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The Weekly Wrap: April 26-May 2

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The Weekly Wrap: April 26-May 2

New Bookstores

“Independent Bookstore Day: Bookshop.org founder on how small retailers are taking on Amazon.” This Fast Company notes that since 2020, the number of members in the American Booksellers Association has grown from1,900 to 3,200.

I think there is something to this. Two nearby communities that have never had bookstores in my memory will have three bookstores by this summer. Escape Into Fiction opened in Powell, Ohio last fall. This summer two bookstores open just down the street from each other in downtown Worthington. Celestielle is scheduled to open May 22 and focuses on fantasy and romance. Then in July, The Whispering Page is scheduled to open, stocking new books of all genres and hosting used book swaps. Their Instagram page also advertises a cafe and bar.

Will they survive? That’s anyone’s guess. But it excites me that there are entrepreneurs who see this a good time to make a go of it. Increasingly, there is a conviction that the big online behemoth is not invincible. Bookshop.org has provided an online alternative to that behemoth that supports Indie stores, and, according to the Fast Company article, have already channeled $47 million to Indie stores.

What delights me about these stores they help to turn the town centers of these communities into more interesting places. And they are filling empty storefronts. They hark back to the time when we’d walk downtown rather than pile into a car to go to the mall. There is a movement of people are going analog and craving interaction with real people.

To me, all this seems a good thing.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Sometimes my “five articles” cluster around a theme. This week, they were just a potpourri of things that caught my attention.

Plough is one of my favorite sources of good writing. This week they posted “When Kierkegaard Got Cancelled.” It’s a fascinating study of how Kierkegaard responded to the attacks and cancelling he encountered.

I was disappointed several years when my one chance to see Bob Seger in concert was lost when he had health issues. He was one of my rock legends, representing the gritty rock of middle America. “The Lost Idealism of Heartland Rock” reviews “Won’t Back Down by Erin Osmon, which traces the progressive strain in artists like Seger, Tom Petty, and John Mellencamp.

Both the change from local businesses to big shopping centers and many of our rock songs assumed the ubiquitous presence of the automobile. “Life After Cars?” reviews a book by the same name that explores what a post-automobile landscape might be like.

His novel Lázár, has been on the German best seller lists for 29 weeks. It’s been compared to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. And he is 22 years old. “A Very Old-Fashioned Novel Has Made a Star Out of a Very Young Writer” features the life and work of Nelio Biedermann.

Finally, one of the most prolific American diarists of the nineteenth century was George Templeton Strong. For example, he wrote four million words between 1835 and 1875. His diaries capture what life in New York was like during the Civil War. “Inside a Four-Million-Word Diary of 1860s New York” profiles Strong as well as offers resources if you want to read more of him.

Quote of the Week

In recent years I’ve become something of an advocate for poetry, even daring to read some on my Facebook page. Yusef Komunyakaa, who was born on April 29, 1947, captures something of the essence of the work of poets:

“Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.”

You can read more about his life at the Poetry Foundation.

Miscellaneous Musings

After thirteen years, I made a small tweak to the tagline on my web page, which was “Thoughts about books, reading, and life.” It now reads “Thoughts from a human on books, reading, and life.” Because it is increasingly common to get reviews from AI (which I think sometimes uses reviews I write!). I felt it time to affirm that the reviews on this page are 100 percent human written, based on the reading of whole books by a 100 percent human. Whether that’s better than AI, I’ll leave up to you.

I am an Inklings fan. But Leslie Baynes Interpretation and Imagination reveals that Lewis made scholarly mistakes like the rest of us. He trusted his memory too much when citing others and sometimes misread those he was critiquing. It seems that particularly when he engaged biblical criticism, he was prone to errors stemming from his lack of expertise and background in the field.

Reading Louis Markos’ From Aristotle to Christ challenged me that I had never read Aristotle. He recommended a basic edition, which should be arriving in a few days. Just another example of how reading one book leads to others!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars

Tuesday: Steven Garber, Hints of Hope

Wednesday: Betony Coons, The Unwinding Path

Thursday: Louis Markos, From Aristotle to Christ

Friday: Jane Austen, Emma

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap  for April 26-May 2.

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

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Cars

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1961 Ford Galaxie from Ford ad

1961 Ford Galaxie from Ford ad

Dad let me go with him when he went to Baglier Ford to trade in his old Dodge for a sleek, dark blue 1961 Ford Galaxie. I remember the new car smell, the gleam of all that chrome, the front grille with low and high beam headlights side by side, the big round rear tailights and the hint of tailfins!

I think that was the day I fell in love with cars. That same year, my grandfather bought a 1961 Chevy Impala. I took lots of trips with my grandparents in that car. And the Ford-Chevy rivalry ran through our family. When I’d go for rides, I’d count Fords and Chevys. Chevys usually won.

