Madam Mayo: Gregory Gibson

Showing posts with label Gregory Gibson. Show all posts

Monday, December 15, 2014

Top 10 Books Read 2014

#1. Finding George Orwell in Burma
By Emma Larkin
A splendid, intrepid, and thoroughly original marvel of a travel memoir. Most interestingly, in this day & age of facebookesque over-sharing, Emma Larkin has no web page nor author "head shot"-- such is the nature of her work. Dear reader, if you don't know who George Orwell is, get your 1984 here.
P.S. Emma Larkin on pen names.

#2. The Courage to Remember:
PTSD- From Trauma to Triumph
By Lester Tenney
This may not qualify as a "literary gem," but it takes stupendous guts and a heart as big as the world to offer up such a gift as this author, now elderly, did with his memoir. I would go so far as to say, don't depart Planet Earth without having read this book.

#3. River of Ink:
Literature, History, Art
By Tom Christensen
It was an honor to be able to give this one a pre-publication blurb:

Truffle-rich, cumin-exotic, from Mutanabi Street to Céline's ballets, Gutenberg and the Koreans, a winged sphinx and an iron man and Nur Jahan-- oh, and a beturbaned Sadakichi Hartmann-- these world-trotting essays make one groovy box of idea-chocolates.

#4. Demon of the Waters:
The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe
By Gregory Gibson
Read my post about Kindles and the Kindle edition of this extraordinary travel memoir / history, which has the strangest ending of any I can think of... (no worries, I won't give it away).

#5. Struck by Genius: How A Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel
By Jason Padgett and Maureen Seaberg
Deeply, wonderfully weird. Actually made me nostalgic for high school geometry, college calculus, and linear algebra, too.

#6. The End of the Sherry
By Bruce Berger
Read my post about this five star memoir of a soon-to-be Baja bohemian in Franco's Spain.

#7. Texas People, Texas Places
By Lonn Taylor
If you don't love Texas and Texans, you will at least be thoroughly charmed (I mean, "thuruhleh chahmd") after reading Lonn Taylor's latest collection of columns for the Big Bend Sentinel. Plus, he's knee-slappingly hilarious, in a southern-gentleman-historian kind of way.

#8. The Last Frontier:
Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming Our Fear of Death
By Julia Assante
As those of you who have been following my blog know, I've crunched through a heap of Afterlife literature in researching my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. I read Assante's book too late to include it in my bibliography, alas. If you're willing to explore this subject (and I know not everyone is) I would suggest that you first read Eban Alexander's Proof of Heaven: A Scientist's Case for the Afterlife, then, highlighter in hand, Julia Assante.

#9. A Gathering of Fugitives:
American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965
By Diana Anhalt
As a long-time expat living in Mexico City, I especially enjoyed this one. For those who know little about Mexico, this beautifully written memoir / group biography lights up some murky corners of Mexican and U.S. history. (It went at once onto my list of recommended books on Mexico.)

#10. A tie between

The Last of the Nomads
By W. J. Peasley
This is one of the most powerfully moving books I have ever read. It tells the true story of the 1979 rescue of an elderly couple, Warri and Yatungka, the last of the Mandildjara people, marooned in the vastness of Australia's Gibson Desert, starving and slowly dying of thirst.

and

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:
The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
By Marie Kondo
A one-time Shinto shrine maiden, Kondo bases her "KonMari" method on the assumption that one's house and all the objects in it have consciousness but, boy howdy, even if you're a die-hard materialist, follow her method and you'll zoom to a wiggy new oxygen-rich level of tidy. I am not kidding.

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Cyberflanerie: Bookstores, Happening & Not

C'est moi, C.M. Mayo, with Uli Quetzalpugtl
visiting Prairie Lights in Iowa City

Recently as I breezed through Iowa City, of course-- but of course-- I stopped in at Prairie Lights, the book lover's midwestern Mecca, which I last visited in (uyyy) 1990. In tow: puglet Uli Quetzalpugtl, my new writing assistant. Right now, Uli Q. has two speeds: wiggly-wiggly and dead asleep. Anyway, Prairie Lights, I am delighted to report, remains a handsome space, its vast inventory a pleasure cruise of discovery. Oh, the contrast to your average airport bookstore or Barnes & Noble, with its paid-for displays, was RE-FRESH-ING. As Uli Q. might say, like a wiggly loll on the grass.

More about bookstores:

A profile of Joyce Meskis, owner of Denver's iconic Tattered Cover Book Store. (Fun factoid: I am slated to introduce her at this year's Women Writing West conference in Golden, Colorado.)

