Last month, Scott Renshaw invited me to share thoughts about New Year’s Resolutions with City Weekly readers. I’m not qualified to make resolutions for others but I can share some suggestions and thoughts about getting more from books and reading. Here are eight ways to improve one’s relationships with books.
America: The Farewell Tour Chris Hedges
Simon & Schuster
9781501152672
Hardcover
$27.00
America: The Farewell Tour is a scathing indictment and a call to action.
Sam Weller started passing me used book buying advice when I was a working kid so I learned some before the slightly more deliberate, but more focused, tutorials that would begin in the 1980s. By the late 1980s, I was buying and pricing used and rare books for the bookstore.
Michael Pollan
9781594204227
Penguin Press
List Price: $28.00
Our Price: $21.00
Reviewed by Tony Weller
To fall in hell or soar Angelic
You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic
Bookstores are hubs of culture. Humanity crosses chasms of time, geography and language with bridges made of books. Cities and towns used to be more thickly populated with independent bookstores. Stock-empowered corporations thinned our numbers in the Nineties but curious thinkers, intellectual explorers, community builders, revolutionists, dreamers and romantics cannot be fully oppressed.
Happy New Year everyone! I wish I could make it a magic spell. What will it take to achieve a Happy 2018? Booksellers are merchants of dreams and knowledge; and readers’ minds are made of what they choose. I have found durable wisdom in books of widely varied topics, and from every geographic region or era. No one person, or period or culture has all answers, and none has none.
More than a Centenary Birthday for Lila Weller!
I am a fortunate son; I received uncommonly interesting, open-minded and devoted parents. My parents were older than those of most of my peers, so it feels especially wonderful that I get to help my mom celebrate her 102nd birthday. Although as a 1960s vintage boomer, my sensibilities and tastes are different than my parents’, I believe we are a closer than ordinary family with our shared love of books and the sensibilities informed by their reading. I have worked in this bookstore and with my mother since my childhood, minus 12 years when she was caring for my dad following his retirement. A blog is typically too brief for a century-plus tale so I hope you’ll forgive my short rendering of my mom, Lila Weller’s long and interesting life.