I’m pleased to report that Worcester, Massachusetts still has a friendly neighborhood bookstore.

Annie’s Book Stop, previously at 120 Stafford Street, has reopened its doors at 65 James Street in the James Street Shopping Plaza, near the Commerce Bank ATM, the Clayground pottery studio, the Green China restaurant, and the Clippers hair salon.

Their selection includes a sizable science fiction and fantasy section, as well as two full rooms of children’s books… both factors warranted to make me tickled pink. Annie’s carries new and used books and offers trade-in for store credit.

Their first in-store event is a talk and signing on Saturday, November 14th with Michael Bisceglia, a veteran New Hampshire educator and author of the novel ROOM 600.

Annie’s Book Stop has a LiveJournal at anniesbooks.livejournal.com and a Twitter account at www.twitter.com/anniesbooksworc. Their telephone number is 508-756-9836 and their hours are 11AM to 7PM Mondays through Fridays, 11AM to 5PM on Saturday, and 12Noon to 5PM on Sunday.

I’m very excited to have an independent bookstore in walking distance again.

—pmc2

I’ve been given a bit of a kickstart in digging this blog out of mothballs by Adam Lipkin. We had a brief exchange about reading several books at once, based on where we were at any given moment and what we were doing.

Here’s mine:

My “bathtub” book [what's the point of having a clawfoot tub in an old house if you can't read in it?]: TOM JONES by Henry Fielding. This was a “discard” from the local state library.

My “backpack” book: WAR OF THE WITCHES by Maite Carranza. Easily digestible on the bus while running errands.

My “porch” book: TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY by John Steinbeck. This is normally an annual ritual re-read in summer, after the completion of DANDELION WINE. 2009 has been anything but normal for me, and thus this has been moved to become an autumn indulgence.

My “bedside” books: An ARC of Kate DiCamillo’s THE MAGICIAN’S ELEPHANT, my BEA scores of INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY by Gary Frank and WATER WITCH by Deborah Leblanc, and the first EREC REX book by Kaza Kingsley.

I’m curious, Gentle Readers, if you [a] read several books at a time and [b] keep books stashed all over your living spaces.

—pmc2

I was never fortunate enough to meet Charles N. Brown, and now I’m sorry that I never will.

http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/07/charles-n-brown-1937-2009.html

LOCUS is a magazine that’s given me much pleasure since my college days. I am glad it will continue.

My thoughts are with his loved ones and friends.

—pmc2

I’m very glad to have made it to Readercon on Thursday night. If things here improve, I’d love to make this convention a regular item on my calendar.

* The evening started with dinner at The Burlington Mall with Mari Ness, whose short fiction works have appeared in Farrago’s Wainscot, The Edge of Propinquity, Fantasy Magazine, and Reflection’s Edge, among others. Michael and I hadn’t seen her for several years, so it was a grand reunion. She brought us what is to me an amazing treat from Florida… a Chocogator.

It’s chocolate! It’s an alligator! It’s a chocogator!

It both amused Michael and me and touched our hearts.

* After our meal, Michael, Crystal L. Woods, Mari and I made our way to the convention hotel. We quietly sneaked/snuck in to the last twenty minutes of Jennifer Pelland’s reading; her selection was “Ghosts of New York”, which properly chilled *my* blood.

* Once that reading broke up, we were able to say a quick hello to Inanna Arthen and to Trisha J. Wooldridge, with hopes of catching up with both later this summer.

* My intrepid little party of four then hung out for a brief span in one of the common areas near the ballrooms while we waited for our 9:30PM appointment. I saw Warren Lapine in passing, but did not get a chance to say hello, so this shout-out will have to do. I’m looking forward to getting my copy of REALMS OF FANTASY in the mail that I requested last month.

* We parted company with Mari at 9:30PM, and Michael, Crystal and I had a lovely sitdown with Jim Freund and Barbara Krasnoff in the gazebo on the hotel grounds. Our conversation dabbled mostly, if I may mix my metaphors, under the umbrella of my other “hat”… that of distributor of speculative fiction on audio and in print, rather than as a retailer of same, but nonetheless it was wonderful to get to meet these folks and gave me reason to scratch my head as to why our paths had not crossed earlier in my New York City days.

