The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (29 page)

Yeah, our senses of humor aren’t very sophisticated.

Staff Picks is a nod to the awareness that people like to visit bookstores because someone will suggest things for them to read. Do you think Amazon and
Half.com
would be so aggressively making suggestions “just for you,” or that Facebook would analyze your posts and fill the side of your screen with little pop-up promos if people didn’t like such recommendations?

Getting to recommend books to people is one of the most rewarding parts of running a bookshop, but it’s also a bit tricky. The timing has to be good; as I said before, someone in the middle of a story about their recent family loss doesn’t need to be struck upside the head with a sales pitch. We don’t suggest
Old Yeller
to a customer talking about her dog’s death. There are basic tenets of human decency (and common sense) that all retailers must follow.

One evening pretty close to closing time, a woman entered our shop and stopped just inside the door. I didn’t recognize her as a repeat customer, so I asked if she needed any help acclimating to where things were.

Her eyes remained stuck on the books in Staff Picks as she said, “No, I think this will be fine.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, since she had nothing in her hands, and the woman shook herself and turned to me.

“You close in fifteen minutes, according to your sign out front. I am in town with my husband; he’s spending the weekend doing some contract work for the town. I will spend the next two days holed up in a hotel room, and I must have something to read or I’ll go crazy. Who chose these books?” Her hand indicated the Staff Picks.

“Mostly me,” I said, “although my husband may have chosen one or two.”

The woman moved to our table and sat down. Extracting a twenty from her purse, she held it out to me. “Find me something to read this weekend,” she said. “I’m in a historic novel frame of mind.”

As I stared at the twenty, the woman’s imperious expression relaxed into a smile. “Four of my all-time favorite books are in your Staff Picks,” she said. “If you like it, I’ll like it. Now get cracking; you close in twelve minutes.”

It is fun to introduce other people to what you like. So, a book about running a bookstore simply must contain a Top Ten List of the author’s favorites. And since I’m a fan of Christopher Guest films, my list goes to eleven.

Here, in pure self-indulgence and alphabetical order, is my own list of books I love to recommend to people who enjoy reading—along with my even more self-indulgent stories of what miles they marked on my personal journey. Like any bibliophile, I will talk about these titles anytime, anywhere, with anyone—and like any bookstore owner, I rarely get to with customers. So consider yourself trapped, get a cup of tea, and enjoy.

Charlotte’s Web

E. B. White wrote what is arguably the greatest opening sentence in literature:
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
C’mon, admit it, you’re hooked from that moment forward. A literate spider, a frightened pig, a little girl helping generations of young’uns come to terms with life’s cruelties: magic happens. You learn to cry over the written page when you’re seven, and you never stop.

Storyteller and children’s author Carmen Deedy tells a personal tale about being a slow reader as a child, and how the first book she ever checked out of a library (
Charlotte’s Web
) took three renewals to finish. “Finally, I marched back to the children’s desk in a flood of tears and said, ‘This is the saddest I’ve ever felt in my whole life! It’s horrible! How can books do this to you? Give me another one!’ And those words sealed my fate. I became a reader for life.” Don’t you know just how she feels?

Web
wasn’t the first book I ever checked out of a library; that was
The Snowy Day
by Ezra Jack Keats, when I was three. My dad taught both my sister and me to read as preschoolers; he filled a paint bucket (hopefully scrubbed clean of toxins) with plastic letters. “Pull out W,” he’d say, and I’d grasp this red spiky thing bigger than my hand and haul it into meaning. Letters formed words, words formed ideas, ideas formed stories, stories formed lives. As with generations of little girls and boys before me,
Charlotte’s Web
was my earliest introduction to the reality that not all stories end happily, or fit neatly into a cozy world. It hurt, and it sealed my fate.

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads,
Volumes 1–5

Before writing, singing moved information—truth, spin, dogma, lies, and funny things that happened at the castle. Frances James Child published a collection of his favorite ballads in the late 1800s; as my Scots husband points out, they are mostly Scottish even though England enjoys equal titular credit. (He’s not a nationalist, just has his moments.) The poetic expressions found in these outpourings of human spirit remind us what’s best and worst about ourselves.

One of the things I love about this collection is how it proves that there is so little new under the sun. The common themes of literature—love gone wrong, family dynamics, the wistful longing for a better life—are alive and well in ancient snapshots of what people wanted to hear then. It’s still what we want to hear now: who loves whom; who killed whom and why; who overreached himself and fell down; who outran her humble beginnings to make good. In “Twa Sisters,” sibling rivalry for a boy’s love dooms them all; “Long Lankin,” about the murder of a highborn baby, evokes stomach-churning disgust even as it asks some harsh questions about haves and have-nots; the upbeat “Comfort for the Comfortless” gives scorned lovers a new outlook. One of the world’s first paranormal romances, “House Carpenter,” still raises goose bumps on my skin when the fate of the doomed faithless wife and her not-who-he-appears lover is sung:

“Oh what are those hills, yon high, high hills,

With flowers as white as snow”

“Those are the hills of heaven, my love

That you and I will never know.”

Then twice around went the gallant ship

I’m sure it was not three

His hoof broke that shining ship in half

And they sank to the bottom of the sea

Their archaic language makes the enduring quality of their themes stand out even more. These ballads are beautiful, creepy, stark, strong, and timeless.

The Grapes of Wrath

Pushing his literary lens in for close-ups of one family, then pulling back to explore a generation’s terrible luck, John Steinbeck made people think. He made even those tucked up safe in warm houses seventy years later feel the fear and betrayal of being turned out from them. And he did it with such beautiful, beautiful language.

