Guest Post: Sarah Paige Ryan's Holiday Survival Guide

Oh, the holidays. The shopping lists. The paper cuts. The delayed flights. The family gatherings where Grandma reminds everyone that she thought you’d never graduate from high school. If you’re like me, then the season of giving is a source of both joy and dread. After years of holiday meltdowns, I’ve compiled the perfect survival guide to see you through the merry-making.

Old-Fashioneds
You might associate this classic cocktail with the likes of Don and Betty Draper, but I have my in-laws to thank for this hangover-proof mood enhancer. Every year, my relatives gather around the Christmas tree and get good and drunk on their own version of the Old-Fashioned: lemon-lime soda, brandy, a dash of bitters, a slice of orange, a maraschino cherry, lots of ice and, for good measure, a sprinkling of Sweet’N Low.

Bad Sex
Why waste your time on a furtive quickie when you can read other people’s half-baked exploits? On December 6, the British magazine The Literary Review will announce the winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. According to the editors, “The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel and to discourage it." Twelve authors from around the world are on the shortlist, including Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Jean Auel, and David Guterson. Extracts are available online at The Guardian.

A Good Book
There’s no better excuse for retreating to an armchair with an old-fashioned and a warm blanket than a really good read. When the season strikes, I want to be transported to distant locales. I want to ooh and aah over the marvelous and strange. If you love novels, I recommend Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder for its fire and ice evocation of disparate locales (Minnesota and the Amazon) and love and nature. If you prefer to dabble, pick up a copy of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and enjoy a bizarre and horrifying collection in which parasites might hold the key to religious ecstasy and mechanical teachers are linked to the development of mustard gas.

Schadenfreude is the time-honored art of deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others. It’s distinctly un-seasonal, but it’s also an invaluable source of relief at a time when there’s so much pressure to love one another. On Wednesday, November 30, at 7pm, the members of the Old Town Writing Group will share their tales of holiday mishaps during the Feast of Fools event at Bas Bleu Theatre in Fort Collins. The reading is free. The writers include Karye Cattrell, Dana Masden, Laura Pritchett, Laura Resau, Carrie Visintainer, and myself. Work off that Thanksgiving stress with stories of social disorder.


Sarah Paige Ryan is a local writer and blogger. Her memoir, Solar-Powered Sex Machine, is available online. Learn more at www.sarahpaigeryan.com.

Feed by Mira Grant

It is very very rare that I feel compelled to write a book review. I did a few too many papers in college to get excited about the process these days. I'm a simple rate it from 1 to 10, and move on gal. That said, the book I just finished deserved a few words. I want to talk about the book Feed, by Mira Grant.

How do I talk about a book like Feed?
I'm not sure where I could possibly begin.
I suppose I should start with myself, because my experiences deeply colored how I read and felt about this book.

I worked for two years at a major newspaper, and believe me when I say I know the ugly side of the news media. When I left the paper the news was already on its slide toward what I call Infotainment, and away from the Truth. Don't get me started on how I feel about the reporting being done today. I also happen to be extremely political, something that stumps my more apathetic Gen X friends. I'm constantly on my soapbox begging people to get informed and get involved. So why is this important? Oh, didn't I mention? This isn't a zombie book. This is a wake up call.

Feed takes place in the years after the zombie Rising. Life carries on. And zombies are just a fact of life. And the book follows a group of bloggers as they cover a major political campaign. The traditional news has lost its pursuit of the truth, and it is in the hands of bloggers to do the real reporting. The bulk of the book is spent on explorations of the news and politics. It is methodical and somewhat repetitive, though I never balked at its surprisingly laid back pace. You join the campaign trail and get pulled in to a well constructed world, frighteningly familiar in its similarities to our own. The actual zombies take a back seat. Terror, on the other hand, does not.

