently read all the volumes of a gigantic work of French literature and had a favourite volume.

My friend Tim was unsurprised by this story.  He used to work at that very bookstore and said more than half of the staff were completing postgrad studies in literature.  Tim was the marketing student who read Robert Ludlum.

So maybe there’s a role for them after all, at least the staff who have read the later volumes of massive novels and can save you the trouble.

—David Pullar

Currently I’m about halfway through a book that ranks fairly high on the environmentally conscious scale. It’s printed on paper made from 100% recycled paper, and certified chlorine-free. The text was printed using soy-based inks and the book jacket with vegetable-based inks. And that’s not the most important part of the environmental impact of this book.

No, this is not some tree-hugging manual about how to live off the grid and harvest the fleece from your sheep so you can eventually knit sweaters out of handspun yarn. The book is Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution (2008) and it’s (gasp!) a management text.

So far I’ve learned that it takes 200 liters of water to grow the resources to produce one liter of Coke. Read that sentence again if you have to. As for coffee, 140 liters are needed to end up with a single cup. Shock factor aside, the book elaborates on some of the unconventional partnerships that are being forged in the name of innovation with regard to preserving the environment, and cutting back on the human footprint. Coke teamed up with the World Wildlife Federation in 2007 in an effort to better manage their water supply, with a goal of not taking more water out of the system than they replenish.

The managers of the corporations and organizations of tomorrow need to have a thorough understanding of the impact that the growing population of the planet is having on its irreplaceable resources. Not only that, however, they need to think creatively to help establish jobs and industries that work to rebuild the environment and replenish vanishing resources. Because we will never get ourselves out of this mess if we can’t figure out how to make the bottom line worth everyone’s while. Senge and his co-authors have some excellent case studies and strategies for crafting a workable future where the environment benefits and managers can be proud of how they grow their business.

—Lara Killian

Ooh, to be Horace Engdahl this morning…

Engdahl is secretary of the Swedish Academy, the group responsible for selecting literary Nobel Prize winners. In a recent interview, as reported by the Independent, Engdahl referred to American literature as “isolated” and “insular”, further stating: “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world.”

Did he really...?

He did, and the backlash has begun. New Yorker editor David Remnick is having a go, as is Harold Augenbraum, director of the US National Book Foundation. “I’ll send him a reading list,” Augenbraum is quoted as saying. (That’s my kind of threat.)

The larger issue here is the Nobel selection process, and just what US authors are supposed to assume upon hearing such grand dismissal from a key figure on the selection committee. An American author has not taken home a Nobel Prize for literature since Toni Morrison in 1993; Engdahl started on the prize committee just four years later… connection?

The latest winner will be annouced next week. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth are said to be frontrunners. From the sounds of things, with all books in contention surely well and truly finished by Engdahl and his committee, the pair might rethink writing those just-in-case acceptance speeches. 

—Nikki Tranter

This weekend I finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. This book is very readable and has a number of thought-provoking themes, taking place as it does in the summer of 1964 in South Carolina when racial tensions ran high.

Lily, the protagonist, is a white teenager whose life has been full of misery, her mother having died in an accident when she was a toddler, and her father sinking deeper into anger and violent tendencies over the years. Fed up, Lily runs away and take with her the few mementos of her mother that have survived, including a strange picture of a Black Madonna.

Lily’s wild nature and spontaneous actions are offset by the calm presence of August, the black beekeeper whose home Lily ends up invading, led to it by the Black Madonna, in a way. The personalities of Lily and August keep this book wonderfully balanced. They’re both quirky in their own right; Lily notices that in August’s bedroom, “On her dressing table, where less interesting people would’ve put a jewelry box or a picture frame, August had a fish aquarium turned upside down with a giant piece of honeycomb inside it.” Later on, Lily takes to carrying around a pile of mouse bones in her pocket. “Every day I carried them around in my pocket and could not imagine why I was doing it.”

Such details, along with the intense racial and emotional themes that permeate this book, make Kidd a great storyteller. I’m glad this book landed in my hands.

What are you reading this week?

—Lara Killian

In case you haven’t already encountered it, here’s the deal with Achewood: If you come across the comic strip online right now, in it’s seventh year of publication, you’ll probably feel like you have no clue what’s going on.  Something about cats, and bears, and robots, and a naïve otter.  Heck, you probably won’t get it when you read the first strip. But if you spend the time to go back through the archives, read from the beginning, and take the time to learn about the characters and their history, you’ll quickly become engrossed in one of the most savagely funny evolutions in comics today.

