Bookshops of Yesterday & Today
Although the literary pursuit is frustrating for almost all writers, in my case having failed to attract the interest of publishers for more than a decade proved fortunate. It allowed me time to get to a point where whatever of my work got into print was about the best it would ever be. My first novel, Five Cents, begun in late 1975, underwent a major overhaul 40 years later. Still, of my ten books, it is the one in which I have the least confidence, although I believe there are many good things in it. How fortunate that self publishing was so costly back in the day. Now, in the digital age, it is virtually free. I might have made Five Cents public the way it was, and been embarrassed by it until my dying day. Anyway, this blog entry is about another writer’s first novel, Amy Meyerson’s The Bookshop of Yesterdays. She is light years ahead of where I was at her age, which I’d guess is mid-30’s. She teaches creative writing at USC, and has had short stories published in notable literary magazines. Her prose and dialogue are solid. Although I liked the book, it was drawn out. 364 pages, it would have worked better, at least for me, had it been considerably shorter. The story, outside the complexity of human relationships, is simple. A relative dies and leaves a young woman, a teacher in Philadelphia, his book shop, which is on Sunset Boulevard in L.A., her hometown. He also leads her on a scavenger hunt that reveals painful family secrets. The clues are spread throughout many famous works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. I think most readers would quickly see where it is going, which diminishes the element of mystery considerably. That won’t matter to those who prefer a tale of the human condition. I’d guess the book would appeal more to women than men, which I suppose is sexist. Sue me. 176 users at Amazon have rated it, forging to a consensus of 4.1 on a scale of five. I say 2.75. A year after its publication, it is still selling well, currently ranked 44,000th+ at Jeff Bezo’s behemoth, where at least 32.8 million books are listed across all formats. The Bookshop of Yesterdays is a first novel to be proud of.
As for the floating book shop, it was an active session that featured two substantial donations of highly marketable material, some of which sold immediately. My thanks to the gentleman who dropped off his share in a crate, and to Marie, who delivered a shopping bag’s worth; and to Wolf, who bought ten books in Russian; and to the woman who purchased six; and the gentleman who went for another; and to the woman who chose On the Street Where You Live by Mary Higgins Clark; and to Ira, who selected three pictorials; and to the gentleman who opted for The Crucible by Arthur Miller; and to the young man who took home The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway, his last uncompleted novel, published 25 years after his suicide in 1961. According to the synopsis at Amazon, it’s “the story of a young American writer, his glamorous wife, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman.”
Alan and Ira, who each worked many years in Manhattan, knew that the old Penn Station was inspired in part by the Roman Baths of Caracalla. Kudos. Here’s the cover of the aforementioned book:
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