That was the era of slot car race tracks. I had a big layout in my basement and everything from Ferraris to Buick Rivieras in my collection of cars. Later on, I would use some of the money I made cutting grass and delivering papers to go down to the Mahoning Pharmacy to buy the latest issue of Hot Rod or Road & Track. When I would walk to West Junior High, I would try to identify every car by year, make, and model. I was always on the lookout each fall to see examples of the new models.

1967 Pontiac Bonneville"BonnevilleLookRiverbendNOLA" by Infrogmation of New Orleans - Photo by Infrogmation. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

1967 Pontiac Bonneville – Photo by Infrogmation. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1967 my brother brought home a black 2 door Pontiac Bonneville coupe. It was the new definition of sleek with a sweeping roofline, stacked headlights and a 400 cubic inch V-8. I believe this was one of the cars styled by John DeLorean while he was still with GM. It came equipped with an 8-track tape deck and I couldn’t believe what Jefferson Airplane sounded like as Grace Slick sang “Want Somebody to Love.”

Not too long after, my dad bought a 67 Ford Galaxie — it also had that sweeping roofline and stacked headlights but was not quite as stylish. That was the car I learned to drive in and the car I was driving the first time I took out the girl who became my wife. I was working my way through and paying for college so borrowing the family car was the way we made ends meet.

1967 Ford Galaxie 500 By JohnBgon (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

1967 Ford Galaxie 500 By JohnBgon (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Youngstown is a car town. For years the steel manufactured in our mills supplied the auto industry. Then the auto industry came to town when GM opened a plant at nearby Lordstown in 1966 that became a new source of labor jobs and also a case study of labor troubles. Somehow, through all the ups and downs of the auto industry, GM has kept this plant open and it currently manufactures the Chevy Cruze.

I never owned a muscle car or a hot rod, despite my love affair with cars. But its funny how I still connect cars to different seasons of life. There was the Volvo I had my first year out of college that taught me about all the things that could go wrong with a car. Then there was the 77 Plymouth Volare’ (at least it had that sleek roofline like my brother’s Bonneville). That was the car we took on our honeymoon and later nicknamed the Plymouth Ruster. I associate our years in Cleveland with the silver Chevy Malibu that we bought second hand and ended up getting $1500 back from the state because the folks we bought it from had tampered with odometers. It was a good car we had for five years and ended up costing us just $1000.

Most of our time in Columbus was defined by Ford Taurus station wagons, the second of which we had for 17 years. That was the one my son learned to drive on. Now as empty nesters, we drive a Subaru Outback–good for hauling and the snowy winters we’ve had of late. It’s funny the things we associate with the times of our lives.

Are there cars you particularly remember or connect with a particular time of your life?

Want to read other posts in the Growing Up in Youngstown series? Just go to the “Growing Up in Youngstown” category on my homepage.

 

They Don’t Make ’em Like They Used To!

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This was the candid admission of the appliance salesman who was selling us a new refrigerator because our less than eight year old one had died and would have been too expensive to repair. We both went on to reminisce about appliances either we or our parents had owned that lasted twenty, thirty years or longer. What is troubling in all this is that all the new appliances tout their energy saving features. What they don’t talk about is the cost of manufacturing, shipping, delivering the new appliance and the costs of removal and hopefully re-cycling the old one. We discovered that our electric utility would re-cycle the old one and pay us $50 if it worked! That left us out. Truth is, the new refrigerator isn’t any more energy efficient than the old one, which we would have kept using if it worked!

As it happened, we’ve been in the market for a newer car to replace our 17 1/2 year old Ford Taurus station wagon. And we found one on a local dealership’s website the same afternoon that was exactly what we were looking for–a 2008 Subaru. Friends of ours speak of having Subarus for 20 years or longer. We’d never had a car as long as the Taurus, and it WAS running when we traded it in.

Seems kind of odd in a way that a refrigerator that does nothing but sit there and cool lasts only half as long as an auto exposed to all kinds of temperature and road conditions, shocks, physical stresses and use.  Interesting as well that the A/C compressor on the car still worked after all this when the one in the fridge didn’t.

This seems to be nothing but an effort of the appliance industry to manufacture on the cheap.  Various sources I looked at said compressors these days fail in as little as three years, generally the range is eight to seventeen. That is the key refrigerator component and one that in the past would last 20-30 years or more.

Since this is a book blog, one thing I will observe is that well-made books on acid free paper stored properly can last hundreds of years.  I have a set of books from my mother that are nearly 100 years old.  True, some books are made cheaply but I have sci-fi paperbacks from my youth that are still readable nearly 40 years later.  Maybe this is one of the reasons for my love of books.  Some are old friends I can go back to years later and remember the pleasures of reading them many years before.  Not something I can do with any refrigerator or car I’ve owned!