My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said the bookseller. The woman laughed and left. Bookselling is tough; that’s nothing new. In Riceyman Steps, a 1923 novel, the proprietor of the eponymous bookstore and his wife die of impoverishment and immiseration. In The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller, a 1931 novel presented as a memoir, the destitute bibliophile gases himself. As novels, they present a dark fantasy of bookselling; and, maybe unsurprisingly, both are British. The bookstore in the American imagination—established in part by Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop (1919), where customers receive bibliotherapy amid the lamplit labyrinth of a “warm and comfortable obscurity”—is a happier place. As scholars Kristen Doyle Highland and Eben Muse have demonstrated, ours is a fantasy of homey nooks where contingency and serendipity rule, outside the dictates of worldly time.
Evan Friss announces his commitment to this fantasy with the title of his new book, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. Typically, bookstore is American usage and bookshop is British. But the booksellers at Friss’s paragon, Three Lives & Company in Greenwich Village, think store “sounds too commercial” and prefer shop—so he does too. Three Lives is a place where life happens. Camille remembers to ask after your ailing grandmother; Richie pops in with a “wedge of Gruyére”; Adrienne drops off ballet tickets she can’t use. And fair, if Friss is a little biased: his wife worked there for eight years. A rheumatologist, “Dr. Gary,” once diagnosed her with shingles among the shelves. The novelist David Markson flirted with her, called her the “girl of my dreams.”
What would it take to grow plants to feed future astronauts on Mars? In science fiction, it isn’t much of a problem. Matt Damon’s character in the 2015 movie The Martian simply had to build a greenhouse, spread out human excrement, add water, and wait. The film got a lot of things right—bacteria in the human biome will be useful—but it didn’t account for the perchlorates. The potato plants that sustained him would never have grown, but even if they had, two years of eating contaminated, carcinogenic potatoes would have nuked his thyroid, boxed his kidneys, and damaged his cells—though he might not have realized it, because perchlorates are also neurotoxic. It would have been Matt Damon’s finest death scene.
At the time Andy Weir was writing the book on which the film was based, no one really knew just how plentiful and ubiquitous the chemicals were. Though they were first discovered by NASA’s Phoenix lander in 2008, it took subsequent rovers, and compilation of historic data, to confirm that not only are perchlorates everywhere on Mars, but they are, in fact, abundant. Overall, Mars’s surface has perchlorate concentrations of about 0.5% by weight. On Earth, the concentration is often a millionth that amount.
A concert begins with a series of reassuring rituals. First, the quick clip across the plaza, the flourishing of tickets, the awkward jostle of knees and coats. Then comes the hush between the audience’s hum and the first downbeat, the instant in which everyone present can legitimately hope for a miracle. What unfolds next is both foreordained and unpredictable: a performance superficially the same as any other rendition of the same score, but also profoundly different — wondrous, perhaps, or merely rote. Even when we know how the music will go, we don’t know how it will make us react.
As a society, we value that margin of uncertainty. We feel so strongly about preserving it that we erect large, expensive buildings for that purpose. A concert hall is a facility designed to generate indelible memories. This is where architects come in. Music can happen in a shed or a subway station. A violinist remains just as talented in her bedroom as on the stage of Carnegie Hall. But a great hall lies at the convergence of architecture, acoustics, and music. For the audience, the pleasures of seeing, hearing, and inhabiting a beautiful space merge in multisensory intensity. How high the ceilings rise, how intricately the walls curve and fold, how far the balconies extend, how steeply the floors are raked, how many seats fill how much square footage and what material they’re upholstered in — all these separately humdrum factors conspire to loft a crescendo so that it reaches the ear and hums through the body’s wires. We ask homes to give us comfort, offices to coax us into productivity, hospitals to help us heal; what we demand of concert halls is a regular opportunity to be moved.
We think of restaurant and pub closures in terms of chef and bar staff jobs lost and eating opportunities withdrawn. Our once vibrant hospitality sector, which pre-pandemic was worth almost £100bn, is shrinking fast. With it so are our lives. All of that is obviously true. But the impact of its sharp decline will be felt elsewhere too, not least at the very heart of our cultural lives. Because, as Tucci, Dornan, Casey, Graham and so many others attest, a web of hospitality jobs has long been what has kept struggling actors, writers, musicians and artists going through the lean years. They offer vital flexibility. In effect they prime the pump for the arts. Without those starter jobs, we limit who can make it to the few who have access to the bank of mum and dad.
As the days grow shorter and the night’s get colder, the urge to curl up with something darkly atmospheric and bewitchingly gothic begins to take its hold. Jennifer Delaney’s Tales of a Monstrous Heart is the sweeping slow-burn romantasy to lure you in with its Jane Eyre inspired vibes, ominous supernatural backdrop and brooding romance. But the best thing about this book, aside from the perfect blend of macabre fantasy and heart-stealing romance, is how completely unpredictable it is. From one eerie chapter to the next, you never quite know where this story is going to take you.
Write what you know they say, and Zoë Foster Blake has done just that, giving practical business insights throughout Things Will Calm Down Soon. This chick-lit is a cleverly disguised how-to guide for any young entrepreneur who wants to turn a product into a profitable machine. You can have it all, but at what cost?
Juice is a hefty book, in terms of pages and the future it sets out, and it keeps delivering.
Her novel resists obvious answers, rejects the attempt to neatly package something as complex and ordinary as a human life.
To write a biography of a figure as well known as Marie Curie and still offer something fresh or surprising is no easy undertaking. The double Nobel prizewinner is, as author Dava Sobel acknowledges, the only female scientist most people can name. She has inspired more biopics and biographies than I can count, including those written by her two daughters. Parents of young children will have encountered her story in almost every one of the worthy children’s anthologies that adorn school bookshelves: she features in Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, She Persisted Around the World and Little People, Big Dreams.
To help shed new light on such an iconic figure, Sobel, a bestselling writer of science histories, has interwoven her account of Curie’s life and scientific discoveries with those of dozens of female scientists who passed through her lab in Paris.