Feed is a meditation on what it is like to live in a state of constant fear. This is a book where zombies are a clear metaphor for terrorism. Actually, not even a metaphor at times - in places it is even literal. This is a world wherein the people are afraid all the time. They shut themselves in their homes, and they fear their neighbors. It's terrifying. And after reading over and over and over again about blood tests being clean, to the point where it begins to grate, the tension has reached such a point that the payoff is as jarring as it is inevitable when one comes back dirty.

This book won't appeal to everyone. It's not action packed. It's not an all out zombie fest. The terror comes in the form of a creeping dread, and in wanting to believe things will work out when you know damn well that they will not. The fear is not in the moments where zombies are running toward you. It's in the moment you are pulling off your shirt, searching for holes, hoping against hope that you aren't dead and just don't know it yet. Or worse, when you are watching your loved one do the same.

- t

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

You know that all of us here at Old Firehouse Books like to keep up on book to movie or television news. So we have to share the trailer for the upcoming film based on The Lorax by Dr. Seuss with you.

What do you think? Will you see it when it hits theaters in March?

A little too on-the-nose?

Stumbling across the internet, I found this comic strip that seems to sum up the current book-selling climate astoundingly well (though it is, perhaps, somewhat dated by the presence of Borders, may-it-rest-in-peace.)

Thanks to the original authors (and original wits! DOH hoh hoh) Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. If you want to read more of their work, click on this sentence.

-KELLER

This Friday: Old Firehouse Books Halloween Bash!

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With Halloween falling on a Monday this year, we all get a premium amount of time to celebrate beforehand and we decided to take advantage of this at Old Firehouse Books.

We're throwing our own Halloween Bash in the store this Friday (10/28) from 6-8pm. You should come get your BOOk on!

We'll have a literary costume contest, for kids and adults, and trivia too. Winners will receive a gift card to use in the store - you can buy that new book you've been eyeing or stock up on the classics you've read and loved. Snacks and drinks will be provided as well.

And the best part? It's free.

So grab your costume, bone up on your book knowledge, and join us.

*Adults: Need some help thinking of a costume? Check out this Flavorpill post featuring 7 bookish pop-culture costume ideas: Flavorpill Book Costumes.

DC Comics pulled from Barnes and Noble shelves?

So, I just had a long weekend. Very relaxing. Full of fun. But then I come back to the store--glibly optimistic in my ignorance--to find that Barnes and Noble pulled one hundred DC comic titles from their shelves in retaliation against Amazon's exclusive E-book rights. Curious.

To quote Jaime Carey--Barnes and Noble's chief merchandising officer--in a response made to the New York Times,

"In a few isolated instances, exclusive publisher deals have prohibited Barnes & Noble from selling certain e-books, preventing millions of our digital customers from access to those titles. To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms and not have the e-book available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime."

Does this sound silly to anyone else? They are pulling titles from their shelves because having them would "... undermine [their] promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime?"

They are pulling books.

Because they want them to be available.

Maybe I'm just taking this personally. I am, after all, what some would call a 'nerd.' When I hear that titles like Watchmen and Sandman are being pulled from shelves in a snit fit over e-book rights, I can't help but lament the fact that someone, somewhere, won't have access to them.
And maybe it's just me, but it always seems like anytime big distributors or big publishers fight over copyrights, or e-book exclusivity, or who-wronged-who in the profit-wars, the fallout always hurts the readers the most.
I can understand wanting to protect your livelihood. In light of Borders' perilous decline, I can see how Barnes and Noble would try to do its best to protect its investments. I mean, we've all got to survive, right?
But at the same time, when is it too much? If a bookseller takes a book off the shelf because another book seller has it available at a lower price or in a different format, wouldn't we all be out of business? Isn't it enough just to have the book for people to read, whether they buy it or not? Whatever happened to coming into a store to browse?
Because, see, that's why I go into book stores. It's not always a desperate quest to find the exact title I'm looking for. For me, it's an exploration. A walk in the woods, so to speak, to see just what's out there. And if we cut down all the trees, what's left to explore?