And here is my recent Women Writing the West listserv comment in response to a writer who shared her experience marketing to bookshops and specialty shops in the tourist town where her several books are set (what she had to say was most interesting, but these listervs are private, so I only quote myself):

Re: marketing to a specific place... I went through some similar things with my book on Mexico's Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air. One would think that it would find a good market with US and Canadian and other visitors to Los Cabos and yonder (there are, literally, millions, flying & driving & sailing in) and it got rave reviews, including in the Los Angeles Times, but-- though I hasten to add that a few bookstores such as El Tecolote in Todos Santos and Baja Book & Maps were quick to carry it-- the sad thing is, most people, and that includes many gift shop owners, don't care about books. They just don't. They don't get it and they won't get it. And they are overwhelmed with dealing with inventory and paperwork as it is.

This is why I am thrilled with on-line booksellers such as amazon-- which I know isn't perfect, I know it's been a nightmare for independent bookstores--- because the people who actually do read, who actually would care to read a literary travel memoir such as Miraculous Air, can google it up, or surf on in from my webpage and get a copy lickety split. With a wifi connection, they can even download the Kindle and start reading right there, on the plane or on the beach-- and I am happy to report, a good number do. Better yet, I actually get paid for those Kindles-- which in my experience as a literary magazine editor, is rarely the case for books left on consignment.

That said, I have heard of some authors doing splendidly well with just the right store for their books. Thank you, [name], for sharing your experience with this, and I for one hope to hear more. The book business has always been a bit of a mystery to me and certainly it is changing fast.

PS I also think retail itself is changing fast-- that's another subject.

And Gregory Gibson, an author and owner of Ten Pound Island, has some interesting things to say about how the used and antiquarian books business has changed, on his blog: http://bookmanslog.blogspot.mx/2014/06/let-it-bleed.html

+ + + + + +

SURF ON:

Ye olde ode to bookshoppes of yore (Red Room)
Why Aren't There More Readers? A Note on Curiosity, Creativity, and Courage
Top 10 Books Read 2013
The future of bookstores (guest post for Carmen Amato)
My shop (yeah!)

COMMENTS always welcome

Friday, May 30, 2014

Cyberflanerie: Writerly Whatnot Edition

Ellen Cassedy's generous & inspired monthly column of writing tips for She Writes
(P.S. Cassedy's guest-blog post for Madam Mayo, 5 Links to Learn Yiddish.)

Hugh Howey's Author Earnings

Jane Friedman shows the changing face of publishing in 5 charts
(This is why so much of my focus these past few years has been on publishing Kindles and making podcasts.)

The last installation of novelist Carmen Amato's Bookstores of the Future series

(P.S. My ancient ode to bookstores over at Red Room.)

Thank you, dear Gregory Gibson, one of my favorite writers and the best rare book dealer blogger, I am honored to find "Madam Mayo" on your blog roll at Bookman's Log.

Lucas Klein on Translation and Translation Studies as a Social Movement

Novelist Leslie Pietrzyk on 10 Works You Must Read (IMHO) and 10 classic works she wishes she'd read

(P.S. My War & Peace blog and recommended reading for writers.)

Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviews Laurie Colwin

Rose Rosetree reads Maya Angelou's awesome aura

Robin Black on 21 Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started Writing

SURF ON, BODACIOUS READER-WRITER:

Giant Golden Buddha & 364 More Free 5 Minute Writing Exercises

Eight Conclusions After 8 Years of Blogging

That Andrew Wiley interview, again, because it just so totally floats my boat

Conversations with Other Writers Occasional Podcast Series

COMMENTS always welcome.

Friday, May 09, 2014

Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe by Gregory Gibson

Apropos of the splendid Demon of the Waters, three topics in one blog post today: (1) Blogs (2) Kindles and (3) Literary Travel Memoirs.

(1) Blogs: Oh, so many (or few?) good ones. Seems most bloggers never quite hit a stride; they sprint into the blogoshere, usually promoting something such as their new book, then poop out. (Or sink to posting pix of their food on FB.) As for excellent bloggers posting at a steady stride: one of my favorites was Seth Roberts-- alas, he passed away, very young and suddenly (check out the archives, highly recommended). Another blog I love, still going strong, rubber boots and all, is Katherine Dunn's Apifera Farm. (Don't be deceived by the simplicity of her posts about elderly farm animals and rescued cats; she's an artist and a poet of the highest order.) Seth Godin's is my daily mind-vitamin. Marginal Revolution. The Archdruid Report (though as I write, the felicitously hypergraphic Mr. Greer has awarded himself a vacation.) Jim Kunstler, whose blog invariably retails ye same olde, same olde doom 'n gloom, but somehow, every Monday, makes it freshly hilarious. (Did I mention, I have a very Mexican sense of humor.) Early Retirement Extreme (extremely Krishnamurtian). On the literary front, I keep up with my novelist amiga Leslie Pietrzyk via her Work-in-Progress, my poet and translator amigo Zack Rogow's Advice for Writers-- and many others. And I get my Viking fix with Nancy Marie Brown's God of Wednesday, aura and face reading adventures with Rose Rosetree (seriously, these are skills anyone can learn and the concepts are especially useful for fiction writers-- a blog post expanding on that anon), and rare book fix with Gregory Gibson's Bookman's Log.

