From the Archives: A Love Letter to Independent Bookstories
In the United States, the last Saturday of April is Independent Bookstore Day–a nationwide party for book lovers. (If you’re reading this the day it comes out, that’s tomorrow.) If you’re lucky enough to have an independent bookstore near you, stop by and show them some love. Me? I’ll be traveling back from a speaking gig in Oklahoma City. I guess I’ll just have to celebrate a day late.
I’ve never seldom, met a bookstore (or book-selling venue) I didn’t like. I will happily browse through a big box store, a used bookstore, or the odd shelf of books in a flea market stall. In a strange town or foreign city, a bookstore visit will always make me happy, even if most of the books are in a language I can’t read. I’ve never come away from a library sale without an armload, or in the case of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference annual book sale, several canvas bags full.* But independent book stores have a special place in my heart.
Heritage Books in Springfield, Missouri, was my first bookstore crush. It was a small store in a strip mall within walking of my house. In retrospect I realize that the selection was both small and eccentric, but at the time it seemed as bounteous as the Strand Bookstore in New York, which boasts eighteen miles of books. In some ways both the smallness and the eccentricity were to my benefit as a novice book buyer. On those rare occasions when I had some money to spend on a book, I gave in to the delights of serendipity, finding books I didn’t know existed.
Today I live in Chicago, which is home to fabulous independent bookstores. Once again, I’m lucky enough to live within walking distance of my favorite stores: the very academic Seminary Coop Bookstore and its more commercial sibling, 57th Street Books. I browse. I chat about books with booksellers. I eavesdrop on the bookish conversation of others. I check to see if my own books are on the shelves. I check to see if my friends’ books are on the shelves. I attend an occasional reading when the stars are in alignment. I resist the temptation to buy books I don’t need, because at this point I already own several hundred books I have not yet read. And I give in to the temptation to buy more books because with bookstores it’s a case of use them or lose them.
*Held each year on the weekend around Columbus Day. It’s a dangerous event. See you there?
The Longest Day
As I’ve mentioned before, My Own True Love and I are traveling to Normandy in May on a tour led by the National World War II Museum. The focus of the trip is D-Day–something I know about in only the broadest of terms. Which means I decided to read up, because that is what I do. The museum helpfully included a list of suggested reading: ten serious works of military history written by respected historians and journalists, ranging in scope from a comprehensive history of the war from the American and British perspective drawing largely on first hand accounts to the story of a group of men from one small town in Virginia who died at Omaha Beach.* Overwhelmed by the choices, I identified the ones we already owned (and by we, I mean My Own True Love) and then picked one at random.
The book gods smiled on me. Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day proved to be just the kind of military history I like. In the foreword Ryan claims the book is “not a military history. It is the story of people: the men of the Allied forces, the enemy they fought, and the civilians who were caught up in the bloody confusion of D Day.” Ryan manages the paradoxical task of portraying the sense of confusion with utter clarity. Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of a omniscient narrator who can see the invasion as a whole, he moves from one powerful vignette to another, replicating the isolation of each unit on the battlefield. He moves from tragedy to comedy and back. His enlisted men are as vivid as his generals. He not only made me care about members of the invading force, he made me feel sympathy for lower-level German officers unable to respond to the invasion because of bad decisions made higher up the chair of command. (Quite a hat trick.) My only complaint with the book is that it made me cry on public transportation.
Will The Longest Day help me follow the course of the invasion as we walk the beaches in Normandy? Maybe not. But it certainly helped me understand the battle in human terms. And that is, after all, one of the reasons I read history.
*Here’s the list for anyone looking to add to your To-Be-Read shelf:
Stephen Ambrose. Band of Brothers.
Stephen Ambrose. D-Day: June 6, 1944
Stephen Ambrose. Pegasus Bridge**
Rick Atkinson. The Guns at Last Light: the War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
Tom Brokaw. The Greatest Generation
Robert M. Citino. The German Way of War
John Keegan. Six Armies in Normandy
Alex Kershaw. The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice.
Donald L. Miller. The Story of World War II
Cornelius Ryan. The Longest Day
It’s an impressive list, but I must admit it made me wonder if there are any books about D-Day written by women. A quick Google search gave me an impressive number of hits, all with notation “missing: women“–which sums things up on many levels. If anyone knows of an example, please let me know.
**In case you hadn’t caught on, Dr. Ambrose was one of the founders of the museum.
Women Warriors and So-Called Armor
I am slowly tiptoeing my way into the edits on Women Warriors: responding to my editor’s concerns about structure,* fixing sentences that cause me pain as I read them a month or ten after writing them, tracking down incomplete references,** tightening up some sections, and expanding others. I find it to be a satisfying process, but there is no doubt that it does lead me down side paths that don’t directly affect the work at hand. Over the course of nine days, I’ve dug deeply into the Tailhook scandal, the relationship between the combat exclusion policy and requiring women to sign up for the draft,*** and the troubling question of “boob armor”. You can guess which one caught my imagination. (And may make it into the footnotes as part of a brief discussion of the contrast between our response to highly sexualized female warriors in media**** and our historical discomfort with real life women warriors. Not a trivial subject after all.)
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, “boob armor” refers to the form-fitting breastplates worn by many women warriors in comics, on the cover of pulp-ish fantasy novels, and in video games, television, and movies–and consequently by their cosplaying real life imitators. (Not to mention various Wagnerian sopranos. Opera and space opera have more in common than you might think.) Some versions of boob armor are more overt than others–Xena’s armor not only has bra cups but swirls designed to call attention to the same.
Boob armor is at first glance one step better than the pervasive “armor bikini”–which is made of some material generally associated with armor but does not cover any of the body parts you would want armor to protect in case of a fight. But as the video below makes clear, the illusion of greater protection is just that: an illusion. It is intended to suggest that the character is a badass of the baddest variety while still leaving her *ahem* assets as unprotected as those your average damsel in distress.
What does all of this have to do with historical women warriors, you ask? Perhaps nothing. But then again, the image is an old one. It appears in Renaissance paintings of warrior-goddesses and in eighteenth century political cartoons of Britannia at arms. The unspoken message seems to be goddesses and female super-heroes can fight, but regular women? Not so much.
And yet, we know that Joan of Arc Joan transformed herself from a peasant girl in a homespun red dress into a knight, complete with the expensive accoutrements of horse, retinue, standard, and armor. I bet it wasn’t boob armor.
Joan of Arc
*Evidently it’s weird to have three separate introductions to a book. Who knew?
**In some cases, I didn’t have the complete reference and did not want to stop forward motion. But occasionally I didn’t write the whole thing down while I had the book in my hand. Why, past self? Why? *Headthunk”
***Evidently eliminating one would trigger constitutional problems with the other. A sample of the twisty thinking and odd arrangements that have been part of discussions about women in the military since World War I, when Western countries first accepted women in the military to different degrees and with different amounts of doublespeak.
****Not a new issue. Read Herodotus’s reports about the Amazons. Or eighteenth century ballads about women disguising themselves as men and joining the army, or the navy, or a pirate crew.
NOTE: If you’re reading this post as an email, you may need to click through to your browser to see the video. It’s worth it.