Well I Never!

It's been awhile. I beg forgiveness. Gianna is working on something for the blog that involves her tendency to scatter underwear like Johnny Appleseed across hotels far and wide, and I do hope that I'm earning double Hilton Honors Points every time I pass through a hotel where Gianna has previously stopped. It seems only fair considering what I might find.

Anyway, recently I've been playing with an idea that popped up when Doubleday announced the publication of THE ANGEL'S GAME, the new book by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He's the guy who wrote SHADOW OF THE WIND, and I know there are a ton of fans for SHADOW. I've actually never read the first book, but I did read and enjoy ANGEL'S GAME. It's published in June and should be humongous. The book, like SHADOW, is set in Barcelona and is full of book lover delights like the cemetary of lost books, a catacombs of books left and taken. You bring a book to leave, you take one that calls to you. It's a great idea. Here's another great idea: Spain has a holiday, La Diada de Sant Jordi, or St. George's Day, where it is customary to give a book and a rose to a loved one, on April 23rd. We need this holiday in the US! Gianna and I have been playing with this idea of lost books and rediscovering books that aren't lauded on Good Morning America or Oprah here and now. How great would it be if every bookstore in the US set up a display for this St. George's Day, and sold their favorite books to give to loved ones? It's like Christmas, except in my case I'd get something I actually want.

All of this lost book thinking led me to all of those books out there I've never read. For example, in the last few months we've started selling to a terrific mystery book store in Houston, Murder By the Book. I actually haven't read many mysteries in my life. As a kid I read mostly American lit classics because those were the books I could get in podunk East Texas without a bookstore or Amazon. In college I focused mostly on the English masters and came late to the wonders of contemporary literary fiction, which is one of my two book passions. While I enjoy mysteries as movies (and the darker the better), I'm just now coming to the genre in book form. I've read read Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett or James Cain. I just last week read my first James Ellroy book (BLOOD'S A ROVER, which releases in fall 2009). In the last year, with Stieg Larsson's amazing thriller GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and a book about to come out called THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE, I'm really starting to embrace mysteries into my literary comfort zone.

There are other authors whose company I have yet to keep. There's a new biography out called CHEEVER, about the life of John Cheever, and though I should have, I've never read any of his stories or novels. In fact, many of those masters writing between World War II and, say, 1990, are new to me. I think I was born too late to read them on release and too early for them to be taught in my college classes, so there's a gap. I've read some Updike, but not the Rabbit series, just the last few novels. I've never read CATCH 22. I've read more of the women writers from that time, and Joyce Carol Oates, Muriel Spark, and Margaret Atwood are some of my favorite writers.

This St. George's Day, I'm going to celebrate by giving a book to a loved one (me), and reading one of these books that I've missed thus far in my journey. I don't know what yet--I'm willing to take suggestions. Maybe I'll read one of Gianna's favorite books, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. It's supposed to be terrific. Never read it.

Random sighting while traveling in Lewisville, Texas, yesterday: I passed an out of business barbecue joint called Sugar Babies, which looked like a barn and featured a morbid, cartoon pig feasting on a rack of ribs (isn't that cannibalism?) on its sign. Sugar Babies also had one of those marquee signs where you can advertise specials. The specials were still posted, and the first was "'Sonic' like ice, only 99 cents!" So, the best lure this restaurant could come up with was that they had an ice machine that spewed crunchy ice like that found at Sonic Drive-Ins? No wonder the place went under. Awesome.

Navel Gazing at 73 mph

Monday was Presidents Day. Naturally, being averse to the idea of idleness, I completely expelled the information that we were off for the "holiday" and worked three hours before realizing that it was awfully quiet and emailing Gianna.

My email: subject: Stupid Question
Text: Dude, are we off today?

Gianna: subject: re: Stupid Question
Text: Yeah, so quit emailing me.

I spent the rest of the day hanging out with my sister and playing the Nintendo 64 version of Mario Kart (also known as "what I really majored in during my senior year of college). What I didn't do was pack for my trip to Oklahoma on Tuesday. Mario Kart is a cruel taskmaster. The Kart kept me out of Phi Beta Kappa, and the Kart kept me from departing at 8 am for my seven hour drive to OKC the next morning.

