Moving Sale

A few weeks back, we stopped by our local Barnes & Noble store to discover everything in the store was 25 percent off. Add my member discount and that made for some cool savings. A couple of the books I will be reviewing in the next week came from that trip. But such a sale was unusual, and to either quell or confirm my fears, I spoke to a bookseller.

What a relief! I learned they are moving into a bigger space across the street, in a building once occupied by Bed, Bath, and Beyond–a casualty of the retail wars. Instead of going there to fit out my son’s college dorm, as we once did, we can feast our eyes and empty our wallets on books!

But the news gets better! This week, I learned that the discount was up to 40 percent. The rationale is that it is easier to sell off the inventory than move it. And they still had books of interest. I came home with three–a collection of Jorge Luis Borges essays, a Haruki Murakami novel, and o book on the working homeless in America I’d seen reviewed recently. My TBR ever groweth!

But not all bookstores do it this way. The Guardian ran a story recently of a small-town bookstore that mobilized a human chain to move 9,100 books to a new location, passed from hand to hand. Three hundred people came out to help. That’s bookstore love! I suspect that wouldn’t work in our case because of a heavily travelled road between the two locations.

Part of me is wistful. I have memories of sitting at the cafe with my wife, sharing our book finds, or “retreat” days that included a stop at the Panera that shared the building, for lunch, then a quick browse and some coffee while I journaled. The Panera moved out a couple years ago, and soon, the building will be empty. I’ll guess we’ll have to make new memories.

Five Articles Worth Reading

“Doing Nothing Is Everything” reviews Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer. The author describes himself as areligious but represents a growing trend of areligious people seeking out monasteries for silence.

Miles Terlunen makes a confession that amounts to an apology from literary scholars to the wider reading public. He admits that “Scholars Have Lost the Plot!,” as they follow strategies of slow reading to ferret out other aspects of literary works.

“‘Why would he take such a risk?’ How a famous Chinese author befriended his censor” is a fascinating account by a critic of the Communist Party of his relationship with a censor on Weibo, China’s equivalent of X. Makes me wonder what could happen (or is happening) here.

Emily Henry is described in this article from The New York Times as “a new standard-bearer of the romance genre.” I’m not a romance reader and had never heard of this fellow Ohioan, but for those interest in the genre, this is a deep dive into her work.

Camino Real by Tennessee Williams is set in a mental institution. In “Faulkner and Plath Go to a Play,” we learn of the profound impact the play had on each of them, due to their own histories of institutionalization.

Quote of the Week

Thornton Wilder, born April 11 1897, offered this advice, that could be a personal watchword:

“Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I’m thoroughly enjoying The Bookshop by Evan Friss. It’s a history of the American bookstore, from Ben Franklin on, concluding with Parnassus, Ann Patchett’s bookstore. It impresses me with the unique personality of every bookstore, one thing that makes visiting them so much fun.

I’m reading a rather thick book on “the next quest for the historical Jesus.” It is a collection of essays that seems to be an effort to lay the groundwork for this “quest.” But it is curious in admitting on one hand that we cannot get behind the accounts of Jesus, yet also explores many of the background factors from class and clothing to the military presence in Judea. One thing that I do appreciate is the easing up on the criteria of “authenticity” which would reject as an authentic saying of Jesus anything anyone else had said.

One of the books coming out this spring is a new biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow, who has written a number of significant biographies, including biographies of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. It’s at the top of my wishlist.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Tuesday: Agatha Christie, Three Act Tragedy

Wednesday: Camden Morgante, Recovering From Purity Culture

Thursday: C.S. Lewis, The Reading Life

Friday: Evan Friss, The Bookshop

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for April 13-19, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page