I'm off to the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in Portland, Oregon today! This is the second occasion of the WI and it will be chock full of education sessions, author receptions, and wise words from the darlings of independent book-selling. It should prove to be a wild and crazy booksellers mini-convention. It's not quite the annual BookExpo trade show in size and scope, but will be an opportunity, nonetheless, to commune with other trades-people and learn a bit about what's going on in the book world at large and what's working for other independents around the country.

I'm also looking forward to the trip because I've never been to Portland before and I'm taking a couple of extra days to wander around the city and take in all the sites. I picked up a copy of the Eat.Shop city guide series for Portland to help me wend my way through a few tasty meals and some crafty shopping. The series is very cool and is quite literally a square and simple design mixed with lush, enticing photos. They focus on smaller, independent, locally-owned restaurants and stores; it's no wonder I have an affinity for them. I'm happy to say they have a Washington DC eat.shop guide and we carry it at Olsson's, but some of the other cities they cover are Austin, Seattle, Chicago, and Paris. So I am eagerly awaiting my flight when I'll get to map out my meals, plan a little window shopping excursion, and then read, read, read. A ton. And then some more. And then maybe the in-flight magazine crossword puzzle. And then some more reading.

This brings me to the book aficionado's great dilemma: what books to take on the plane. I usually make a huge stack and then whittle them down and still end up with a bag half full of books and good intentions. But in this circumstance I can likely look forward to bringing more books back with me, which further complicates my decision making process. So some highlights from my pile so far are The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. These two are not yet available but I'll definitely be getting back to you about them here nearer to their respective releases. I'm actually about halfway through the Hall book now and it is pretty fantastic. It owes a bit to Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami, but also reminds me of Jim Dodge's Stone Junction, which I'd have to check to see if it's still in print.

Anchoring my pile of books right now is the must-have polito-cultural book of the month Power, Faith, & Fantasy by Michael Oren. It's a heavy one, but worth the haul. He offers a comprehensive history of America's involvement and interest in the Middle East from the Barbary Wars to the present day. He takes a broad approach, contextualizing our current entanglements through past involvements and perceptions, political and cultural, and manages to navigate a fraught landscape and tell a fascinating story along the way. Obviously, this book is inside-the-beltway material, but it also is a rich and engaging history that will appeal to a much wider audience.

I hope I can get all my clothes and sundries in my bag along with my books, but if not, my fellow bookies probably won't notice if I wear the same pair of jeans two days in a row... I hope.

Nestled in between all opportunities to mingle with my bookish brethren and discuss the finer points of author corralling and point-of-purchase displays I'm looking forward to teasing out some good, clean fun and re-invigoration. There really is nothing like geeking it up with a bunch of booksellers to get one fired up for the springtime.

So I'll report back soon, probably with some new books to ramble on about and maybe even some cool tales of the fabled and magisterial bookstore of Portland, Powell's Books.

Well, even without all the Holiday Madness of a few weeks ago, I am still swamped. My pretty red chair is already covered in books and papers and sweaters (because who knows weather it’s going to be freezing or 70º). And I am not a fan of the clutter. But it is upon me and I need to dig out.

To counter this heavy load of work weighing down on me, I’ve been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Henry Holt, $26). This is certainly a bit of a departure from her last two books, Nickel & Dimed (Henry Holt, $13) and Bait & Switch (Henry Holt, $13). But insightful and detailed reportage is what she does best and all three of these books fall into that category.

I remember the first time I read Barbara Ehrenreich… Back in those heady days of college in an American Studies class my professor assigned a book called Re-Making Love, which she co-authored with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs. Looking back at the Sexual Revolution through the closing aperture of the 80’s with the AIDS epidemic and a collective conservatism setting in, Ehrenreich and her co-authors wrote a compelling academic book that noted that it was women who had defined this major shift. I remember being very taken with the intelligent and measured writing; not that I didn’t like myself a little dazzling polemic back in the day. I just was so impressed by the coherent and well argued look at the appropriation of a movement by a collection of disparate cultural groups and influences. And I think I got a very rare “A” on that paper.

