STACKED

books

Going, going… gone.

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Theft is an unavoidable part of being a librarian. I’m amazed at the amount of material that I never see again after it hits the reading room floor. But theft also has its good points – popular items get stolen more (yes, this is an obvious statement). Consequently, I know what I need to buy more of during the next month’s ordering process. This kind of loss is one of the better ways to judge trends in the community. At times, when I’m buying books, I feel like Sisyphus, rolling that boulder up the hill another day. But at least I know that I’m on the right track with my collection development by purchasing such desirable items.

I work at a busy urban branch in an economically depressed area of Los Angeles, so what’s most stolen will not corroborate with branches in other cities. Hey, it doesn’t even corroborate with our closest branches! As a disclaimer, this list was not scientifically compiled in any way. I have no real facts or figures. And despite how many times I ask, I don’t have access to many statistics from the circulation system in our library. This post is just a collection of anecdotes and personal observations from fellow librarians and clerks. I can’t count all of the torn covers we’ve found underneath computers or library bar code stickers balled up and tossed behind the magazine racks. These are some of the items that stand out.

Theft of Naruto has reached epic heights. The Young Adult librarian recently received an additional $2,000 as a prize for winning a competition. She had an amazing shopping spree at Borders, filling out all of the gaps in the Naruto collection. Within a few weeks, the Naruto books in the library were down to 6, despite the catalog showing over 35 books on the shelf.

Troubles for our YA librarian doesn’t end at manga. She also buys skateboarding books, many of which grow legs and walk (skate?) out of the library on a regular basis. This particular volume has been missing since December of 2008. We have a huge skateboarding population; we desperately need more skating books, not to mention a proper skate park. Hopefully a park would also cut down on the number of patrons run over by the droves of kids practicing their tricks outside the entrance.

Evidently it’s tough to read the future with only a three week loan period. This was the most recent addition to the tarot collection, but it’s been missing since March of 2008. Unfortunate, especially because I get asked for tarot books on a regular basis.

People still love Tupac Shakur. He may have died over ten years ago, but he still captures the imagination of this community. We’ve “lost” countless hardcover versions of this book. Even last week, a messenger clerk found a torn cover from a paperback copy stuffed in between cookbooks.


Popular movies have high shrinkage figures, unsurprisingly. Around here, Tyler Perry, Wall-E, and big-budget action movies are the most popular. One of our clerks mentioned Batman Begins as a particularly notable case. It was put out on the shelf, and within the hour, it was gone. I guess Christian Bale has some rabid fans in South Los Angeles!

Unreliable Narrators

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I started listening to the next Amelia Peabody book – The Hippopotamus Pool – a few days ago. It started out a little differently than the previous books. Instead of Amelia diving right in to the narrative without much preamble, the “editor” of Mrs. Amelia Peabody Emerson’s personal diaries sprinkled her own commentary via footnotes throughout a rather lengthy introduction by Mrs. Emerson herself that recounted the major events of the previous books. It served a dual purpose: catch the reader (or listener, as in my case) up to speed on the pertinent events of the previous books that would impact the events of the current one, and make us laugh. Take this passage:

Text: “The date of my birth is irrelevant. I did not truly exist until 1884, when I was in my late twenties.”

Footnote: “This is not consistent with other sources. However, the editors were of the opinion it would be discourteous to question a lady’s word.”

The “other source” the editor refers to is in fact the first novel in the series, when Miss Peabody tells her readers that she is thirty-two years old in 1884. The editor points out other inconsistencies throughout the introduction, and they all made me grin. While I love Amelia all the more for it, it also made me wonder…exactly how much should I take her at her word? Is her dashing husband really all that dashing, or is he only dashing when seen through her eyes? (Isn’t the latter much more romantic anyway?) It helps that the editor is voiced by Davina Porter, who is one of my top five favorite audiobook narrators.

