On Books-Confessions of a Bookstore Snob Part 1: The Everything-to-Everyone Bookstore.

When I was a child, my family was struggling financially, as any young family would be. We lived in Taiwan and my parents learned to live frugally. I had my share of toys as I was growing up, not as much as some other kids but I never felt the sting of not having things. My parents were always up front saying no when I asked for things that were beyond the family budget.

Yet the one thing that I could ask for and was never denied is books. My dad was a connoisseur of the used book stands in Taipei, he was well known amongst the stall owners. At that time, Taiwan had not started honoring the international copyright laws, so pirated editions of English language books filled the book stalls. He was particularly keen on acquiring inexpensive pirated editions of English language textbooks in mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering. We always spent Saturday afternoons together, our bonding time, and time for my mom to take a break from me, the only child. We would stroll up and down the stalls of books that populated a specific section of the marketplace in Taipei where all the booksellers congregated, taking our time browsing for treasured finds. Even though I did not know how to read at that time, I enjoyed that time immensely, partly because I spent time with my dad, who worked 8-5 every weekday and half a day on Saturday. This was the germination of my book habit.

Our ritual did not stop when we moved to Honduras. We would often go to the only English language bookstore in Tegucigalpa and spend time going through the store carefully. I was preoccupied with the comics: Archie, Classics Illustrated, Peanuts, Doonesbury, etc. When we moved to Colorado, I had a yen for my own books and I would often buy books with my allowance; of course if I didn’t have enough money to feed my habit, I would always ask, and I would get what I wanted most of the time.

Some might ask at this point: why not take advantage of the libraries? This is where part of the snobbery comes into play. The school libraries were fine, the public libraries were fine, but I had a problem with reading on a schedule, I wanted to read on my schedule, having to renew my books every two weeks was an annoyance that rankled. One can say that this is part of having privilege.

On a subconscious level, this could be my nascent attempts to attain Umberto Eco’s anti-library: a large collection of references at my fingertips so that I can look up pertinent knowledge as the fancy tickled me, my own personal Google, before there was a Google. I did use the library as I progressed through my schooling, doing research for various papers that was assigned to me and often researching topics that were then unknown to me, but I accrued my own library according to my interests through the years.

As I made my way through college and gradual school, my reading interest became much more catholic and the depths of my desire for reading material grew. As an engineering gradual student, I was always on the lookout for technical books. I did not, however, limit my purchases to just technical books. I went through various reading phases: a personal feeling of inadequacy regarding my lack of grounding in literature drove me to read the books on the New York Times fiction best sellers list; my own ego, presumptuousness, and arrogance drove me to buy books that I thought I should be reading as a member of the intelligentsia; and my exaggerated pretensions of grandiosity drove me to buy books that I perceived society expected me to read. I have since given up most of those impulses because of all the less than satisfying books that I had waded through. Now I read whatever piques my interest.

My expertise in bookstores, if you can call it that, came from my experience frequenting bookstores in my life. I frequented bookstores where I lived and in towns where my travels had taken me. In my later professional life, I was afforded the perk of travelling around the country for work, so I always planned some free time to visit bookstores in whichever city I happened to be. I would map out the bookstores in an unfamiliar city ahead of arriving so that I did not waste any time trying to figure out the lay of the land. I consulted the internet, as well as fellow travelers in this bookstore barnstorming adventures. My Bookstores (Rice 2012) is an invaluable book that I read repeatedly, hoping that one day I could hit all the stores listed. I am not even close to completing that bucket list.

I call the chain big box store for books the everything-to-everyone bookstores, some are more successful at their raison d’etre than others. They reside in strip malls or large commercial spaces, vying for space with the boutiques and the shoe stores. They serve people who are looking for a quick escape from the shopping routine of their spouses or as a convenience store for the generic literary needs. These bookstores have massive sections set aside for stationary supplies, journals, greeting cards, wrapping papers, and various other literary accoutrements.  The book selection at these book megamarts are rarely inspired, they sell what they think the  general public wants to buy. The store employees have very little say in the selection, most of the stock comes from a general warehouse that is filled titles determined by corporate buyers. Understandably, books that reflect the regional preferences or character are nonexistent.

