Category: books

I’m really sorry to see Borders going into liquidation and closing all their stores. There’s a good article about this on AnnArbor.com. (Ann Arbor is where Borders started out.)
Our local Borders, in Bridgewater, has been around for about 10 years, I think. I’ve spent a lot of time in there, poking through SF novels, computer books, comics, and CDs. I will admit that I’m one of those guys who often looked through books at Borders, then bought them through Amazon. I did buy a fair amount of stuff in-store though, especially when I had 30% or 40% off coupons from Borders Rewards.
There’s a Barnes & Noble at the Somerville circle, so I guess that’s where I’ll be going when I want to actually look at a hard-copy book before buying it.
There used to be a Waldenbooks (or maybe B. Dalton) right here in downtown Somerville, along with two different used book stores. Now, there are no book stores at all in Somerville. (One of the used book stores moved to Raritan, I think, and is probably still in business, but I haven’t checked lately.)
I can’t help wondering if brick & mortar book stores (and even hard-copy books) are on their way out. I like my Kindle and my iPad, and I like Amazon, but I’m not sure I’m ready to start buying and reading everything electronically.

I don’t see my local Borders on this store closing list. I buy most of my books at Amazon these days, but it’s nice to have a bookstore where I can go to browse through actual, physical, books, on actual shelves.

Around here, we’ve got one Borders and one Barnes & Noble, and not much else. In Somerville, we used to have one small bookstore for new books, and two used book stores. They’re all gone now, though I think one of the used book stores just moved to a different town.

I do hope Borders survives. I try and buy stuff there once in a while, even if it’s more expensive than Amazon, just to help keep them afloat.

Mark Evanier on libraries — I too was issued an adult library card before I was old enough to have one, mainly because I’d outgrown the stuff in the childrens library. One of the first things I remember checking out was a science fiction anthology that contained Harlan Ellison’s story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. It was the scariest thing I’d ever read, by far. (Up until that point, I’d mostly been reading Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books.)

I finished reading Catcher in the Rye last night. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading this book. There are a lot of other great books that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I think next up is maybe Catch-22 or For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’ve actually never read any Hemingway, and it seems like I should. I vaguely recall having a conversation with my father about a particular Hemingway novel that he liked. I can’t remember which one it was though.

Well, now that I’ve read Catcher in the Rye, and Salinger’s short story Laughing Man (which I read a year or two back), I should probably re-watch the Ghost in the Shell: SAC anime series. There are various references to Salinger throughout the series, and I think the series as a whole might make a little more sense, having read a bit of Salinger.

I noticed today that Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things is now available as a mass-market paperback.  I’ve never gotten around to picking this up previously, so I went over to Amazon and took a look.  The new paperback is $7.99.  There’s a Kindle edition for $9.59.  And, strangely, there are six Selections from Fragile Things Kindle e-books for 99 cents each.  I think that those contain the entire contents of the book, when you put them all together, but I’m not sure.  I wonder what the thinking on that was.  I probably think about these things too much.