Writer/artist Chris Onstad has developed a small universe inside a pathologically erudite world called Achewood.  It’s a place where your toys and your pets live human-esque adult lives right alongside us.  Our hedonistic habits, shopping centers, television shows, celebrity chefs, and fashion labels are theirs.  And in Achewood, Onstad has created a cast of characters that have effectively satirized contemporary life through their own distinct personalities.  It’s rude, it’s frequently crude, and some of the smartest work being done in webcomics.  Not only do you have the semi-regularly updated online strip, but Onstad has created blogs for each of his major characters, displaying a range of voice and a breadth of cultural savvy.  There’s even a series of Achewood cookbooks.

Which makes it both a triumph and a challenge that Onstad’s The Great Outdoor Fight has finally been collected in hardcover book form and is now available through Dark Horse Comics.  The “Great Outdoor Fight” story-arc is one of the most sustained sequences of the strip’s history, and is a mixed-sentiment fan favorite (explanation to follow).  It ran over a number of months online, and the amount of backstory and characterization make it a perfect stand-alone collection—if you already know Achewood. 

This isn’t an easy one for new readers to pick up.  It’s just not possible to understand the absurd humor if you haven’t come to know Ray and Roast Beef—essentially the two main characters of the strip, and the central focus of this storyline.  Knowing something about Ray being the luckiest semi-idiotic egomaniac with a heart of gold in the world is important to getting the joke of his being invited to the event that gives the book its title.  Knowing that Roast Beef is a chronically depressed hypochondriac with the world’s worst self-image is important to understanding the transformative moment of Beef taking charge in an event that is entirely about machismo.

For the Great Outdoor Fight is the most aggro of competitions.  Three Days, Three Acres, Three Thousand Men.  An all-out, nothing-barred, bloody fight until the last man standing is declared the victor.  It’s hyper-violent, completely over the top, and a hilarious commentary on the historical urge for bloodsport.  And yet, because Ray is the son of a former champion, the entire fight becomes an observation.  There are graphic moments, but those are less important and less visible than the people involved and their reactions, from the Achewood gang at home following along online (through a blogger using a Blackberry from inside the fight itself) to the strategy discussions of Ray and Roast Beef.  The hows and whys and spectacle of the event are more important than the action.  When this initially ran, it actually drew a mixed reaction from the fans, who only received small chunks in daily updates.  This made it hard to sustain the momentum, and the lack of visual violence and the almost necessarily pat conclusion left some feeling underwhelmed.  But when it’s placed in full context in this book, you can see the complete picture and not stall out waiting for updates.  And sure, you can get this experience by reading it online in the strip’s archives, but something about the book form makes it feel more unified.  If you’re already hip to the language manipulation of Achewood’s style, it flows much more smoothly in this form.  Plus, you get a few neat little extras, characteristic of Onstad: a text intro and history, some fight-related recipes, and some new art.

But if you’re someone who’s had Achewood recommended to them, or is curious about Onstad’s recent ascendancy to New Yorker blog subject and GQ comic strip appearance, do what everyone is told to do: go start from the beginning and read the strip online.  Then read the character blogs.  And then you might fully understand why the release of The Great Outdoor Fight in a mass-market form is a great thing. 

—Patrick Schabe

I was surprised by the sudden arrival of the fall season today in the northern hemisphere. Some people feel like it will soon be time to pull on the woolly coats and hibernate until the sun shines again, but I feel there is a reawakening going on in areas with vibrant student populations.

The energy on campus as first assignments come due and readings start to pile up is fantastic. And with a return to school comes a renewed focus on outreach programming related to literature and writing.

This Saturday, 28 September, The Word on the Street Book and Magazine Festival 2008 will be celebrated in five Canadian cities: Calgary, Halifax, Kitchener, Toronto and Vancouver. The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is sponsoring some excellent readings and local events not only in the week leading up to The Word on the Street Festival, but right on into October as well. And all this week, Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, is on. I particularly wish I could have swooped in for Andrew Davidson’s reading from The Gargoyle at Winnepeg’s Millennium Library. He’ll be in Toronto on 24 September, just in case you’re interested.

Any upcoming book or literacy festivals in your area?

—Lara Killian