I read
Wrath
for the first time in high school. Up to then, I’d read classics when they were assigned, but everything else in the library like a voracious little vacuum cleaner. My reasoning was simple; adults were weird, so if they were pushing something, it probably wasn’t nearly as good as the stuff they dismissed as “junk.” I devoured Madeleine L’Engle, Paula Danziger,
Summer of My German Soldier,
and a whole bunch of lit lite for kids, but plowed my way through
The Scarlet Letter
with martyred sighs and CliffsNotes. Then Mr. Beekman, our eleventh-grade advanced placement American literature teacher, assigned
The Grapes of Wrath.

The class was a survey starting with the 1600s, but for some reason, probably availability, I checked Steinbeck out of the library first. Finish and cross it off, then blast through the other titles so I could get back to reading the good stuff: that was the plan.

Do you remember high school, where social strata affect your life every day and the strong rule while the weak try to fly below the radar? And do you remember what
The Grapes of Wrath
is about? Talk about context creating meaning; this book, an adult treatise of the haves and have-nots caught in the unfairness of economics, takes on a different significance to a high schooler whose understanding of injustice is that pretty girls get asked to dance before sweet ones do.
Wrath
was a wake-up call with instant empathy; we all knew what “wrong” felt like, but had never seen it on such a large scale. There were worse things than what was happening to us, happening in the world, every day. That simple lesson some kids learn by the time they’re five, sheltered old me discovered in high school. For the first time, the big picture formed in which small players moved, each having to make individual choices, even if there weren’t any good ones.

At that age, injustices look easily changeable; if the adults only knew how silly they were acting, they’d stop. It was our duty, when we grew up, to act more sensibly and end this silly unfair nonsense. Anne Frank wrote something very similar in her diary, some forty years before Steinbeck expanded my sight line.

When I finished
Wrath,
I understood three new ideas: America, let alone the world, was bigger than I’d ever imagined, but still looked a lot like high school; there were other people who thought things should be fairer than they were, and I could join them in working to make life that way; and classic literature was awesome. Awesome in the classic sense: awe-inspiring and awful. Good-bye, teen pop lit, hello, Hemingway, Miller, even Chaucer and Voltaire once I got used to the language. What a wonderful, horrible, ambiguous world!

The Grapes of Wrath
marked the end of childhood and the beginning of a lifelong passion I couldn’t even put a name to then, although its slickest moniker has become “social justice.” I thank Mr. Beekman (the lit teacher) for introducing me to it. But this story has a coda, because the book—or rather, the play—hit me again some twenty years later. A call went out from the theater department at a nearby college: volunteer musicians were sought for a production of
The Grapes of Wrath
to be staged during the fall term. A customer who knew our musical background brought it to my attention, and I raced to Jack with the flyer in my hand.

“This book changed my life! We have to do this!” I babbled, then fired an e-mail off to the theater faculty. That’s how we met Dr. Gary Crum, executive director of an organization that recruited medical professionals to underserved areas (to wit, where we live). He played concertina, banjo, and harmonica, and also responded to the e-mail. Gary, Jack, and I had a blast creating the music for
Wrath
, in large part because Michael, Michael, and Ben, the faculty members running the show, gave us a free hand to embed folk music throughout the production. It wasn’t a musical; we just aided with mood and ambiance, plus scene openings and closings. It seemed like neo-heaven.

Michael is an unusually nurturing director, one who sees his job as getting the kids to understand more than to act. Most of them were just a couple of years older than I’d been when
Wrath
interrupted my cozy little life; watching them figure some things out as practices progressed rekindled hope that the next generation might make a few more changes than mine had managed. And on opening night, when Gary, Jack, and I stood up to sing, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore,” twenty years of meekness, patience, and anger turned our voices into melodic steel. The theater students didn’t so much perform as explode; they knew what the play was about. A student in the audience said later, “I cried four times. Y’all just changed my life.”

I hope so, kid. For all of us, I hope so.

Green Shadows, White Whale

Actually, almost any collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories would be among my favorites. In short spurts of fiction interspersed with essays and bits of memoir,
Shadows
details Bradbury’s career as a young screenwriter working on
Moby Dick
under the dubious care of legendary director John Huston. Bradbury has the most interesting way of revealing meaning by obscuring it; his characters wrap three times around human nature, but just as you believe yourself lost in a maze of descriptive symbolism, the angel choir sings and lights you home. Baby, could this guy write. And he mostly mined his own life.

Although it would be hard to choose a favorite of all Bradbury’s stories, one stands out as a recurring theme in my life, its warning subtle yet clear. Bradbury wrote about a man (but it was him, on assignment with Huston) being in Dublin and hearing a street beggar playing her harp on one of the three famous bridges. He gave her money and complimented her incredible playing—and nearly wrecked everything, because he made her aware of what she was doing. Her fingers fumbled, she lost her nonchalant confidence, and it wasn’t until he fled in horror at what he’d done that she regained a deft, unexamined touch. Bradbury learned then not to ask too many questions, a lesson that threads through his beautiful, bizarre story collections.

Sometimes people talk to writers and storytellers about “talent” and “charisma” and “learning the craft.” Humans have always wanted to find the line, to bottle (and then sell) the difference between that little magic spark and a lot of bloody hard work to master an art form. I’m all for anyone learning new skills, and as Edison once said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it arrives dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Still, with those caveats in mind, perhaps it doesn’t do to lean too far over when peering into the deep well of creativity. One of the muses might sneak up from behind and push you headlong down the shaft.

Homeland

Rosina Lippi (this little paperback’s author) may not think the following anecdote cute, but I picked up a dog-eared copy of her work for ten pence at a library sale in Britain one day, on the basis that the cover looked interesting. If I didn’t like it, it could go to the used book store in Milnathort and nary a word needed to be said about my extravagance. I curled up in an armchair and opened the book that weekend, when Jack was out for the day with a friend.