BookEnds

• For the third year in a row, Edgar Allan Poe’s biggest fan has failed to materialize at his grave in Baltimore: “When he appears, the Toaster is typically shrouded in a long coat, his head covered with some kind of hat and a scarf that drapes across his face, the spotters say. He strides quickly along the cemetery’s narrow brick pathways, darting in and out of the low light and natural shadows.”

  

• A plethora of books for the Downton Abbey set.
• Bookish highlights of the year to come — among other things, major birthdays for Edith Wharton and Charles Dickens, new books by Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson and Martin Amis, and a trio of classics adapted for the screen: “Anna Karenina”, “The Great Gatsby” and “On the Road”
• Poignant advice and “dearest love” from “Daddy” (F. Scott Fitzgerald) to his 11-year-old daughter.
• As a testament to the resilience of Afghan culture, a calligrapher has unveiled the world’s largest Qur’an, made with the skins of 21 goats.
• A posthumous collaboration between Scottish poet Robert Burns and…Michael Jackson?

Borders Book Shop on High Ridge Road. Photo by Kathleen O'Rourke

When the Borders Books on High Ridge Road announced its doors were closing a few months ago, I witnessed a mad rush of customers eager to scoop up the last of the ailing store’s goods. Interminably long lines snaked through the store, through the rifled, half-empty shelves stamped with bright orange 70% off stickers. People rushed around with teetering stacks of marked-down books piled under their chins, bumped into each other in the aisles between the shelves and waited, largely without complaint, for long stretches of time before taking home their bounty. In a strange way, it gave me a little prick of hope — surely, the thronging crowds jostling around the shelves meant that there were still those who cared about books of the old-fashioned, ink-and-paper variety.

Like everyone else, I rooted through the shelves, hoping to find something that might have escaped my eye during the many visits I’d made to Borders over the years, or to at least pick up one of those books I’d always been meaning to buy at half the price. Distracted by the chaos and unable to decide, I came away with a strange collection of titles: Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, the title of which felt fittingly resigned, Middlemarch by George Eliot, a collection of essays by Zadie Smith and an obscure novel by Rainer Maria Rilke, a purchase which felt satisfyingly like one of those overlooked gems I’d been hoping to find (Middlemarch subsequently took up a large swath of my time and imagination, but more on that later).

When the news came out that the entire Borders franchise was doomed, I felt those same sad pricklings of nostalgia. I feel that I’ve grown up with Borders, not simply as a place to buy books but as a place where I’ll admit I spent a good portion of my childhood, specifically at the large, seemingly unchangeable outpost on High Ridge Road. Few places felt so calm and collected; it was the natural destination on sultry, unbearable summer afternoons, or on those frigid, pre-Christmas days when the downtown mall became too much to endure and I welcomed a quiet space to hunt for appropriate books to press on my relatives as gifts.

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I was wandering through the Ferguson Library the other day, with no determined purpose, when I spotted one of the usual book displays on the first floor and noticed that the arrangement of the books seemed a little…familiar. “This Side of Paradise” next to “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”? “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” propped next to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? And then I realized - the books on display were all part of the article I wrote back in July about novels with local references. The library display is titled “A Connecticut Story” (I like that! It reminds me of “The Philadelphia Story”), and I was very happily surprised to see a neat printout of the list The Advocate compiled for the article stacked next to the books. It’s certainly a long enough list to stretch into the crisp months of fall (a Stephen King for Halloween, perhaps?). The next time I’m in the library, I hope to see some of these novels snapped up for a cozy armchair read…

Kudos to the Ferguson Library for the clever idea - and the display looks beautiful. Does anyone at the library know who put this together? I’d like to say thanks!

Image by emdot via Flickr

When I first read “The Great Gatsby”, it was summer — the best time of year, I think, to become acquainted with Gatsby’s decadent stretch of Long Island. Lying on the beach, I flipped through sun-soaked pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s languid prose, wishing I could dust off my sandy feet and step straight into one of those glorious, glowing parties.