I was going to Oklahoma in order to sell books to two accounts--Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma City proper, and Best of Books in Edmond, which is basically a suburb of OKC and recently in the news for the tornado that tore through town last week. (I'd called ahead and asked that they delay any future violent weather until after my visit.) After selling to these two stores on Wednesday, I drove to Plano, the Stepford of Dallas, spent the night, and then sold my summer season books to the large, new store that recently opened there, Legacy Books. And from Legacy I drove the 4+ hours back to Houston. Even though I drove more than 700 miles on this trip, this little three day excursion is actually a fairly easy trip in terms of road fatigue, so Gianna and I didn't travel together. Coincidentally, though, Gianna happened to be selling to the same accounts this week, just in reverse order. It's nice when you see an account just before her. I like to leave her little notes tucked into my buyer's catalogs, to be discovered when she arrives, or encourage my buyers to give her a hard time. And since my buyers are book people and therefore at least mildly deranged and sadistic, they often oblige (they are awesome).

So, I had about 16 hours worth of driving to ponder my existence while chugging along at 73 mph with the cruise control. Here are some random thoughts, observations, insights, statistics, etc.

• Number of giant, inflatable creatures on top of buildings between Houston and Dallas, the dullest drive I make every season: 19
• I wonder how many times the giant statue of Sam Houston, along the highway outside of Huntsville, TX, has been struck by lightning. I love ridiculously large statues randomly inserted along highways.
• By far the coolest, most intriguing business I pass between Houston and Oklahoma City is the Oklahoma Horseshoeing Academy, South Campus. How many campuses are there?? And what sort of degrees do they offer? And don't you feel sorry for the horses used as their practice ponies?
• After hearing this song called "Jesus Take the Wheel" on the radio, I email (while driving, which is a no-no) one of my buyers saying that I'm literally taking this advice. I learn that I need to have my tires aligned soon before regaining control of my vehicle. I also need to change the radio station.
• Number of ways I imagined killing another driver while on this trip: 7
• Dallas radio plays some Ryan Seacrest radio program every afternoon. This fact will join the one about the Texas Rangers being an American League team as two reasons I don't live in Dallas.
• Why are they called "Sooners?"
• I learned that Earth Day is also Land Grant Day in Oklahoma. I'm sharpening my stake for a symbolic property grab for this April.
• Why do Texans feel the need to promote Texas while inside the state already? There is a whole series of Ra-Ra-Texas billboards along I-45 lauding the state. The King Ranch is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Texas has two of the three largest universities in the US. As a Texan, I don't care. And I would think that Rhode Islanders don't care either. I mean, don't you think that they are hooting it up that they also get 2 Senators for their pint sized state and can therefore negate the second most populous state in the union by block voting against our Senators?
• Number of times I had to rewind the audio book I was listening to (A Mad Desire to Dance by Elie Wiesel) because I was contemplating unusual roadkill: 2

Book news--I've started reading for our fall season and the fall line-up is pretty amazing. I just started the new Margaret Atwood novel, The Year of the Flood. One of the pros on my list when I was considering whether to work for Random House is that they publish Margaret Atwood. I love her. This new novel is very much like another of her speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic novels, Oryx and Crake. I'm not far into it yet, but what I have read I liked and I'll be spending the weekend reading this book.

We Must Be Crazy (Or, How This Thing Started)

No sane person would enter the book business right now. Stores are closing, the daily industry newsletters tell of little but cutbacks and lay-offs at the publishers, and let's face it, I hear more discussion of Lost than I do of any book even when I'm in a bookstore. I entered the book business in 1998 after graduating from college with exactly $328 and no career aspirations whatsoever. I thought I would go to graduate school, but I couldn't afford it either financially or spiritually. I was burned out with school. So, moving to Austin, Texas, I decided to spend a gap year by working at a bookstore, if I could get a job, and recharge for my future enrollment in even more education. I started work at BookPeople, the large, independent bookstore in downtown Austin, on June 15, a week after my 22nd birthday, and earned a whopping $5.40 an hour. I was too economically ignorant to realize how stupid I was to take this job, but I've never really been motivated by money. I am a book nerd. I wanted to spend my days surrounded by the stories that inspired me to be an English major before over-analysis drove away the joy I found in reading. I also wanted to be around smart people and thought that a bookstore might be a mecca of well-read, fascinating thinkers. At the time I didn't realize that all booksellers are a bit nutty.