A few other famous unreliable narrators include Dr. Sheppard from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Briony Tallis from Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I have varying levels of tolerance and appreciation for stories with unreliable – or outright dishonest – narrators, and it depends on the purpose of the character being written in such a way. With Amelia, it’s done for comedic effect, and I love it. In Atonement, it seems as if Ian McEwan did it to make me cry (it worked). Oh, and to bring up all those fancy meta-fiction issues while he’s at it. I thought it was brilliant, and it helped lessen my antagonistic feelings toward Briony. (I also thought the movie adaptation was just as good as the book, a quality that is very rare.) I can just imagine Dame Agatha patting herself on the back and grinning slyly when she first devised the events of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I’m still undecided on whether I believe what she did was a genius move or a dirty cheat. Then again, it can be argued that fiction needs to be related by a less than honest narrator in order for the fiction to be honest at all, another one of those true oxymorons.

If you’re interested in reading books with a narrator who may not be entirely trustworthy, check out the three I’ve mentioned above and the few below:

Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz
Odd Thomas (not short for Todd) is a twenty year old fry cook who sees dead people. It’s much better and much less creepy than the Sixth Sense, and Odd as a narrator is engaging, likable, and honest – usually. In the first installment (it became so popular it blossomed into a series), Odd must stop some very bad men from perpetrating something horrible upon his small California town. Unless you have a cold cold heart, the ending will make you cry.

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by Jon Scieszka
I outgrew picture books very early on in my reading life, but this is one that I returned to many times. Scieszka is just so clever with everything he writes. Here, Alexander T. Wolf sets the record straight – he was not an evildoer who huffed and puffed, he simply had a very bad cold. And the pigs were rude anyway. Telling classic stories from the point of view of the “bad guy” has always been popular, but no one has done it better than Scieszka.

The Banned and the Banished, by James Clemens
You probably haven’t heard of this series. I don’t blame you if you haven’t – it’s a fantasy that is typical of its genre, with a lot of magic, black-hearted villains, and young good-looking heroes. It’s the kind of stuff that I just eat up. The editor prefaces each book with a notice that everything you will be reading is false, the author of the book is a traitor, and in order to even be allowed to read his/her lies, you must be an advanced scholar, put your thumbprint on the page, and swear to tell no one what you have read. It’s up to you to determine which person – the editor or the author – is the unreliable one. This aspect of the series is what hooked me, although it tells a very entertaining story too.

While searching Goodreads and Librarything for books tagged as unreliable narrators, I came across James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Two Librarything users had tagged this nonfiction book, now notorious for its falseness, as having an unreliable narrator. I suppose in the strictest meaning of the phrase, it’s true. But there’s a sense with fiction that it’s okay for the writer to deceive us – it’s not the writer who’s doing the deceiving anyway, is it? The deceitful one is the narrator, who we all learn in grade school English classes is a separate entity from the author. So perhaps I should give Christie a free pass after all – Dr. Sheppard is the one who pulled the wool over my eyes.

What’s your take? Do you like reading books with unreliable narrators, or would you prefer it if the narrator just told it to you straight? Did you want to strangle Christie after she so blatantly and inexcusably broke one of the primary rules of detective fiction? What are some other books with unreliable narrators that I should check out?

The Oxford Project, Stephen G. Bloom and Peter Feldstein

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I won’t lie: The Oxford Project appealed to me initially for two reasons. First, I heard about it because it received an Alex award from the American Library Association this year, and second, upon researching the title following that nugget of information, I found out it was set in a town about 30 minutes southwest from where I went to college.

Bloom and Feldstein’s book is a non-fiction photographic exploration of one Iowa town over a generation. Feldstein began the project by taking photos of nearly all 600 residents in 1984. His goal was to capture each of them in their natural state — no fancy clothes, no fancy make up. These photos were put on display in town and turned out to be quite a neat feature for the downtown area and its citizens. Once the exhibits were finished, Feldstein put the project to bed.

A two decades later, Feldstein thought it would be interesting to take their photos again, but this time also ask them about their lives: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the sweet. He and Bloom teamed up for this aspect, and both were incredibly surprised with how honest and forthcoming the citizens of Oxford would be with them.

The Oxford Project is a series of photographs, the original beside the new, as well as a series of vignettes that are a glipse into the lives of the individuals that make up one small town. The stories are raw and are both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are similar threads running through many of the stories, including the value of working hard, the value of being a good person, and the regret for many who did not attend college (not surprising, as the University of Iowa is a mere 10 miles from Oxford).

