It's a good day, Gothic Shoppers.

Way back when we first got started with this here blog-type-thing, I posted on those bookselling moments that make it all worthwhile. Just a few of those moments every couple of months can get a bookseller through a good long stretch of the doldrums. I bring this up now, because –shockingly—a customer just bought our last copy of Baseball Haiku.

Don’t panic, though. We’re ordering more.

At a former bookselling job, I was roundly mocked for suggesting this fine anthology as “the perfect holiday gift for fans of sports and poetry,” as though such a creature had not yet been invented. In the defense of my colleagues, total sales of the book came to a big fat goose egg. But I never lost hope in that little book. It seemed like a perfect idea. Baseball is a game that, for both spectator and player (well, outfielder, at least), provides ample opportunity for contemplation. Between concentrated bursts of action are periods of near stillness that can seem timeless. What better art form to capture such an atmosphere than haiku, poetry that draws heavily on a sense of stillness within the natural world?

Anyway, we’ve sold the heck out of those suckers.

As soon as it starts getting warm I get excited about going to baseball games. I won’t lie to you, Gothic Shoppers: no one who knows me even a little would confuse me with a die-hard sports fan. I just don’t have a brain for it. But I like baseball. I like its sounds and its pace and its place in the mythology of our country. And its hot dogs and beer.

I also really love baseball novels.

Baseball is by far the sport that gets the most representation in the world of fiction. I’m not sure why this is, though our understanding of it as America’s Game must have something to do with it. Perhaps it’s that contemplative pace that I was alluding to before (golf runs a close second to baseball in the world of fiction). Certainly the structure of a ball game lends itself to written description. Try, on the other hand, writing a chapter than contains a shot-by-shot description of a game between the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels. Your fingers would fall off.

This is not to say that there haven’t been great novels written on other sports. Don Delillo, for example, gave us End Zone, a brilliant postmodern novel about a college football team, and Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough is a funny-as-all-get-out story of an epic Super Bowl game. Gothic favorite Nick Hornby’s book, Fever Pitch –weirdly made into an american baseball movie—is now considered a classic of soccer (sorry, football) writing. Boxing been represented in any number of great novels, most significantly Leonard Gardner’s Fat City.

But lest I get off on a tangent, I’ll bring this post back to baseball novels and my fondness for them. The genre has some classics: Bang the Drum Slowly, Shoeless Joe, The Natural. But my favorites have been those odd, lesser-known titles –the ones that have come out of (I really am sorry about this) left field. Here are a few:

The Dixie Association, by Donald Hays – a great southern yarn about an Arkansan minor-league team, owned by a one-armed socialist and populated by ex-cons, American Indians, Cuban communists, and women. This could be your most fun read of the summer.

The Seventh Babe by Jerome Charyn – Charyn is one of those great American writers who has gone almost completely unnoticed by the reading public. In Seventh Babe, Charyn gives us a baseball story that resembles nothing so much as a medieval legend. We follow the ascent and downfall of a Jewish third basemen –Babe Ragland—through a crazy season with the 1923 Red Sox. (One reader who has noticed Charyn is Michael Chabon. If you liked Chabon’s last novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, do yourself a favor and read some Charyn.)

Season’s End by Tom Grimes – Set in the malaise of the late seventies and leading up to the players’ strike of ’81, Grimes’ novel is a bittersweet tale of baseball success amidst the escalating greed and racism of that time. It’s a great read, as much for the fan of classic American fiction as for the baseball fan.

The Brothers K by David James Duncan – Those who know Duncan’s work are passionate evangelists for it. His novel The River Why is considered, along with A River Runs Through It, to be the very epitome of the fly-fishing novel. Brothers K is one of those great, sprawling American family sagas. Against the backdrop of our country's Vietnam-era turbulence, the Chance family struggles to reconcile its two driving forces: religious fundamentalism and a love for baseball. It’s a moving and often funny book, and of course there’s a comeback-kid story to follow, as there should be in all baseball literature.

I could go on and on about this (as you all well know by now). But it’s a sunny day out there, and you Gothic Shoppers need to shut off the computer and get outside. First, though, swing by the store and pick up a copy of Baseball Haiku to take with you to a Bulls game. As I recently found out, though, there are no home games this weekend. You’ll have to wait until next Tuesday. Until then:

Blinding spring sun:
Upturned faces
Wonder where the fly ball went.

In Memoriam: Dave Arneson

I just want to echo the sentiments in this link. I’m not sure how my life would have panned out if it were not for the systems this man created. It is hard for me to imagine a world without RPG’s in it. The sad thing is to many his death will go unnoticed. Many people think RPG’s have nothing to do with their existence, and for many they might not. But, if you’ve ever played an RPG of any type, played a MMORPG, or enjoyed the feel of an RPG on your next generation gaming system then this man was responsible for helping define it.

Some may argue that the Monster Manual or the D&D Rules Book don’t constitute reading a book. I beg to differ those books are equal parts story and textbook, and in a way more difficult to get through than a regular book.

In closing, this man created the skeleton on which all RPG’s are forged today and for that I honor his passing.

Like, Wao!

Hi again, folks.

Many of you have probably already heard that the summer reading for the incoming class of 2013 is Junot Diaz's book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book was chosen from an excellent list of finalists, but I will now freely admit that I was pulling for this title all along. It's a challenging but fun read, and I think it will make for a great campus-wide conversation in the fall.

Diaz was on campus a few months ago, giving what I understand was a fantastic reading. Any of you who missed it can go to the NPR website and hear a clip of the author reading a passage from Oscar Wao. Check it out, and if you like what you hear you'll find plenty of copies of the book here at the store.

Taking Stock

Hi Gothic Shoppers.

The throngs of you who flocked to our doors this past Saturday probably noticed that our doors were locked. At least, I hope you all noticed that; otherwise, our security procedures need some adjusting.

It wasn’t that we’d grown tired of servicing your book needs. No, we were engaged in that great retail ritual to which we all must submit: we were doing inventory. Now, those of you who have not worked in a bookshop before do not know the pure joy of a physical inventory. It involves pulling out every single book, magazine, card, and tchotchke, and scanning its barcode with a little raygun until a beep is heard.

It takes a really long time.

I’d like to tell you a story of how I came to enjoy the process, how I came to feel close to my fellow booksellers as we pursued some common goal. I’d like to say, even, that I was a ray of sunshine the whole time. If I tried to tell you this, though, my coworkers would murder me on the spot. (I acted like something of a you-know-what there towards the end, and I duly apologize)

No, none of us really came to feel anything other than dread and annoyance about the whole thing. However, it did give me a renewed sense of the scope of our stock here at the Gothic. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the titles of the books I was scanning; that just slows a person down. But once in a while I would surface from my ennui-induced walking coma to find myself holding a book on the conquest of the American West, or some random book on mathematics, or a book on making pickles, or Kevin Young’s volume of film noir poetry, or Foucault’s History of Madness, or (I’m not making this up), a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And I’d think to myself: wow, we’ve really got the bases covered here.

If it sounds like I’m bragging here, well, I can’t deny it. We do have a seriously well-stocked bookstore, and, after all, the purpose of this blog isn’t to tell the world that we suck rotten eggs.

So, after all, in the midst of the hellish slog that was inventory, I once again found purpose as a bookseller, and was truly glad for the experience...






I’m kidding, of course. I hope I never have to perform that godawful task again. But we do have a lot of great books here.