I spent almost 9 years at BookPeople, working my way from lowly closing shift bookseller to buyer and inventory operations supervisor with an office. It was a great education into a business I found more and more fascinating, at a time when the industry grudgingly was coming to terms with inevitable change (as it still is), from economic challenges to the digital revolution. I had the pleasure of meeting booksellers from around the country as well as publishing execs from New York, but by 2007 I found myself weighing my options. Stay at BookPeople and continue to make it the best bookstore in the country (indeed, it won Publishers Weekly's Bookseller of the Year in 2005, a fact for which I'm quite proud), or expand my horizons? When a Random House sales representative job came open in the Texas territory, I swallowed back my overwhelming fear of change and leapt. I moved to Houston, set up an office in my apartment, and spent many nights wondering if I was a complete idiot.

Random House is the biggest publisher in the world, and the company publishes a hell of a lot of books each year. On top of this, the sales force also acts as a representative for smaller publishers that aren't actually owned by Random House--houses like National Geographic, the art publisher Rizzoli, DC Comics, and fantasy giant Wizards of the Coast. We're talking thousands of adult books that need selling, so there are two sales reps per territory "out in the field" (the people selling the books to stores who don't live in New York and rarely visit the home office). When I joined Random House, I signed on to sell books in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi, which geographically is a huge territory. My partner, selling the other half of the adult books, is Gianna, another Austin resident but Chicago native who found her own way through the book business ranks. We didn't know each other well when we started working together, but we're both book people, and one can always talk about books. About the time I started at Random House, we were instructed to start driving more and flying less, and as people who value our jobs, we followed orders. It's a long way from Houston to Amarillo--about 12 hours if you stop to pee or eat--and a long way from Austin, where Gianna lives, to Jackson, Mississippi--again 12 hours by car. For sanity and safety, we started making these long road trips together, so three times per year to each location, we'd load up a car with advance reader copies of the soon-to-be-published books and hit the road to bookstores far and wide.

Road trips have the potential to ruin even the soundest relationships. You're packed in a sardine can for hours on end with a radio and another person and the scenery outside providing the only distraction to the thoughts in your head. It turned out, though, that Gianna and I travel very well together. We both have a fine appreciation for the absurdity of situations, have similar interests in books and movies, and frankly, know how to shut up. We aren't gabbers. In fact, we're both introverts, but with senses of humor. And to dispel any visions of what kind of reps we are, I should point out that book reps are nothing like, say, the pharmaceutical sales reps who audition for Survivor and hook up with the "aspiring actors" after 27 days without showering. I would say that as a group, book reps are, like most book folk, introverted, semi-awkward, non-models. At least, that's me. Anyway, we started recounting stories of our travels, and typically the reactions from friends and colleagues alike started with gap-jawed disbelief that we would travel together in this way, followed by laughter at what we saw or experienced, and then came the inevitable "you should write a blog." So here you go, our blog.

What you'll find here--thoughts on the book industry as it goes through a period of great, perilous transition, commentary on the books we love both new and old, stories from the road and the stores we visit, and frankly anything else that captures our fancy but won't get us fired. There is a strong possibility that I will comment on the proliferation of giant, inflatable creatures that storm the tops of buildings between Houston and Dallas, or Gianna will recount how she once joined me in Amarillo wearing two mismatched shoes (classy), or we both speculate on what, exactly, is sold at a business called "Unclaimed Furniture" outside of Oxford, Mississippi, or ponder how many horseshoeing campuses there are in Oklahoma as we pass the south branch on our way to OKC. No doubt we'll highlight our favorite restaurants, our quirky routines, what we do to amuse ourselves after four days of almost constant driving, what shenanigans our office mates (meaning our pets--we work from home when not traveling) have pulled, and, of course, we'll talk about books. If nothing else, at least we won't hear "you should write a blog" again. Be careful what you ask for.