A Bookish Scavenger Hunt, or The Time I Almost Lost a Rigged Contest

We booksellers often joke at the bookstore that when someone comes in to ask us for a vague recommendation like "I just want a good page-turning book," we freeze -- like we've never read a book in our entire lives. It's not that we don't have any ideas, it's that we have TOO MANY good ideas -- paralysis by choice, sort of. (To be fair, we do go through the progression -- "what do you usually read? what have you read lately that you've liked?" -- and that usually jars a few ideas loose.)

So when the hosts of the Chicago Writers Podcast, Dan Finnen and Michael Welch, cooked up an idea (there may have been a beer or two involved) to try a video Book Scavenger Hunt version of their popular podcast, and invited me to be a contestant, I was both excited, and terribly, terribly nervous. Would the Bookseller Freezing Phenomenon happen for something like this too? 😬

Here's how it worked. Dan came up with categories, like "the book that would be the best bad gift for your grandparents" and "the most Greg Zimmerman book here" (see how rigged this was!), and Mike and I had to run off to find a book that best fit the category. Then, RoscoeBooks' owner, Erika VanDam, judged which book we picked won each category. 

I am nothing if not a gracious winner. Much credit to Mike, who had to overcome a hostile and unfamiliar environment, a very biased referee, and extremely Greg-friendly categories. 😂 He made it close. 

Watch the whole video below (or at YouTube).

Shelf Lives, Vol. 5: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

I'm writing this in a bookstore. RoscoeBooks. The bookstore at which I've been a part-time bookseller since November of 2014 -- nearly 11 years. November and early December of 2014 is also when I spent two of the best reading weeks of my life with The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell.

I'm not sure there's another book on my shelf that so quickly elicits such strong memories and sense of time and place as this one does. It's almost like one of those scenes in a horror movie when a character accidentally touches a talisman of some sort and the music crescendos and we get a horrifying glimpse into that character's evil past deeds of murder most foul. When I flashback to when the bookstore opened, it's not quite horror movie vibes...but if I'm honest, it's close.

The store opened on November 21, 2014 -- the Friday before Black Friday. We were a small staff of four, plus our owner, who was venturing into the book business for the first time. Only two of us actually had any bookselling experience at all. What could possibly go wrong? 

That first holiday season at the store was pure, unadulterated chaos. The neighborhood was SO EXCITED to get a bookstore, and there was never a moment when we weren't absolutely slammed. Combine that with the fact that we hardly had any freakin' idea what we were doing and those first few weeks in holiday-rush December were weeks that tried our souls. We hadn't yet perfected our system for special orders, and I'm sure there were several disappointed customers who'd ordered books for gifts that didn't arrive in time. We almost never had any of the popular books in stock because they'd sell out as soon as we got them back in. We didn't even have a website yet! 

But we made it. What we lacked in expertise, we made up for in hustle and pure love for the books. For the most part, people were cool. There was an occasional annoyed customer (everyone's frazzled during the holidays), but people understood we had just opened, and were so happy the neighborhood had a bookstore, they were willing to forgive us our sins. We told ourselves in January that that first month was as difficult as it'd ever be. If we'd gotten through that, we could navigate anything. (That turned out to be true until March 2020 rolled around...but that's another story.) 

November 2014 -- a few days after the store opened.

I finished The Bone Clocks (here's my review) on a mid-December afternoon right before an evening shift at the bookstore. I remember I was almost late because when I closed the book, I couldn't move. I was almost sobbing, so sad it was over. But mostly just stunned. How could what I just read have come from another human mind? 

And the book itself? It's bonkers. Just absolutely nuts. It's six interconnected stories set over 60 years centering on the life of one Holly Sykes. There's no easy way to summarize what Mitchell is up to here. Many readers are probably more familiar with Mitchell's breakout smash Cloud Atlas, and this book has a similar vibe. But more. So much more. It's the story of good vs evil on planes of existence only David Mitchell could write. And it's all set in what Mitchell calls his "uber-novel" -- a universe of his recurring characters. 

When I first finished the book, I wrote that it may creep its way into my top five favorites of all time, but I needed some distance before I could make that call. Here we are, 11 years later, and I can tell you it's still there -- still an all-time favorite. And I'm still here, working (and writing) in a bookstore. The Bone Clocks and RoscoeBooks --- two things inextricably linked, both of which I love dearly. 

Pan, by Michael Clune: A Splatter Pattern of Images, Light, and Color

I love it when a book unwittingly (or perhaps very wittingly) describes itself. Here's a sentence from Michael Clune's debut novel, Pan: "Good writing, I came to believe, was the careful, painstaking replacement of each part of the world with a part that looked the same, but was deeper, more mysterious, richer."

Good writing -- which this book decidedly exhibits -- describes the world in new ways. It attempts to take something common and make it extraordinary, to render something recognizable with a fresh veneer, to give readers a new and original way of looking at the world.

No wonder writing is so goddamn difficult. 

In Pan, though, Michael Clune succeeds in doing exactly what his character describes as good writing: He uses an array of linguistic acrobatics to make a story deeper, more mysterious, and richer. A seemingly straightforward plot about a teenager suffering from panic attacks and anxiety and trying to figure out why and how to ease his pain is rendered both recognizable and empathetic, but also completely fresh.