B. Dalton’s was the chain that I grew up with because there was one of those in the mall close to where I lived. The mall is also strategically placed between our house and the high school I attended; an after-school outing to B. Dalton’s was often added on to my trip home. It holds the distinction of existing as a contradictory space and time: having a massive selection in stock and yet never having anything that is unique nor breathtaking, strong on the Harlequin romances and inspirational books that appealed to the suburban readers, but not to any other possible clientele. Their stocks are chock full of books that other bookstores also carry and rarely, if ever did they have something that was unique or distinctive. These same stocks will inevitably end up on the discount tables at the local  big box stores after sitting unsold for months if not years at B. Daltons. I was, however, both shocked and amazed that I found Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian there. First, I never thought that they would even consider stocking a title like this; second, I didn’t think anyone in the small suburb of Denver, outside of yours truly, would look for a title like that; third, I didn’t think the local clergy in the small suburb of Denver would allow such a title, maybe they didn’t know or perhaps there was a rebel book buyer throwing his weight around. Truth be told, I single handedly helped keep stores like that in business during my high school years.

There are also the two giants that co-existed for a long time: Borders and Barnes and Nobles. Border’s started out life in the college town of Ann Arbor, MI, I visited the mothership many times and it was very impressive. The selection is sometimes eclectic as well as being all things to all people, a difficult feat to accomplish. The vibe was very much of a cool college town bookstore, where the students aspiring to be the cool kids congregated to learn how to act as the future bookstore dwelling hipsters and to develop their look of faux gravitas. Of course, these same people  will mostly eschew poor Border’s when they become gradual students and congregate at the local independent bookstores. They will then knowledgeably disparage the likes of Border’s.

Border’s also was the first chain store that was dawdler friendly, having a reasonable coffee shop with agreeable pastries and selling Seattle’s Best coffee. I quite enjoyed it, even though Starbuck’s bought them out. Although I can never forgive Border’s for destroying my favorite independent bookstore in St. Louis.

Barnes and Nobles (B&N) is still alive today, even after Amazon had destroyed most of the brick and mortar bookstores around the country, like Border’s. Their resilience does say something about them; persistence is admirable. B&N has always been the staid, teetotaling stick-in-the-mud relative kind of bookstore. This chain was never interested in providing the reading junkies with their fix of ample choice, or inspiring the light reading clientele to read more interesting and challenging books, they were very happy to be as bland and uninteresting as possible so that they do not threaten the status quo. The layout and décor of the neighborhood B&N gave off the unwelcoming vibe to me, I rarely spend much time there to browse. One trip through the aisles told me most of what I wanted to know. They usually have a coffee shop, many times they are Starbuck’s. I will dawdle there over overpriced coffee and pastry while I plowed through a sack of books that I bring into the place; with headphones on, because their muzak are as generic as their book selection, as I focused on enjoying my reading experience despite my location.

Here Dayton, there is a bookstore named Books & Co, it is a chain, but a chain that was unfamiliar to me. It is housed in a large and impressive looking building in a shopping center that was deliberately designed to look like a charming European village with all the standard cliches filling up the “village”. I was hopeful when I moved to town and learned of its presence. I was sorely disappointed. This is a bookstore that had all the potential of a great bookstore, but mostly disappoints. The store is huge but filled with books that is available anywhere and everywhere else, there was no distinguishing character ethos to the bookstore. Their religious book section exceptionally large and full of different titles. My thinking here is that if they can put forth a more than pedestrian effort on one section of the bookstore, why not put forth a similar effort to building a few of the other genres? They instead filled their massive space with more calendars that they can ever sell, discount books that are discount books for a self-evident reason, and once again, average generic books that the average generic corporate book buyers believe the average generic readers will throw their money at.

Waterstones is the British equivalent of B&N, except they are a bit better in my opinion, perhaps I succumbed to my Anglophilic tendencies, or it might be that I was in the UK whenever I visited a Waterstones, which made me that much more agreeable. There is something to be said about the feel of a Waterstones that clearly made them salient in my mind, a sense of calm amidst the hustle bustle of the British streets. Even their bookstalls in airports are very inviting and gives the traveler an oasis in the sensory overload that is the average airport. Perhaps it was because I saw books that I had not seen nor was I acquainted with filling the front tables of the Waterstones, but I was always suitably impressed. Rest assured however, that I was not blinded to the fact that Waterstone’s was more similar to B&N and Border’s than it was to my favorite independents, it was just that the vibe in Waterstone’s was distinctly British and not American, and that difference attracted me, even though the primary and driving fundamentals of the stores were the same: make lots of money and cater to the least common denominator.

The irony here is that Waterstones parent company has acquired B&N in mid-2019, and the Waterstones’ CEO, James Daunt is now the new CEO of B&N. I certainly hope that he can revive B&N as he had Waterstones. I wish him well.

