Serenity Prayer for Overwhelmed Book People
Fess up. I can’t be alone. It’s just too much sometimes, isn’t it?
Because I must be informed, and it all looks so important, I subscribe to email updates from Digital Book World, Hubspot, assorted LinkedIn conversations and the TechRepublic along with PublishersMarketplace, the Observer’s book column and the requisite NYT book& other news, along with ten or twenty other feeds. It doesn’t matter whether the source is techno or literary–most of them make me feel like I jumped on the wrong bus–or, more accurately, like I was sitting on the right bus but the driver sneakily changed the route, so all of us folks happily chatting away in the back didn’t even notice we were on the wrong street.
Read MoreA World Without Borders
A lifetime ago, on a lovely fall afternoon as I sat, ostensibly studying, beneath a big shady tree with my college beau David on the University of Michigan Diag, a perfectly puppy-looking puppy bounded up to greet us. This brown bundle of adorable was trailed by a sad young couple, one member carrying a large bag of Puppy Chow, and the other a tiny leash and collar.
“We thought our landlord allowed dogs,” they explained. Neither David nor I had ever owned a dog, but we were smitten. We agreed to take the dog on an “experimental” basis and we held tight to the couple’s phone number, just in case, but we knew we would keep him. He had chosen us under that tree, and we couldn’t let him down.
He also wasn’t trained. At all.
So we didn’t walk straight home with the pup. Before he even had a name, we walked (the puppy trotted) into the one and only Borders’ bookshop on State Street, headed to the back of the store and up the stairs, and picked out and purchased a few key books on puppy training before heading home to face the roommates.
Step One: puppy. Step Two: bookstore.
These sweet memories come back to me now in the wake of the news of the Borders’ Group bankruptcy.
Read More