Tuesday Thingers (hosted at The Boston Bibliophile)

A similar question was asked in a recent Booking Through Thursday, and I said:

(E)ven if Amazon.com disappeared overnight, I think there would still be other online booksellers to step in, and despite rumors of poor health,there still seem to be plenty of bricks-and-mortar (or stucco, or wood…you get the idea, some building material) bookstores around.Granted, many of them are chains like Borders or Barnes & Noble, but chain bookstores these days offer much more than the ones I remember from shopping malls when I was younger.

As it is, I live in a one-bookstore town – granted, it is a Borders, but that’s one of my biggest complaints about where I live -but if something happened to that bookstore, there are others within reasonable driving distance. While I do shop for books online when I know exactly what I want, it’s not the same experience as the physical wandering, discovery, and leafing through pages that happens in a bookstore itself, when I go in not looking for anything in particular and leave with four or five new additions to TBR purgatory.

Borders has been my favorite bookstore for over ten years now, regardless of where I’ve lived. I find browsing there a very pleasant experience, and I rarely leave empty-handed. Since I live ten minutes from the store in my town, it’s also very convenient to get to.I probably stop in at least once a month, and usually more than that. I didn’t have the local store marked as a “favorite” in Library Thing, but I took care of that before I wrote up this post; I haven’t really made much use of the LT Local options, but I think I’m going to start.However, when I need a specific book and want to find it quickly, I go straight to Amazon.com, where I get free two-day shipping as an Amazon Prime member.

The Los Angeles area has seen the demise of several long-established local bookstores during the last year or so, and none of them were very close to where I live. I’ve been intrigued by Vroman’s Bookstore when I’ve visited their booth at the Festival of Books,but since I don’t often get to Pasadena, I’ve never actually been to the store itself – and other than the Festival, I really don’t go to many local literary events.

Teaser Tuesday (hosted at Should Be Reading)

• Grab your current read
• Let the book fall open to a random page
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. NO SPOILERS!
• Share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Leave a link to the blog post where you’ve shared your “Teaser“ in the comments to the week’s TUESDAY TEASER post at Should Be Reading. If you don’t have a blog, share the teaser in a comment on that week’s “Teaser” post.

Two new books have found their way into my house this week, thanks to a drop-in at Barnes & Noble last weekend; both are books I learned about from folks on my books blogroll.

“Well,there’s a shortage of boys with the war,” she said, picking up her cup. She continued to sit forward, her knees angled toward his.
– Keeping the House, by Ellen Baker

At birthing class, I once heard the Giraffe say to Julia Child, “It’s time to get this thing out!” as if it were some kind of frozen ham that’d been stuffed down her shirt. I was not one of those women.
– The Bright Side of Disaster, by Katherine Center

Booking Through Thursday: Gold Medal Reading

• Do you or have you ever read books about the Olympics? About sports in general?
• Fictional ones? Or non-fiction? Or both?

• Do you consider yourself a sports fan?
• Because, of course, if you’re a rabid fan and read about sports constantly, there’s a logic there; if you hate sports and never read anything sports-related, that, too … but you don’t have to love sports to enjoy a good sports story.
• (Or a good sports movie, for that matter. Feel free to expand this into a discussion about “Friday Night Lights” or “The Natural” or whatever…)

Part One: I don’t recall that I’ve ever read any books specifically about the Olympics. As an aside, though, I’ve been to the Olympics – the Centennial Games in Atlanta, in 1996. My(now-ex-)husband has family in the city, so we had a (free) place to stay, and we went to some of the lower-profile, less-expensive events -namely four days of volleyball and one water-polo match – but it was an exciting and memorable experience all the same. Even so, not that you asked, I’ve watched very little of this year’s Olympics on TV; too many other things going on, and I actually think the events of the Winter Games are better viewing anyway.

I don’t really seek out sports-related reading, generally. I did enjoy Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter, however, although I thought its sequel Independence Day was better. But better than either one was the true story that was so fascinating and well-written that I almost forgot it was about sports at all, let alone a sport that doesn’t interest me even on the first Saturday in May: Seabiscuit: An American Legend,by Laura Hillenbrand. I’ve never even liked horses all that much, but I can’t recommend the book highly enough. (Don’t knock yourself out to see the movie, though.)

Part Two: I raised a sports fan (you can read about how he got that way in this May ’08 post from his blog),but I don’t really share his obsessions. I like baseball, but that’s pretty much where it starts and stops for me. I might be more interested if I had a shred of athletic ability, but that is not the case; the so-called “sports” I tend to participate in are things like bowling and mini golf, and sometimes the occasional bobbing-around-the-pool that can only be very loosely described as swimming.

Sports do offer an excellent,inherently dramatic framework on which to hang a story, but I generally prefer to see that story at the movies or on TV rather than read it. I think that these stories work better visually, and I’ve enjoyed quite a few of them, even ones about sports I don’t like at all, like Rocky. That reminds me – I haven’t watched Field of Dreams for quite awhile, which is a perfect meeting of both a movie and a sport that I love.

Friday Fill-Ins #85 (hosted by Janet)

1. The last meal I had at a restaurant was at Marie Callender’s on Wednesday night – I got the Quiche and Salad Sampler.

2. Seriously underestimating how long it will take to do something, and then having to rush is something I intensely dislike.

3. The full moon looks so beautiful over the ocean.

4. “Y’all come back and see us” is one of my favorite local expressions (from back in Tennessee. Southern California isn’t really known for colorful local expressions – eventually, they all get written into scripts and the whole country ends up using them).

5. Sometimes it’s best to just cut your losses and move on.

6. Iron Man is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year! (But I suspect Janet is hoping everyone will say The Dark Knight for this one :-).)

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to having the work week over with, tomorrow my plans include back-to-school shopping for the kids and Sunday, I want to be done with back-to-school shopping for the kids!

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