* After we parted company with Jim and Barbara, it was past 11PM and we three tired congoers attempted to go to the Goblin Fruit party. Unfortunately, the combination of the room crowds and my inability to keep standing, even with the Sexy Sleek Black Spy Cane, meant that we needed to call it a night.

**************************

All in all, Readercon-on-opening-night was a very nice experience for us, and a change from the usual day-to-day operations here. Again, based on my little “nibble”, I wouldn’t mind tasting the “full course” sometime, and I’d certainly like to add it to my regularly scheduled events in any given calendar year.

—pmc2

I will be at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts, tonight and tonight only.

If you see me sitting in one of the common areas, please stop by and say hello. I’m not always good with faces.

For the rest of you who will get to enjoy the full convention, have a great time!

—pmc2

I have survived BookExpo America – huzzah!  Let jubilation reign.

I am not yet back in Wormtown… I have a day or two more with my kindly hosts, Frank Raymond Michaels and his family.

This post comes to you from an elegantly appointed study full of books and musical instruments, with a beautiful cutwork-iron light fixture above me and an Andreas Vollenweider CD spinning its aural magic at my feet.

Today is about compiling my notes, sending follow-up e-mails, and enjoying some feline therapy.  There’s a coffee-and-cream lovebug cat, a dainty little cow-cat, and two elegant longhaired blackest-samite bookend cats.

I’m hoping you are all well, my Gentle Readers, and I am glad to be back among you.

I’m trying to pack two weeks’ worth of preparation into today, because I embark tomorrow at noon on my big trip to New York.

I’ve got meetings and lunches and coffee dates scheduled, and in between all of them I will get to indulge in three of my heart-held obsessions… books, trains, and time spent in The Only City In The World… the only one for me, at least.

I’ll be leaving the laptop behind, and the phone I’m bringing may or may not be able to Twitter, so chances are I’ll be keeping a paper journal on the trip and will transcribe it when I get home. That’s the delight of train travel.

Books, bookpeople, and bibliophilia. I am a lucky, lucky woman.

Be seeing you.

—pmc2

Now, THERE’S a loaded statement… “books are what the reader brings to them”. Even I, in my occasional self-absorption, don’t believe that entirely.

Books are *mostly* what the author brings to the reader. It’s the author’s words in print on paper or in pixels on a reading device or in soundwaves on recordings, after all, conveyed TO the reader… not the other way around… right?

I’ve had a few experiences lately, however, which tell me otherwise. And maybe I *am* being a little self-absorbed lately, but please indulge me a little longer, Gentle Readers, while I explore this.

==============================

A few months ago, an author colleague of mine was clearing out her library and gave me copies of RED DRAGON by Thomas Harris and NEVERWHERE by Neil Gaiman.

I had read RED DRAGON before… I had “been meaning to get around to” NEVERWHERE, but “getting around to it” hadn’t happened until KT dropped the books off at my dealer table at 3Pi-Con.

I re-read RED DRAGON last month. I’m reading NEVERWHERE now.

——————————-

I first read RED DRAGON during the first summer I lived away from home in 1982; I was doing a work-study at the college library & renting a porch room in a classmate’s apartment. It was a hot, lonely summer in the Bronx for the most part, punctuated by a few bright spots, but most of my memories of that summer revolve around lying on my couch-bed in my sunporch room, listening to city street noises over the whine of the oscillating fan and reading books.

The atmosphere of that time and place seeped into my subconsciousness so much that when I’ve tried to recall the 19-year-old I was, I remember every book I read that summer as being set in New York City.

Those who’ve read RED DRAGON know that only one chapter is set in New York City.

RED DRAGON when read in 1982 frightened the 19-year-old child I was then… a child living essentially alone [my roommate worked nights, so we seldom saw each other], on her own for the first time, all alone in The Big Bad City of eight million.

RED DRAGON when read in 2009 by a forty-something-year-old is a fascinating read, not a frightening one. It has a clever construct of dictating past events in the main character’s life to such a marked degree that the reader thinks that he or she is reading a sequel to a book he or she has already read… a book that doesn’t exist.

