While grabbing more bags from the basement, overhear one of your co-workers mentioning to a customer that the book they are buying was written by a bookseller at this very store! Hear another co-worker chime in that the book is “amazing,” and feel so much warmth in your heart that you could cry. Then hide under the basement stairwell until you are certain the customer has left the building.
As much as I’d love to paint a pretty picture of myself, curled up peacefully in my window seat, I don’t read there, or on any of the couches or armchairs in the living room or the bedroom or the den. I read in bed. I lie down on my side, beneath a down comforter, with my rat terrier Moochie tucked into the crook of my legs and her chin resting on my knee and my Kindle glowing. And, while Moochie snores, I will fall into the world of my book.
Blame a one-word culprit: search. Todd Stocke, senior vice president and editorial director at Sourcebooks, said that subtitle length and content have a lot to do with finding readers through online searches. “It used to be that you could solve merchandising communication on the cover by adding a tagline, blurb or bulleted list,” he said. But now, publishers “pack the keywords and search terms into the subtitle field because in theory that’ll help the book surface more easily.”
I’ve walked for days, even months and years, in Boston, New York City, London, Paris, Moscow, Vienna, Rome, Sydney—all beautiful, unique cities with varying grades of walkability. I went to Denver partly because all the books I’d read about walking tended to orbit around either these world-renowned cities or hiking and mountain climbing. “What about New York?” people invariably asked me when I talked about the lack of walkability in the United States. Sometimes they’d bring up Chicago, every now and then Boston. It’s so easy to turn to New York City and its fellow high-profile cities and ignore the rest of the country, the rest of the world. Yet all over the United States, towns and cities are quietly regaining their right to walk. From health initiatives like the Walk with a Doc program to the surprising removals of Futurama-inspired freeways in cities like Dallas, Texas, and Rochester, New York, to Atlanta’s one-billion-dollar commitment to walking and biking infrastructure over 25 years, walking is making a comeback. A slow, step-by-step comeback, as might be expected of such an endeavor, but with the strength one would also expect of a movement seeking to reclaim our free-striding bodies’ rights to our public spaces. I went to Denver to find how at least one lesser-discussed city was reshaping itself around the pedestrian.
This year, for the first time in my life, I have fasted for all of Ramazan. The Quran says during Ramazan you’re supposed to “eat and drink until the white thread of dawn appears to you distinct from the black thread of night.” And then fast until sunset—no food, no drink. The black thread/white thread part fascinates me, eating in the predawn morning until it’s light enough outside to tell the white thread from the black.
Nowadays there’s an app called Muslim Pro (a hilarious name) where you enter your location and it tells you exactly what time to stop eating. But I like to imagine a time when someone was sitting outside eating bread and cheese alone in the dark, checking and rechecking their two threads. They’d eat a bit more, yawn a bit, and then, suddenly, rubbing their eyes, they’d catch a gleam of light against the white thread and shout “Stop! Stop!” to their family inside.
That’s probably not how it ever worked.
The result of all this cleverness and torment is a highly enjoyable absurdist comedy about love and desperation, and male geniuses who are feted, and female geniuses who are ignored – and how despite this invidious state of affairs, we might at least agree that book reviewers are the worst people of all. That is, apart from novelists.
Passion, Gilbert never tires of informing us, that's the stuff of life. Not money, not the Darwinian struggle for survival, certainly not the family you are born with — passion is our raison d'etre. It's what makes us feel we are rocketing through the streets of New York City during the best days of our lives.