Promoting Health & Diet Books, They Moved My Fiction Titles & I Have Never Been Happier

I try to visit my local book store daily, even if I just walk in and walk out; it's the feel of new books, the sweet smell from the bargain tables, and the allure of the literary and political magazine sections that keep calling me back. But I am used to seeing things in this order: the lobby area is stuffed with bargain classics (buy one get one free or fifty percent off; the same usual classics, books by Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne, Melville--some special editions published by the bookstore's publishing wing; so of course they are inexpensive, and, unfortunately, I already own most of them, but I always find myself attempting to browse them.) Next, I enter the second set of doors, and suddenly, I am lost, like how some people enter a casino and the sight of slot machines drains all rationality, and suddenly, they feel lucky. Once I am in this wide world of books, I could stay here without any sense of time. I am used to seeing new fiction and bestselling non-fiction titles on the front-of-store bestseller island: this is where you usually find your Stephen King, your John Grisham, your latest vampire titles, mixed with the latest literary and creative non-fiction publications. I like this island because it keeps me up to date with new trends in publishing, and it's right in the front of the store. That's what I am used to, but lately, my routine has been disturbed by the store's merchandizing changes.

Since the beginning of the year, the front display island has been choking, to the extent that a wooden island chokes, with Diet and Health titles. Very colorful titles with pictures of smiling, big-weight losers, people thinned for success. While I haven't been stopping to examine these titles closely (which I should have), I have often struggled to find my usual books, the new literary fiction, the new informative non-fiction, and I have usually found them after an exhausting four to five minutes, or after detours to the magazine section, which still contains a lot of the Fall 2009 literary journals, so there is nothing new for me there, except the weekly New Yorker, with its fiction section, and the one or two poems it features. I have my New Yorker weeks, when I check to see the latest story by a name like T.C. Boyle (one of my favorites), or Joyce Carol Oates (my real favorite in this category), or lately, Yiyun Li ( an excellent favorite), but after a while, I remember that I can read these writers at home, so I put the New Yorker back on the shelf and let my attention wander to BBC's Focus on Africa, only to realize that I already saw this edition last week; then I see New African (indeed a new one), but the issues are the usual Zimbabwe this, Kenya that, South Africa chino nechocho, and that's okay; so put down and read about President Obama ("what's next?") in Newsweek, New Statesman, The Economist, and at the back of my mind I am thinking: "Since they have all the diet books on my Front Island now, where did they put my fiction titles?"

Next, I look a the other tables in the not-so-front section of the store, and guess what, new paperbacks attract my attention; they are on a special display, new ones mixed with other trade paperbacks that are new too, although they are only new because they have recently been made into movies. You have your Up in the Air, your Lovely Bones, your Saphire novel which was recently Precious and Comack McCarthy's The Road. So you dicide, "Nothing new here", and move on to the center of the store, where, miraculously, you discover the books you have been looking for, on a table labeled "Recent Arrivals". And here you will spend a good one hour poring over the new stuff.

Summertime by Jim Coetzee.

On this table J.M. Coetzee's Summertime is still a recent arrival, which it is, because it has never been "recent" in this and many other (I suspect) US mega book stores--and that's okay, because some books that are new this month in the United States were new in Europe, South Africa (it's a country, I know) and other continents six or so months ago. That's just how things work in publishing, so I start browsing Summertime and, immediately, stop because this is the kind of book you need to own first before you browse because it will force you to write in it, to respond, to nod in ink....

Let's back up a little. Today I stopped at the front of store island, with its diet books (because I ain't getting any younger, in as far as diets, etc). I couldn't help but notice the strong messages in the titles, so I noted down twenty out of the 50 or so titles there: The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Longterm Health; Weithwatchers in 20 Minutes; Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook; Fatbelly Diet; Senza Weightloss Program; Younger You Diet; Eat to Live; The 4 Day Diet; The Intellectual Devotional Health; Your Inner Skinny: Four Steps to Thin Forever; The Mayo Clinic Diet; So Easy (especially if you eat shrimp and veggies); Fabulous Body for Life for Women; Food Matters; Fat Flush Plan; Denise's Daily Dozen; High School ReUnion Diet; The Skinny Girl Diet....and the list goes on.



These titles can make one smile; they have a positive message; a short cut to carthasis, unlike most of the literary titles I am so attached to. Some of these books make dieting seem easy, which is the point, with their pictures of smiling people, unlike some of the horrendous images on the literary table, or the often obscure impressions you see on some of the books I usually browse. Today, I left the front of store island with a smile, but I was hungry too, what with all the colorful shrimp pictures, the nice vegetables, the tender, skinless, boneless....

Then I continued to the literary titles. Took another a good at Summertime (a man shows his father a newspaper report about a killing in Botswana perpetrated by the South African Apatheid army agents, the victims are all ANC members, and as I move to the next section of the book I notice the character is J.M. Coetzee himself ("I'll wait until I get this book!").

There is also this new phenomenon, this novel by Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed. I am going to read it one day. The storyline is attractive; a reasonable man decides to leave his office one day and walk. Walk without stopping until he walks himself into exhaustion, some kind of walk-until-you-pass-out phenomenon. I am reminded of the running Forest Gump, the walking Henry David Thoreau, the transcendalist Emerson: I love books that lift me to flights of imagination, books that make me regret never having written them: walking as inspiration, as flight into new phases of meaning? I will read this one!

Hillary Mantel's new book is very new here (a recent arrival); it is that Booker winning book entitled Wolf Hall. I almost touch it, but I move on to Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze, only because it sounds familiar, the name (and the title); yes, it is in the mail to me from the SF Book Review. It's a new publication, praised by Uwem Akpan (himself a new discovery) as an important book. Chris Abani has praised it too, and it is by an African writer ( a writer from Africa, from Ethiopia, writing specifically about Ethiopia in the 1970s).



There are other interesting new fiction titles: Amy Bloom's Where the God of Love Hangs Out, Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna (which is not new anymore, but I can't complain: it sits next to one of the most interesting literary discoveries of 2010, Heidi W. Durow, whose debut novel The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (and she actually fell)won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Whoever put the title next to Kingsolver knows his or her job; there is a connection.



Bellwether is directed by Kingsolver and it honors fictional works that deal with issues of social justice. Because it seemed such an important book, I already read it and plan to talk about it here during the weekend. But today I picked it and started re-reading parts of it, just to enjoy the use of language, the very lovable point of view. With this, I run out of time.