The irony of the everything-to-everyone chain bookstores existence is that while they had forced the shuttering of many independent books stores around the country, Amazon ultimately forced the big box everything-to-everyone stores to shutter their doors. In a surprising twist of fate the independents have shown signs of renewed life and are flourishing in their own way and in their own space. Perhaps it is because they were competing with the everything for everyone stores that made the small independents resilient and gird themselves to compete, I am not a bookseller so I would not know, but I welcome the return of the small independent, even though I know the 800 lb gorilla that is Amazon is always around the corner.

Works Cited

Rice, Ronald. My Bookstore: Writer's Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers Ltd., 2012.

Next: Confessions of a Bookstore Snob Part 2: The Bibliophiles Dream

Observations-Some Thoughts on How We Deal with Change

 I was just having a chat with a friend about her dilemma: whether she should send her kids back to school. She is conflicted because she understands that most people do not have the luxury that she does, she's a stay at home mom, and the family can afford for her to stay home, which means that she can have her kids take online classes just to make sure that they are safe. She is afraid of the unknowns: the school district buildings are old and small, and the buildings are not air conditioned, a potential recipe for disaster. She also understands that there are single parent families who cannot afford to make the same choice as she does, she understands that there are children who desperately need social interaction with their classmates for their emotional development. She wonders why we have to choose one option over the other, she wonders why her school system cannot accommodate all the citizen’s needs more equitably? She wonders why it has to be one or the other?

In these pandemic times, we are seeing many such conflicts over what we want versus what we must do. These conflicts arise from the fact that we are reacting to transient conditions: the situation we are facing is a massive disruption of our status quo, our steady state. We humans are horrible at dealing with change, we prefer our status quo, our steady state and when we are faced with any change in our routine our minds runs at a million miles an hour and we overreact in response to the disruption in our routine than to the actual change in our circumstances.  Our inability to grapple with our emotional discomfort dealing with the disruption magnifies the actual change in our circumstances.

When presented with the dilemma, we are extremely focused on our immediate decision, as it should be. We have a problem to resolve and it is a difficult problem, so we devote all of our attention on resolving the problem. There is no foreseeable way to resolve this issue without potentially sacrificing a part of our society. If we forced the children back to school, even with all the preventive measures that we can enact realistically, there is not enough evidence that we can avoid people getting sick or even worse, lose their lives. The fear concerns mostly older people: the teachers, older relatives who live in the same house with children, and even then, we are not sure that the children are completely immune from the disease or are completely immune from dying. There are also instances of death for the young, which we do not completely understand. On the other hand, if we decided to have our schools go completely online we are ignoring the needs of those  who do not have a choice in the matter: those who are financially unable to afford child care, which is more people than most of us realize; those who have no other recourse, single parent families, people who don’t have family locally who can help take care of the children  while the parents work, online or otherwise; and those who have children whose behavioral health are squarely dependent on their ability to socially interact with other children. Atop of all that, enabling technology which are essential for online learning are not equally distributed amongst the population, essential enabling technologies which many people do not have or can not afford. It adds up to a potential disaster, which we are witnessing in real time.

There is a reason why the debate over the decision has grown heated and acrimonious. I do not have an answer to it, because both sides make strong arguments.

If we pulled back from the heat of the debate, if we took a big picture view from an elevation, the questions evolve and morph in tone and reasoning.

If our workers are so essential, why do we not provide for their peace of mind regarding the care of their children when they work?

Why do we defer the responsibility of taking care of the children to teachers? Teachers are supposed to teach, they are not supposed to be childcare.

Why do we put our teachers in the position of being front line first responders during this pandemic? They were never trained for this scenario, and more importantly, they never signed up for this kind of hazardous duty, nor are they compensated as front line first responders. They are in this position because the other portions of the safety net have collapsed, either by neglect or by selfish design, and they were at the bottom.

Why is it that we, the wealthiest industrialized country, do not make access to the essential enabling technologies readily accessible for everyone that wants or needs one? If it is essential enabling technologies, does it not mean that one need the technology to survive and thrive in our society?  Why is it that there are urban neighborhoods and rural hamlets that does not have wifi coverage at all?

Why is it that when we decided to go 100% online that there are still families who do not have the essential enabling technology in their homes in order to go 100% online?

These are not new questions. These questions have been asked ad infinitum since March.

The simple answer is that we did not foresee this Black Swan event, that we were taken by surprise. This is a fair answer given the magnitude of the pandemic. The follow up question to Black Swan Events is: could we have done more to make our infrastructure anti-fragile? Is it possible to create our society structures so that even if we cannot completely ride through the transient situation such as this pandemic unscathed? Is it possible to have an anti-fragile system in place so that our society can mitigate the worst effects of any disaster and survive with enough of our status quo, our steady state intact to quickly restart?

I believe the answer is yes. Seth Godin’s blog today answer the question.

