books, books, books

I think I'm spending too much time around books lately.

Not a statement anyone ever expected to hear from me. I majored in literature, after all. I work in a bookstore and a library. My room is crammed with books. I can't even count the times I've woken up with a book next to me on the pillow. I love the way books feel and the way they smell. I enjoy helping people find just the books they're looking for.

Still, there's a point when it feels like I'm taking my work home with me. One of Mom's library books was lying on my desk on its cover. The back of the book had a stylized R and the word "Revell". "Oh," I thought to myself, "Revell is the Christian-themed imprint of Baker, whose books we buy from J.A. Majors." Or I noticed a Scribner book in the living room the other day; that's Simon & Schuster. Each week I update the bestsellers for our store; Saturday I did the lists and only had to look up one of the publishers. For all the others, I knew the imprints already (Grand Central is Hachette, Vintage belongs to Random House, Riverhead is one of Penguin's and so on. For the record, the one I didn't know was Washington Square Press, which turns out to be part of Atria, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster.).

While this is great in a way, because it lets me get done with the spreadsheets-and-order-forms part of my job faster and go on to the rearranging-the-displays and hassling-the-cashiers parts, it's also somewhat alarming. What if I suddenly develop a social life? I won't be able to hang out at bookstores, that's for sure. The people at Barnes & Noble have better shelves than I do, and more of them. They also have their own imprint, which makes me shake my fist every time a customer wants a book that's only available at Barnes & Noble. Heaven forbid I ever get invited to a party. I'd probably be standing around jabbering about multi-press conglomerates and how mysterious it is that the big presses don't seem to actually send out their books on time. As it is, I spend more time on the phone with HarperCollins and Von Holtzbrinck than I do with my best friend. It's gotten to the point where I know which companies have the best hold music (not Perseus - Enya makes me want to take a nap).

I suppose I could do something with this knowledge, like start an indie press movement. We'll listen to peppy music and only buy books from small, expensive, tough-to-contact independent presses! Yeah! Books that nobody would ever want! Or I could irritate people by poking through their collections and pointing out that they seem to buy all their books from one group or the other. I could write an exposé about the irritations of restocking fees and shipping delays that get us the bestsellers a week after they've fallen off the list or why the price-gouging students complain about at university bookstores is mostly a bunch of whining. Nothing much compared to ground up rats in the sausage, though.

I suppose in the end my bookstore skills will be just about as useful as any other specialized skill set, say playing bridge or understanding a dead language (neither of which I can do): sometimes entertaining at parties, but not a lot of practical applications outside of the field. Ah well. That's why I went to a liberal arts college, right?

I read Déja Dead by Kathy Reichs

So, working in a bookstore as I do, I get a lot more exposure to popular fiction than I did as an English/French major at a small liberal arts college. I've been shelving bestsellers the past few weeks, and I noticed the newest Reichs book, partly because it's got a nice shiny cover. The blurb says the series is the inspiration for the tv show Bones, which I know friends of mine adore. I caught the last ten minutes or so of last Tuesday's episode, and it was interesting enough. Being more inclined to books than television, I picked up the first in the series, just to see if it was something I should get into.

From what I could tell from my short exposure to the show, the books are drastically different. For one thing, in the books, the heroine is called "Tempe" instead of "Bones", when people use her nickname. The first one is set in Montreal, not Washington D.C. There's no Booth, no Zach, no Hodge or Angela (these are the things I pick up from listening to my friends). Temperance Brennan in the books is a lonely, somewhat angry woman with a lot more issues than Emily Deschanel's Bones, what with the alcoholism, the marriage on the rocks, the chauvinistic co-workers, and the almost complete lack of a social life. On the television show, she seemed more the mad scientist type: brilliant, but slightly naïve, in a sweet sort of way. Temperance Brennan of the book gets herself into a lot of dangerous situations in Déja Dead, but it seems like it's less because she's got a hankering for justice and more because she can't find much to live for. Passion, sure, but the self-destructive channeling of it gets Brennan stalked and almost killed in Déja Dead.

Given the choice between an empowered but self-endangering woman and a woman whose head is so deep in her work that she has to be saved from burning herself on hot coffee, I'm more likely to take Bones over Tempe. In both cases, Brennan tends to rely on the men around her to avert the consequences of her actions, but at least Booth isn't a jerk the way Claudel is; Bones seems to enjoy her life more. It's also interesting to see a female mad scientist: other women dedicated to their work retain a social sharpness verging on the brusque (Scully from The X-Files) comes to mind. Deschanel's vague loopiness is endearing, and I like Booth more than any of the men I've encountered in the books.

So saying this, of course, I ended up picking up one of the other books, which I'd taken out from the library just in case. I can only hope that Tempe doesn't decide to scramble off on any life-endangering trips down Prostitution Row in Fatal Voyage. Meanwhile, I might tune in on an occasional Tuesday to cleanse the palate with a more cheerful Temperance Brennan.