Village Books Blog

A Friend's Take on the Current State of Bookselling

I've commented before on the state of the publishing and bookselling business and I'm sure I'll have more to say about it in the future.  In the meantime, take a look at this post by our friend Bill Petrocelli, co-owner with his wife Elaine of Book Passage in Corte Madera, California.  His piece, Bookselling in a Time of Disaster, really nails a number of the current issues.

Remembering Updike

I first encountered John Updike's work as a college student in the late 1960's, reading his novel Rabbit Run.  I was hooked.  Over the years, in addition to the other three books in the Rabbit series, I read several of his other books and short pieces.  I was never a "student" of Updike's work but I was certainly a "consumer" of it.  In November I wrote a post about seeing Updike at Seattle Arts and Lectures.  It was a tremendous evening.  Dee and I remarked on how good he looked and how sharp he was at 76.  So we were a bit stunned on the morning of January 28 to learn that he had died of lung cancer, apparently diagnosed after Thanksgiving--a few weeks after we saw him in Seattle.  Updike chronicled America's middle class.  He explored religion and mores of ordinary people.  In more than 50 books of fiction, criticism and poetry he left his mark deeply engraved on the American literary landscape.  John Updike was one of the first contemporary authors to reach me as a young adult.  I hope that re-reading the first Rabbit novel, which my book group has chosen as our April book, will remind me a bit of that early reading of his work and that I'm able to savour those memories.