It’s so beautiful out, my mom used to say, don’t stay inside reading all day.
That’s one of the reasons I love Bart’s Books in Ojai.
While I bet most of you are aware of this California institution, it’s an open-air bookstore and maybe my favorite reason to be in Ojai. You can browse, you can buy, you can look up at the sky. (Which I did, Mom. I hope you’re happy.)
We made the trek up to the store a few weekends ago to check in after a few years away. Though its focus is on used books, Bart’s does carry a nice selection of new ones inside the little enclosed house area; the books in the former kitchen never fail to make me smile.
But mainly, I like to be in the open-air section with the used books, where you can find some great buys or interesting choices. Once I found a pair of newly-published Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales historical graphic novels. They were new to me, looked like fun and were very reasonable – and instantly became a favorite of my kids (not to mention everyone else’s kid as well).
There are a lot of books there, though, and if you don’t have enough daylight (shakes fist at winter’s early nightfall), it can feel a little daunting. While it should be stated emphatically that I don’t need any more books, let it also be said that I don’t care because that’s not the point: I want more books.
So I settled on something I’d never seen before, an omnibus edition of B.S. Johnson’s novels “Trawl,” “Albert Angelo” and “House Mother Normal.” I don’t know Johnson’s work that well – nor did I know that I was apparently getting a pretty sweet deal on the book – but I read and LOVED Jonathan Coe’s “Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson,” which is one of my favorite literary biographies. Even so, as I read Coe’s wonderful book, I wondered just how much I would have liked Johnson or his work. Still, and it’s been years since I read it, I still think about “Fiery” and recall it having compassion for an extremely difficult person. As the afternoon darkened, I had made my choice.
I had my eye on a few more things, but the sun was setting and my bank account dwindling. Clearly, it was time to go.
Zipping off to a favorite bookstore put me in mind of another book, Alta Journal’s “Best Bookshops in California and the West.” Featuring a terrific introduction by Alta books editor and novelist David L. Ulin, it is, as advertised, a well-curated look at some of our part of the world’s best booksellers. Run your finger up the map and you’ll find places to visit from as far South as San Diego’s Libélula all the way through California, Oregon and Washington’s Village Books and Paper Dreams in Lynden near the border of Canada. The book includes some stops in Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, NEvada and Utah, as well.
The book features the heavyhitters you might expect – Book Soup, Powell’s Books, Elliott Bay Book Company – as well as many of my favorites (Point Reyes Bookstore, Phinney Books and, yes, Bart’s, too) and some entirely new to me. I was even pleasantly surprised to find some folks I only know virtually – hello, to Greta and Chris at the Book Juggler in Willets, CA.
The book’s photos are lovely – including, I was surprised to find, one of my own of Octavia’s Bookshelf owner Nikki High – and it’s a fine resource to consult ahead of your next trip. It’s not, thankfully, exhaustive, because there are plenty of other shops to discover or rediscover on your own.
Because that’s half the fun, right? I had one of my best bookshop experiences ever when I noticed a sign for Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights while my family was finishing up lunch in Bath, England. “I’ll just slip over to the bookstore for a few minutes and you can get me when you’re finished,” I told them, possibly even believing it. In any case, we all left the shop 3 or 4 hours later, happy, book-laden and, in my son’s case, well-rested from a 45-minute nap in a cozy chair.
Or a few weeks ago, I met some friends for lunch in Atwater Village and afterward, we all walked to Alias Books East, where years ago I bought a lovely edition of Charles Portis’s “True Grit.” This time around I found a copy of Derek Raymond’s “He Died With His Eyes Open,” a crime novel I first heard about from our pals on the Backlisted podcast and have been wanting to read ever since. The cover, from the Melville House edition I found, is terrific. After that, I made my way to the comics store Secret Headquarters in search of material for last week’s graphic novel roundup.
We all have stories like these, about how we found a great hole-in-the-wall bookshop or stumbled upon a favorite writer. It part of the joy of books and reading and sharing our treasures with others.
Plus, when you make a journey in search of a bookstore, it means that, at least for a time, you’ll be outside in the fresh air.
