Hi folks,

It's been a busy August for me. As DC has emptied out for vacation, I've taken the opportunity to clean out my proverbial closet and my literal desk. As such, I have taken my Buyer's Corner duties for granted. For this, I apologize.

I'll be taking the rest of the month off to clean up the mess I've made. And to read more books. But I'll return in September clear-headed and witty.

In the mean time, here's a few words on a book that I really enjoyed and that remains on our paperback bestseller list.

Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness is a fascinating cultural and psychological look at the human search for happiness. Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard and is also conveniently a funny and engaging writer. He delves into the way our minds work and how our desire to predict the outcomes of our behavior and confounds our quest for happiness. This is most certainly not a self-help book, but a walk through the brilliant but inept imagination of the human mind.

As the weekly email suggests, it’s been a busy week down at the Arlington-Courthouse Olsson’s. The staff at the store took on the project with energy and enthusiasm and so we were able to create our new space with very little disruption to our customers. It looks great right now, and we’re looking forward to having new neighbors and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee.

Right now I’m reading William Gibson’s latest novel Spook Country. There has been a lot of buzz about this book in the past couple of weeks. Bill Sheehan wrote an essay in this past Sunday’s Book World about it, Wired magazine has an interview with Gibson. It’s been a couple of years since Pattern Recognition, which was the first book of his I’d read. This newest offering follows in the vein of the previous one. It’s not science-fiction; it’s more like up-to-the-minute technology fiction. Because really, who needs a future dystopia when the present offers so much bleakness.

Pattern Recognition was very much a post 9/11 novel. The protagonist Cayce is haunted throughout the novel with her father’s disappearance from New York City on 9/11. Under this pall she attempts to reconcile the pace and intensity of globalization, advertising, and instant communication with the physical and spiritual limitations of motion. The clever introduction on the first page of the novel is her friend’s theory of jet lag being the soul’s inability to travel as fast as the body.

Spook Country has Hollis Henry covering a new virtual reality for an as yet un-launched magazine. The application for this technology so far is as an art form; however, it quickly becomes apparent that there are far more sinister possibilities. Although the new novel is thematically a continuation of his previous novel, Gibson is constantly updating and adapting to the world around and the novel is far more culturally and technologically current than I am. Spook Country will be available next Tuesday at all our stores. Check it out for yourself.