(I feel like I should point out that we stock DC's titles, regardless of who has the e-book rights. Come check 'em out!)

- KELLER

REVIEW: Thirteen Reasons Why

Hoo. Wow. It's been a while since my last post. Quite some time, indeed.

SO!

Without further ado, a book review!

Last night, when the store was slow, I picked up a copy of Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (Penguin, 2007.) In between helping the occasional customer, I leafed through the first few pages. Then, when it was time to lock up, I leafed through a few more. When I got home, I sat down on the couch and proceeded to finish the book.

And it was good. I mean, like, really good. That's my official first thought while reviewing this book: it was really good.


Thirteen Reasons Why revolves around Clay, a more-or-less typical high school student, who receives an unmarked package containing seven cassette tapes recorded by a recently deceased classmate. On each tape is two reasons that said classmate--Hannah Baker--committed suicide. The book follows Clay as he visits each location in Hannah's story, listening to how each person mentioned in the tapes influenced Hannah's decision and wondering all the while how he fits into the picture.

The immediacy of the book--one of the things I loved about it--comes from the narrative setup: Clay's story happens over the course of a single night, as he follows Hannah's tour of their town. It's a simple layout of a complex plot, following a map from point A to point B and so on, unfolding the significance of each location with an associated cassette tape.
That's precisely the word I would use for the way the book works, by unfolding. It is as if the book were a music box, or a wind-up toy that has been set in motion, and we've just got to sit back and watch as it plays through itself. In a way, it's a genius narrative setup: the character--and by proxy, the reader--is given steps that must inevitably follow one another, and over the course of the book each one is addressed in turn. If it feels like the story is being placed on track at times, it's because it is.

However good the book is, though, this narrative structure could be seen as both a benefit and a detriment. After all, if everything in the book has already happened, where is the tension? There are scant choices to be made after the story begins, and only a few ways for it to play out. And play out it does, from Tape 1 Side A to the silent Side B of Tape 7. So why should we care?

We should care, as it turns out, because Asher is an excellent writer. He takes an otherwise concrete narrative, and pushes it onto Clay to see what he does with it. How he reacts. If he does or does not follow the instructions on the tape. Even though the events of the story could be considered analogous to watching someone listen to a book on tape, it's handled so deftly and so vividly that I never once considered putting the book down.

The only real issue I had with the book was the fact that it was written as teen lit (Which sounds awful. I mean, why should I judge a book by its genre? It seems horribly unfair until you find out that I was an English major, and for a few years there being unfair to books was all I did.) This isn't to say that I have anything against teen lit in principle, but I've come to find that many teen lit books cling to a lingering sense of unreality regarding the functioning of the real world. This shows most tellingly in Asher's book through the presence of Clay's mother, especially when she lets him 'stay out late for a school project'-- I'm not sure if I was an anomaly, but if I lied to my mother like that and spent all night wandering the town, she would find out and I wouldn't leave the house for weeks (Which actually happened to me once. Fun times.)

This is an issue that I've seen come up in many stories aimed towards a teen audience: a magical parentless wonderland where you can stay out all night consequence-free. The most egregious offender that I've seen is the movie Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, where the titular characters spend all night in downtown New York without a single thought as to what their parents might say.

Luckily, however, Asher's book is nothing like that. It was only a niggling sense of 'But what would their mothers think?!' that I noticed. And Asher does address it, insofar as one can address the issues of parents in a teen book-- I'm just not sure if I really like how teen lit as a whole deals with grownups.

But, before this review is swamped in my gripes about the state of teen lit today, I would have to say that, overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was tense, well-written, engaging, and inevitable in a way that I think only Thirteen Reasons Why can truly be.

OVERALL RATING: A-minus, or about 9.2/10. A thumb and three-quarters up? Four stars? I'm really bad at ratings systems. You should read this book.

-KELLER

PS- Jay Asher is signing at the Council Tree Library in Fort Collins! October 20th at 6:30! Make sure you read this excellent book and attend!