From Seth Godin’s Blog of September 24, 2020  (Godin 2020)

When can we talk about our systems?

Your team is down by a few points and the game is almost over. What play should you call?

[When can we talk about the system of drafting and training that got your team to this situation in the first place?]

Your back hurts and you think you need surgery to help with the pain.

[When can we talk about the technique you use when you go running every day?]

Your employee shows up late regularly. How can you get them to care more?

[When can we talk about your hiring and leadership approaches?]

There’s racial injustice and unfairness all around us.

[Can we talk about persistent indoctrination around caste?]

You just had an argument with your brother. What’s the best way for him to see that you’re right?

[When can we talk about the narratives your family has developed for generations?]

Universities and local schools are in crisis with testing in disarray and distant learning ineffective…

[When can we talk about what school is for?]

It’s comfortable to ignore the system, to assume it is as permanent as the water surrounding your goldfish. But the fact that we have these tactical problems is all the evidence we need to see that something is causing them, and that spending time on the underlying structure could make a difference.

In a crisis, there’s maximum attention. And in a crisis, we often discard any pretense of caring about systems and resilience and focus only on how to get back to normal. This is precisely why normal is what normal is, because we fight to get back to it.

Changing the system changes everything. And it might be even less work than pouring water on today’s tactical emergency.

This is the reason WHY we have systems, so that we are not running around responding to each situation as it occurs, applying ad hoc solutions to potentially permanent situations. This is the reason WHY we need to have safety nets, to prevent any momentary catastrophes from disrupting our status quo lives and societies. So, when my friend and her family is going through the agony of debating the benefits and pitfalls of her children’s schooling options, her long term solution should be: we should change our system so that we won’t have to be so panicked next time something catastrophic befalls us. This is not to say that we should construct a system that is perfect, no system can be one size fits all for all time, but we should strive for a system that is flexible and antifragile so that the least havoc be wreaked.

Works Cited

Godin, Seth. "When Can We Talk About Our System?" Seth's Blog. Seth Godin, September 24, 2020.

 

 

Book Review-Creativity, A Short and Cheerful Guide By John Cleese

 

Any book by John Cleese is expected to be very entertaining. This book is also informative and helpful. John Cleese was a founder of Monty Python comedy troupe. He is also a sought-after speaker on various things which applies to the business world, especially regarding our decision-making acumen, or lack of acumen. He is, to use the overused cliché, an out of the box thinker, a renaissance man.

This is a very short book where Cleese dives into what it means to be creative, he doesn't do it in a pedantic way, instead he does it in his own playful way. The combination is  a winning one, we are entertained as well as informed.  

The first couple of chapters sets the stage: The Creative Mindset and Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. The Creative Mindset sets the tone for the rest of the book: what is a creative mindset and how does one get into a creative mindset? The Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind chapter describes the dichotomy that many imposes on the way the brain operates. While I ascribe to a more continuous thinking process for us humans, it is a popular belief, and I will not quibble. The Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind idea seems like it follows the Kahneman and Tversky formulation of the System 1 and System 2 dichotomy, it is, and it isn’t, there are differences. Cleese focuses on how Tortoise Mind can liberate the mind by setting aside our self-imposed constraints and hopefully challenge our biases in order to be more creative. The Tortoise Mind can be more wandering by nature, it is assessing all the different possibilities that are available to us, it is allowed to be playful. This is not completely what Kahneman and Tversky talks about, yet it also is in a different way. In my understanding System 2 is the rational thought process while Tortoise Mind is the mind where you do have time to explore,  to ask silly questions, to make minds wander, to be playful, and to get at the unconventional solutions.

This exploration of all the solution space  allows the mind to generate all solutions, ignoring the usual human imposed constraints. This is a wonderful way of explaining how creativity works. Our mental processes are often constrained by our biases, by our fears, and by anything else we can find to curtail the number of possibilities that occurs in our mind just so that we can to get at a solution, any solution. Cleese is of the opinion that we need to just let it all go, to let our mind wander, and to let that wondering create as many different solutions as possible and THEN we could all sort it out later as we apply our Hare Brain to filter out the unreasonable, the untenable, and the unrealistic.

The rest of the book consists of many different advices that Cleese offers up as useful tricks to create that Tortoise Mind. They are useful, funny, and while some of them are counter intuitive,  they perfect sense when  Cleese explains it. This is a section where you will often sit back and slap your forehead and exclaim: holy cow, why didn't I think of that? Well there is a reason for that and hopefully by the time you are done with this little book you will be able to explore your own creative mind fruitfully.

This is a book that I will be referring to many times in the future to help me release the constraints that I have, as well as being quite entertained.