The reaction I took away when I finished RED DRAGON last month was satisfaction, not fear. I’m literally a different person than I was when I read it the first time, and thus it’s literally a different book, illustrating my point of “books are what the reader brings to them”.

——————————-

NEVERWHERE is a “new” book to me, although I’ve read quite a bit of Neil Gaiman’s other work – AMERICAN GODS, STARDUST, GOOD OMENS [yes, I know that's only half a Gaiman book], and most of his SANDMAN comics. I’m about two chapters into NEVERWHERE, and although I’m reading it in 2009, I’m already back, emotionally and mentally, to where I was in the early-to-mid-Nineties when it was written.

I remember other things I read back then, and it’s not terribly hard for me to imagine I’m curled up in bed in the townhouse on the cobblestone street where we lived. I expect to hear Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge and Enya and Enigma when I turn on the radio, and I look beside me as I turn the pages and am startled not to see or feel a white cat purring beside me.

Strange, isn’t it, how a book can make one feel.

Stranger yet is how one’s mind can influence the impact of a book.

—pmc2

A few of the highlights from my weekend…

SCENE ONE – Shrinkage is the sincerest form of flattery, sort of.

“I have the oddest thing to tell you”, I murmured to Annette Curtis Klause as she wandered past our dealer’s table at ConBust. “And I’m not sure whether you’ll be angered or pleased.”

Her sparkling eyes twinkled at me from behind her glasses as she awaited my next words.

“Your books are among the top 10 authors’ works shoplifted from the bookstores where I’ve been employed.”

Annette whooped with laughter. She agreed with me that, while neither of us can condone shoplifting, it says something that my shoplifters have excellent taste.

SCENE TWO – First there is a mallard, then no mallard, then there is.

Over on my personal journal, I had posted an amusing picture last night captioned “Duck, Batman, Duck!”, as a prelude to my report on ConBust 2009.

I reproduce that picture for you here, Gentle Readers, for your viewing pleasure.

The context of this photo is as follows…

Theo Black, of The Black Arts, was a guest at the convention, as was Holly Black. Theo seems to have developed a tradition of bringing bags of swag from his home and office to cons, and scattering the contents of his swag-bag throughout hallways and function rooms at those conventions. He made a point to gift my partner Michael and me a spinning light-up CD standee for our BLAKE’S 7 audio titles… a most useful device!

According to Theo, this “redistribution” practice occasionally causes consternation and befuddlement, but in this case it also caused merriment.

When the first stuffed duck appeared in Seelye Hall on Friday night, perched jauntily on a doorhandle, the Smith students and congoers wondered if this was an unannounced scavenger hunt. When I happened upon another stuffed duck later in the con, I mused aloud that it must be Schrodinger’s Duck.

This was seized upon over the weekend by several more congoers, and prompted an impromptu sing-along of “First there is a mallard, then no mallard, then there is”. I was most gratified to know that members of the Class of 2009 through the Class of 2012 were familiar with Donovan!

At the end of the con, two stuffed ducks and a diecast Batmobile remained behind. My partner and I brought them home and have “redistributed” them among friends who have needed a little brightening in their lives.

=====================================

Such little things, these tales, but such far-reaching effects to make the world a friendlier place.

—pmc2

This is cross-posted from my personal journal and from the Mike’s Comics blog. Just a reminder that we DO sell books, despite what seems to be a proliferation of toy posts and audio adventures posts! See the sidebar at the LiveJournal version of Bookseller By Night for some of the kinds of books we carry. And, most importantly, WE TAKE SPECIAL ORDERS. We looooooooooooooove special orders. If Amazon can get it, we can get it, and we’ll match or beat their price whenever possible. Support your independent bookseller!

Anyway, here’s the blurb. If you can, please come to the convention and say “Hello!”

Mike’s Comics will have dealer tables at ConBust 2009 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, this coming weekend. This means that we will have limited availability for phone orders, but we expect to have e-mail access to answer your questions and reply to your want lists.

—Michael and Patty
Mike’s Comics
http://www.mikescomics.com

And thank YOU, Gentle Readers, for passing this along.

—pmc2