Thank you, all. Except those of you who have sunk to posting pictures of your food on FB. You get a raspberry. For that matter, FB gets a raspberry.

(No, I cannot abide Slate, nor that race-the-bottom conglomeration otherwise known as Huffington Post, and every time I read the New York Times, which I do once in a while, when distracted, as when stepping into a pothole, I am reminded why I prefer my personal menu of blogs. No, I do not read other newspapers. But I do maintain a subscription to Mexico City's Reforma because others in my household, for reasons known only to themselves, feel compelled to remain informed about that genre of disturbing but reliably repetitive earthly events I call "bus crashes," and I am happy to be able to bundle up and donate the leftovers --I mean of the newspapers-- to our local dog rescue charity. If you happen to write for Slate, Huffington Post or the NYT, no offense intended; I am sure I just haven't been fortunate enough to come across your pieces. I find bus crashes so distracting, you see.)

Now a blog post can be a "big baggy monster," to steal a quote about the novel, but 'nuf meandering.

The cover for the Kindle.
Sorry, Madam Mayo votes for
the hardcover's dustjacket (see above).
This Kindle cover looks very
generic, which this splendid book
most assuredly is not.

(2) Kindles. So it was in Gregory Gibson's Bookman's Log I came across a post with the very unassuming title of "Kindling." Turns out that, through his agent (why, sir? it's not rocket science) he has issued a Kindle edition of his 2002 Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe. So unassuming was his post that, in fact (did I miss it?), he didn't even provide a link to buy the book. (Herewith, dear readers.)

Long story boiled down to a sentence: Demon of the Waters makes my top 10 books read for 2014. (How do I know, with my voracious reading habits, that between now and December I won't find others to push it down the list to, say, #11? Why, it's that good.)

Of special interest to me was the narrative structure which, a la Melville, included chapters on shipbuilding and the whaling industry's trade, tools, and so on. Whaling was, as Gibson puts it, "Big Oil" of its day. I can see why many readers would object to all that exposition (many amazon.com reviewers do), and at the beginning especially, Demon of the Waters does seem meandering and overly detailed, but I say it works because so much of this hellish tragedy would be incomprehensible without it. For those of us in the early 21st century, whaling is an exotic, horrifically brutal, and culturally rich tradition that, though we might fancy we know it when we stroll through Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard, take home a print of a whaleship or, say, resin replica of an antique whale bone carving, is really as foreign to us as we, with our cars and email and microwavable whatnots, would be to those whalers.

Charles Melville Scammon,
whaler and naturalist

(Personal sidenote: I especially delighted in the connection with my own Miraculous Air, a travel memoir about Baja California, which includes two chapters about Charles Melville Scammon, a San Francisco-based whaler of the grays, and author of a very rare book indeed-- most copies, still in the warehouse, burned after the San Francisco earthquake-- The Marine Mammals of the North-western Coast of North America Together with an Account of the American Whale-fishery. Many of the whaling scenes Scammon recounts were similar to those 20-30 years earlier in Demon of the Waters, and no doubt, many of his crew could have been kinsmen from the same little New England towns as those of the Globe.)

(3) Literary Travel Memoirs. Though the title and most of the content put Demon of the Waters squarely in the category of history, I consider it a literary travel memoir, for it is not only a memoir of a rare book dealer's encounter with a manuscript uncovered in Indiana (I'd stretch that to the literary travel memoir category in itself), but at the end, of the author's journey to Mili Atoll. I won't give away the ending, but I will say it unpacks multiple surprises and has that rare symphonic quality of the very finest of novels.

SURF ON:

Madam Mayo
>Top 10 books Read 2013

>Bruce Berger's The End of the Sherry
>Cyberflanerie: Selections from Gregory Gibson's Bookman's Log
>My Excellent (If Occasionally Head-Banging) E-Book Adventure

C.M. Mayo

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Cyberflanerie: Selections from Gregory Gibson's Bookman's Log

An especially fine blog has recently started blinking on my radar: Bookman's Log by Gregory Gibson, author (Hubert's Freaks, among others) and rare book dealer with Ten Pound Island Books. A few favorite posts (in no particular order):

The House Call
People Who Have It Worse
Wiley Mammals
Rabbit Hole Publishing
A New Year's Recollection
Excerpt:

She informed us that a local dealer had offered $10,000 for the library. I told her we’d pay her $15,000 if she’d let us pick through the collection and take what we wanted. Otherwise, we’d pay her $13,500 if we had to take it all. She cocked her head at this upside down proposition. Locusts screamed in the trees. Then she got it. “$13,500,” she smiled.

COMMENTS