That’s what happens, when we first slip between the pages of a book (or, in this day and age, scroll down the iPad’s screen or plug in the earbuds): we conjure up bits of the characters’ world until it begins to seep into our own. The Jay Gatsby I imagined was not like Robert

Redford, or indeed like the Gatsby of anyone else’s imagination. The characters and places of our favorite books become our own as we read, tainted by the elements of our surroundings, comfortably nestled in the recesses of our imagination for as long as we love our favorite books. They’re often shadowy figures, stronger in essence than in physical presence, and completely unique to our personal interpretations. Gatsby is a particularly elusive character to conjure up — which is why, perhaps, the new production of the show “Gatz” tries to capture, not the character himself, but the process of imagining him.

“Gatz”, which is currently running at the Public Theater in New York, sounds like  a strange hybrid between a play and a book reading. In the performance, presented by Elevator Repair Service , a man sits down to read “The Great Gatsby” — out loud and verbatim all the way through — in a nondescript office building and gradually finds the imaginative world of the book building itself around him. As he warms to the story, his voice plunges and falls with the dialogue and the bland characters around the office fantastically morph into Daisy Buchanans and Jordan Bakers.

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“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”

— Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”

Imagine, for a moment, a canon of Western literature without “The Metamorphosis.” Without Gregor Samsa’s bizarre plight as an insect, without the novels “The Castle”, “The Trial”, “Amerika”…without even the term “Kafkaesque.” That would have been the piteous state of affairs if Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend, had not saved the author’s most famous works and other papers from destruction. On his death in 1924, Kafka left instructions for all journals, papers, manuscripts and letters to be burned. Brod made the prescient, though perhaps morally dubious, decision to defy his friend’s last wishes and brought Kafka’s works to publication.

The remainder of Kafka’s personal papers, though, have had a long and convoluted history, which has led them to an embittered trial over ownership rights that is…well, like something out of Kafka. There’s a preview of a New York Times magazine article coming out this weekend on the trial and the fate of the author’s papers — well worth a good read.

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The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is such a well-known piece of history, that the spiral of events into disaster seems familiar and thoroughly picked over. However, a new book “Good as Gold”, written by the granddaughter of the ship’s Second Officer brings new facts to the surface about the human errors and callous decisions that set the ocean liner on its fatal course.

Louise Patten, a novelist and “the last person alive to know what really happened on the night Titanic sank”, describes family secrets long kept by her grandfather, Commander Charles Lightoller, as the inspiration for her part-fact, part-fiction book. Lightoller initially lied during inquiries into the disaster, saying he knew nothing at the time, but told his wife the truth, which was passed down to Patten.

Lightoller, right, with third officer Herbert ...

According to Patten (and Lightoller), the Titanic struck the iceberg because of a simple misinterpretation of orders. At the time the Titanic was built, ships were transitioning between sailing ships and steam ships, which have different steering systems. Sailing ships, on which Lightoller and many other of the Titanic’s officers trained, operate under tiller orders, while steam ships operate under rudder orders. In an article with The Telegraph, Patten explained the difference between the two:

“…on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as ’tiller orders’ which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way. It sounds counterintuitive now, but that is what tiller orders were. Whereas with ‘rudder orders,’ which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go.”

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The New York Times had a great fall book preview today. Here’s a peek:

There are novels by Ken Follett, Michael Cunningham, Nicole Krauss and Tom Clancy; cookbooks by Ina Garten and Jamie Oliver; humor books by both Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris; a collection of poems, notes and letters written by Marilyn Monroe; and a book by the Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward that is so supersecret its publisher, Simon & Schuster, refused to reveal the title. (A Borders executive said that it is “Obama’s War.”)

This fall is especially intense because of the midterm elections, which coincide with a handful of political memoirs, polemics and studies of the Tea Party movement, President Obama and Glenn Beck whose releases have been timed to the weeks before November.

Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, just released “A Journey” (Random House), an account of his time in office and its aftermath, and was promptly the target of protesters tossing eggs and flip-flops at his first public reading, in Dublin, on Saturday. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, will see his latest political book, “Pinheads and Patriots” (William Morrow), published on Sept. 14. Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, has written a memoir of her family and childhood in Alabama, titled “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” (Crown Archetype).