But enough day-dreaming now, back to the book at hand: Dancing in the Streets. As much a journalist as a cultural historian, Ehrenreich not only looks at the long history of ecstatic gathering, she also frames it in our modern, western world and our increasingly compromised attempts at spontaneously connecting with others. She’s not one to get caught up in the fervor of her subject; this book is as serious a work as anything else she’s written, an equally sober companion to Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (Henry Holt, $17). But the subject is infectious, she tells the stories of fantastic rituals, from African tribal dances, Bacchanals, Sufism, Carnival, to Medieval dance parties and shows the compulsion to counter these effusions through puritanism and organized military spectacles

This book collects a wonderful history of human gathering and celebration and observes with concern the effects of civilization and repression on that human nature. Panning wide but with intellectual vigor she makes a greater argument about human history and the conflicting elements of conformity and reverie.

I’m trying to take a chapter from this book and not get too down on myself for the mess of my office; it must be the whirlwind excitement of work. Who needs all that order?

Well, I’m getting situated in my new office. I brought in a chair of indeterminate Swedish heritage and a very nice rug that I have on (semi-) permanent loan from my brother. So, now I have a comfy reading corner, now I just need a pipe and a reading jacket.

During the holiday season with all that’s going on, it’s a bit hard to get some good reading time in. I am taking great advantage of this slightly less hectic time to get started on a whole host of books I’ve been eyeing for some time. I may have spread myself a bit too thin, I think I have about five books I’ve started in earnest in the last week.

One in particular that I am excited about and really enjoying is the new Martin Amis book House of Meetings (Knopf $23). It’s been a roller-coaster review ride for him the last few years, with his last effort Yellow Dog summarily panned. But this new one is something else!

A few years back Mr. Amis stepped outside of his usual genre and wrote a small book called Koba the Dread. Born of a joke his friend Christopher Hitchens made in reference to his and many other intellectuals' past support for and participation in communism, a reference to an idealism long gone. Even Amis’ father Kingsley had been a devoted communist for many years, before pulling an about face in his older age. This book explores the Soviet experiment and the atrocities that resulted. His central theme questioned how ambiguity of Bolshevism has never allowed for the horror to be fully recognized as it is with the Holocaust.

In House of Meetings, Amis writes the novel of this argument. He creates a character, mean and old, recounting his life story to his American stepdaughter Venus. This recollection is also his final journey back to Russia, back to the gulag he and his brother spent many years interned. Crisp and sharp, Amis’ prose draws a man burdened by his imprisonment, but also by his freedom, his survival.

I haven’t finished it yet, but am well on my way. Amis writes like only Amis can, with a razor wit, but this time without any detours in show-off verbosity. The monologue form suits him well.

House of Meetings hits the streets next Tuesday, January 16th so look for it then.

Another book I picked back up after starting some time ago is the tome Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (HarperCollins $29.95). This is HarperCollins' darling of the season and for good reason. A labyrinthine cast and story takes the reader through the living, breathing streets of Mumbai following the detective Sartaj Singh’s trail of the city’s seedy underworld and the gangsters who inhabit it.

This book weighs in at 900 pages, so I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Hello,

If you’ve been studiously reading Joe’s updates in the Buyer’s Corner, you’ll know that I’m the new Joe. He has officially moved to California, leaving me to fill his well-worn, sensible shoes. I thought I’d take this time to introduce myself to the book-hungry masses out there in the ether.

I hale from the Washington, DC Metropolitan area; specifically Alexandria, VA. As a surly teen I frequented the Olsson’s in Old Town looking for cool CDs and hanging out. I went on to the Big Apple for a number of years. The first four years I spent getting an English degree at Barnard College. And then I spent the requisite four years living in Brooklyn.

After an indeterminate amount of time “finding myself” I ended up clerking at Olsson’s and quickly found myself entrenched and loving it.

So, that’s a bit about me. And next week I’ll tell you what I’m reading and what’s new under the great big sun of publishing today!