David Kipen has covered California in letters
This week in the Book Pages Q&A, we hear from David Kipen, a native Californian with impeccable book credentials. Kipen’s resume includes working as book editor and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle; the NEA’s director of literature; and a critic at large for the Los Angeles Times. He’s also the founder and director of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights. Along with four reissued WPA Guides, Kipen’s previous books include “Dear Los Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters: 1542 to 2018,”and he’s at work on a forthcoming “California-set historical paranoid conspiracy thriller.” He’s got a new book out, and he provides some hints below about it and what it contains.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
Does a short story count? Other than my own books, I’ll steer people to a story by Thomas Pynchon called “The Secret Integration,” in his collection “Slow Learner.” It’s the only thing he ever wrote with a surprise ending. (Sure enough, a couple of his letters are in “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters.”)
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
The great “Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues” by Jim Bouton. Best gateway drug into reading I could’ve asked for. Bouton’s in “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters,” too. Come to think of it, “Ball Four” is Bouton’s diary of a season. Even then, come to think of it, I had a thing for diaries.
Q. Is there a book you’re nervous to read?
The draft of the novel I just finished writing.
Q. What’s something – a fact, a bit of dialogue or something else – that has stayed with you from a recent reading?
John Steinbeck called the Federal Writers’ Project’s WPA Guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together.”
Q. Do you have a favorite book or books? And is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?
This one’s a twofer. A professor, the late James Snead, assigned us “Gravity’s Rainbow” my sophomore year in college. Without that, beats me who I’d be.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
My name on the cover. The cover of “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters” is a beaut. Can you recognize which pier it shows? I wanted to use the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur, because it’s visual shorthand for both Northern and Southern California, but it’s hard to complain, considering how well the pier image worked out. The name of the pier also flips the bird at New York, as punishment all its immemorial cluelessness about California.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
I read the last several Harry Potter novels in about 24 hours apiece, so I could review them in the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle once had an august tradition of book critics, going back to the great Joseph Henry Jackson, who helped discover Steinbeck. He used to review – and this was the name of his column – “A Book a Day.” You better believe I made room for him in “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters.”
Book columnists are the indicator species of a healthy newspaper. The Chronicle no longer has one, but your readers do. I hope they appreciate you and make their appreciation known to the brass.
Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
I started out vowing to include at least one diary entry or letter from every county in California, and I may actually have succeeded. I’m a little afraid to tabulate it all now and find out otherwise. (For what it’s worth, I can state pretty confidently that “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters” contains entries from Los Angeles, Long Beach, Torrance, the Inland Valley, San Bernardino, Redlands, the San Gabriel Valley, Pasadena and Whittier. Also Alpine, the least populous county in California.)
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
It usually depends on what I’m working on. For “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters,” I read a pretty constant diet of, well, guess. If I’m writing an article or giving a paper, it’s the same idea.
If I’m refining my syllabus on the Federal Writers’ Project, to complement my activism for the 21st-Century Act (HR 5192), I read a lot of WPA Guides, plus stuff by John Cheever, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Saul Bellow – all alumni of the original Writers’ Project.
Finally, for the novel I’m polishing, I’ve been reading a lot of classic and contemporary genre fiction, just to see what the competition is turning out. As you might expect, it’s a California book, a Raymond Chandler novel that turns into a Dan Brown novel, which then flirts with becoming a Thomas Pynchon novel. How hard can that be to pull off?
Q. What are you reading now?
In addition to writing books like “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters,” I’m on the UCLA writing faculty and, for a new syllabus, reading a lot of great 20th-century essays by American Jews. I’m calling the class “America Through Cosmopolitan Eyes.” A lot of my students may not even have any Jewish friends, or have read any Jews besides Anne Frank and maybe Elie Wiesel. Indispensable writers both, but neither of them exactly a barrel of monkeys. I think, for example, Eve Babitz and E.L. Doctorow could really – to quote “Sunshine Superman” – blow their little minds. Essay recommendations welcome!
Q. Can you recall a book that felt like it was written with you in mind (or conversely, one that most definitely wasn’t)?
Nothing about fashion was written with me in mind.
Q. If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?
Did you notice that I worked some reference to “Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters” into almost of the answers above?
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Next on ‘Bookish’
The next installment is Dec. 15 at 5 p.m., as Ed Begley Jr. and Patricia Cornwell join host Sandra Tsing Loh and Samantha Dunn to talk about books. Sign up for free now.
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Read any books – and that includes ones you picked up in a used bookstore – that you want to tell people about? Email me at [email protected] with “ERIK’S BOOK PAGES” in the subject line and I may include your comments in an upcoming newsletter.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