Readers often bandy about the cliché that good writers just see the world differently than normal people. Do they, though? Or are they just able to describe their experiences of the world better than anyone else? 

In fact, that's really what this novel is about: How do each of see the world? How are our experiences, both external and internal, unique or universal? How do we tell? Sometimes something that seems universal might be actually be unique. 

There's the classic color conundrum, which I honestly think about quite a lot. So I nearly fell off my chair when I read this sentence from Clune: "No one knows how color really looks to anyone else. It's the definition of a private experience. All we share are the names." 

Clune then goes off on a long tangent about the color of the sky in Gilligan's Island, which is both hilarious and profound, and an example of the many joys in reading this book. 

Indeed, in total, this novel is a splatter pattern of descriptions of images and light and color literally unlike anything I've ever read. Language in Clune's writing is malleable, formable, turn-able, twistable, and the result is writing so unexpectedly fresh and original, it was hard for me to put this book down. Not because the plot was riveting, but just because I couldn't wait to see what new joys the next sentence would bring. 

Almost unfailingly, the next sentence was surprising. I probably read this book way too quickly -- sometimes I got a little lost in the abstractions. Or maybe they were just too abstract and worked better in Clune's brain than they did on the page? Either way, this novel is truly a singular reading experience.

The Quirk's The Thing: Five Books That Make You Go Hmm...(In a Good Way)

I just finished reading Kate Folk's debut novel, Sky Daddy -- a really fun and funny read, which is successful because Folk is able to keep the main quirk of the novel going throughout the whole book. The main quirk? The protagonist is sexually attracted to planes. I know! But it works. And I was in awe of how Folk MAKES this work throughout a carefully crafted plot about making your way in an absurd world. 

The book got me thinking about other sort of quirky novels in which a character has an odd trait or sexual proclivity or just something generally quirky that you wouldn't think could work for a whole novel, but totally does. Here are five.

Nothing To See Here, by Kevin Wilson -- My go-to summation of this novel that hasn't let me down yet: It's the funniest book you'll ever read about spontaneously combusting children. Very much like in Folk's Sky Daddy, I went into the novel assuming the quirk (some may say "plot device" or "premise") is a metaphor for something, but about two-thirds of the way through the novel, I was having too much fun and gave up trying to figure out what it was.

Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino -- Here, the quirk is that the character is an alien and her sexual proclivity is actually that she doesn't much like sex at all. To read this book, though, is to love it -- and the quirk that the character is an alien and has to report back on the absurdities of humanity, which does manage to work all the way through the novel, is more timely now than ever. 

The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman -- A very deep cut here (in fact, I just discovered as I went to try to link to this book that it's out of print, and that both blew my mind and made me sad), but I love Ned Beauman and if you're looking for something really quirky, really strange, and REALLY EFFING FUNNY, try this book about a dude in 1930s Germany whose quirk is that, against all odds, he just can't seem to get laid. Here's a quote from the book that may help you determine whether or not you'll like it: "Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another." Make sense? Good. 😂

Bunny, Mona Awad -- Maybe this books is less quirky and more just "WTF DID I JUST READ?"...but in a good way, yes?  I guess I'm cheating a little here including this book because it could technically be categorized as horror, and then all bets are off regarding quirk. But Bunny is unique enough -- and the "rules" of the novel inventive enough and work well enough all the way through -- that I'd be remiss NOT to include it. (The sequel to Bunny titled We Love You, Bunny, is due out September 23.

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon -- Slothrop, Pynchon's quirkiest of all quirky characters, gets a boner in the exact spot a rocket is going to land. Why? How? Does it matter? Who effing knows. A decade or so ago, I spent six months reading this book -- and Slothrop's boner quirk is basically the only thing I remember about it. Well, that and there's a chapter narrated by a lightbulb.  

What am I missing here? Give me your favorite novels with a quirky plot device! 

Waterline, by Aram Mrjoian: All Happy Families Are Different

Tolstoy famously wrote "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is, of course, bullshit. Well, the second part is probably right, but the first part makes no sense. What even is a "happy family"? Does a "happy family" require that every member of the family is happy 24/7?  What happens when a happy family suffers a tragedy? Do they immediately become in irredeemably unhappy family? 

Aram Mrjoian's debut novel Waterline is a beautifully rendered portrait of a previously happy family, the Kurkjians, who become an unhappy family when tragedy strikes. 

Brothers Edgar and Karo, live next door to each other with their wives and families in Grosse Ile, Michigan, a small community south of Detroit. When Karo's daughter Mari commits suicide, both families are jolted from their quiet, middle-class lives. 

Mrjoian's portrays each family member's attempt to come to terms with the trauma over the course of a couple months in the immediate aftermath of Mari's death. One goes on a cross-country roadtrip. One finds relief in pot and booze. One, has an affair.  

All the while, the legend of their patriarch Gregor, who escaped the Armenian Genocide and heroically helped save members of his village, casts a contextual shadow over the family's post traumatic resilience. In fact, I'd argue that family legends -- not how families are unhappy -- are what make even happy families unique.

I loved this book -- read it in two days. (I can't help but think I when I read a book so quickly that at some level it must be frustrating to the writer to spend so long writing, polishing, and publishing a novel, only to have it whisked through like a dinner buffet. Sorry, Aram!) Mrjoian writes with subtle humor, deep insight, and sharp wisdom. He's a joy to read, and I can't wait to see what he does next!