This is a very unique book that gives great insight into humanity, into the way our lives change both by choice and by accident, and into how a city can become such a part of who we are as people. For a non-fiction book, this one is engaging because it is steeped heavily into the visual images of ordinary people. I think the American Library Association is spot on with this as an Alex winning title — I would not hesistate to hand this book to a student needing to do a report on a non-fiction book. There will be a story that resonates with each reader, who can see a bit of themselves in each of the people featured in the book. It’s hard to build a book that combines both an artistic vision and a powerful story, but I think that Bloom and Feldstein do a fantastic job of this with The Oxford Project.

If you’re interested in reading it and are on a very, very long waiting list for the book like I have been, be sure to check out the website promoting the book and project here. I’m impressed with not only the project, but the notes the author and photographer include about the lessons they learned in undertaking such a task, including lessons on history and preservation. I almost think their author notes — which are sparse and come only at the beginning and end of the book — are just as worthy of thinking about as the rest of the book.

Double Take Part II

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I don’t really notice a lot of cover art. It took me several Sookie Stackhouse books to realize that the artwork actually gave away plot points. I’m pretty dense at times.

However, I have my first addition to the “Double Take” game, despite my lack of observational skills. When Kelly first added The Zookeeper’s Wife to her Goodreads list, I thought, “Oh, I’ve read that.” Then I skimmed the description and realized, “Um, this has nothing to do with gay Thatcher-ites living in London.”

Yes, I was foiled by the covers. Let’s examine.

Published first, the paperback version of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.


The book art depicts a view of a white walkway in a wooded garden as seen through a close-up of a wrought-iron fence. For a book about a man who desperately wants to be part of a privileged London world, this is a fitting cover. Private gardens (and keeping people out of them) play a large role in this novel.

Then, the similar-but-not-quite-the-same cover of Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife.


I haven’t read this one yet, but from what I understand, Ackerman tells the story of Warsaw zookeepers who shelter Jews from the ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Notice the white walkway; the dark green of forests, the muted light; the curlicues of the iron bars. The photograph was taken from a different angle of a different fence, but the feel (and effect) of the cover bear a resemblance to The Line of Beauty. The superimposition of official documents underneath Diane Ackerman’s name also adds a different element to the cover, giving clues to the plot of the novel.

I prefer the Hollinghurst rendition, but only due to personal taste. I find myself photographing items from uncomfortably close angles, so the assymetry of the Hollinghurst cover appeals to my aesthetic. The Ackerman cover is a little too perfectly composed; I prefer photographs that are not centered. For both, though, I keep thinking back to the many snapshots I’ve taken over the years with the same subject matter. The idea of a gated pathway seems to be an almost ubiquitous allegory for things that we cannot have. It’s not surprising that this type of composition is striking.

Any other comments? We’d love to hear them.

Double take

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With inspirational credit to the Alea Pop Culture blog, I thought it would be interesting to look at cover art that appears on multiple books, making them eerily similar. In a sea of fiction, how does one navigate when there are so many similar looking books (admit it, you DO judge a book by its cover, at least initially!).

While perusing some of the new titles for 2009, both those that have been released already and those to be published soon, I ran across this cover double. Published first:

Andrew O’Keeffe’s The Boss to be published by Greenleaf April 30 uses a tie to stand in place of the “o.” The Boss is a humorous and all-too-realistic story about working beneath a number of bosses making absurd demands, stealing ideas, and squelching main character Lauren’s creativity. This book’s geared for an adult audience.

Coming out literally days after The Boss is this book geared for the young adult audience:

Initiation by Susan Fine is set for release in May by Flux publishers. Rather than use the image of the tie with the same stripped design (though in different colors) as part of the title, it’s meant to stand alone as the background image. Initiation is a story a middle class Latino boy trying to survive — forget fitting in at! — an elite private school in Manhattan.

So, which cover did it better? Personally, I think the design is pretty interesting, period, which is the only reason I even noticed it. I had put Initiation on my to-be-read list last night and found The Boss this evening. I’m curious if this will cause any confusion given their similar publishing time frames, albeit different topics and target audiences.

Do you know of any other covers that look similar? Share with us in the comments!