This Week in Books, 11th Ed.

 Grand Opening of a New Local Bookstore

    We have a new bookstore that opened here in Northern Kentucky. Okay, it's not exactly new, but it is the second location of our wonderful Roebling Books & Coffee.

    

    

    Let me repeat! We have a new bookstore location in Northern Kentucky. It's two miles from my house, and a block away from where I work. This might be dangerous.

    It opened Saturday, Nov. 27, which coincidentally is Small Business Saturday. It's at Sixth and
Overton in Newport's East Row neighborhood, a little more than a mile from its main store near the Roebling Suspension Bridge in Covington. So it's a local business -- and a bookstore. Everything is right about this.

    It being Opening Day, it was a little short on stock -- but heavy on coffee and tea, and atmosphere, and comfortable chairs, and wonderful art and antiques throughout. It's so much more than a bookstore.

    It's a local cafe. It's a community meeting center, fitting for its location in a residential neighborhood. It's a place to browse, to find new books, to explore new ideas. It is using a new way to present books -- with their covers facing out, giving them room to show off, to present their best selves, to speak to you, the reader.

    And a slow browse gives you the opportunity to listen, to hear the book call out to you, to whisper what it has to offer. Maybe it's a new experience, presenting a new culture, or showing new way of looking at life. Maybe it's a salve for a troubled soul. It might be a gift for a treasured friend.

    Or maybe it's promising a magical tale, a tour from the faeries into another dimension, a read to remember. What spoke to me was A Darker Shade of Magic, from V.E. Schwab, a wonderful writer who also penned The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

    

Road Trip!! For a writer?

So I have to ask: Is driving 5 1/2 to 8 1/2 hours to listen to a speech and have a new book signed by one of your favorite authors a logical thing to do?

It's not like I'm a stalker or a fan-boy. But I enjoy the work of Welsh author Jasper Fforde, and it's not like he's readily accessible here in the United States.

I look at it this way. I like to drive. The trip will give me a chance to explore a new city. Even better, I get the opportunity to visit another bookstore.


Plus, I get to hear Fforde speak -- and to buy a signed copy of his latest book, Early Riser.


Fforde writes what he calls absurdist fiction. The tagline for the new novel is, "Every winter, the human population hibernates."

I first discovered Fforde's work while perusing a going-out-of-business sale at my local Borders (remember Borders?) I don't like to take advantage of a bookseller's failure, but it was pricing items up to 75 percent off. I could not resist adding to my TBR stack, and off I went. I saw one of Fforde's books, and fell in love with the title: One of our Thursdays is Missing. I often buy books because I like the title -- an interesting color or cover also catches my eye -- and I have found a lot of favorites that way.

I did not know then that the Thursday book is the sixth in a series. Nor did I know I was reading it out of order. But I didn't care. It was funny, clever, and literate. I found the other titles in the series, and read them more-or-less in order.

The series takes place in Book World, a universe where fictional characters are real and live a regular life, only to come out and "work" when someone is reading the novel. Books have a certified copy that cannot change, because it would change the plot in every book that was printed. Indeed, the first tale in the series, The Eyre Affair, relates an illegal attempt to change the ending of Jane Eyre. Enter book detective, Thursday Next, a member of the literary police, who is assigned the task of stopping such things from happening. Thursday has a special talent -- she is one of the few people who can jump from real life to book life, and back again.

It's not only Book World that Fforde has dreamed up. He created a Nursery Crimes division of the literary police, and has its detectives investigate the death of Humpty Dumpty and look into the case of the three bears. He's also written a Young Adult series about magic -- from a golden age that has long since passed -- and dragons and quarkbeasts. "Quark," says the quarkbeast.

His books are filled with literary references, from the mundane to the obscure. Amusing, witty, sometimes laugh out loud literary references.


I know I am not smart enough to get all of them. When I do, I feel smug and brilliant. When I don't, I usually know it's there, and can guess the context.

Or  I'll look it up, as Casey once advised.

My all-time favorite? While attending a party in Book World, Thursday Next looks down to see a young fellow tuging on her skirt. He was asking her, "If you please, draw me a sheep" No. 2 on my list is when Thursday somehow leaps out of a Shakespeare play with Hamlet in tow. She asks her mother if he can stay, or if he should return to Book World. Her mother thought he should stay in the real world for a while "Then he won't need five acts to make a decision."

How many acts do I need? I really want to go.

New goal: To see the best bookstores in the USA

I have a new goal in life. No, it's not to have my Twitter account blocked by Donald Trump or Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, although those are both worthy goals.

The Book Loft, in Columbus, Ohio

Instead, it is to visit every bookstore on this list, which purports to name the best bookstore in each state. I'm not sure how the listmaker made the selections. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that I have visited just two of them, one in my home commonwealth of Kentucky, and the second across the river in Ohio.

As for the Kentucky selection, I would agree that Carmichael's in Louisville is a fine and dandy place. It's cozy, yet has a good, eclectic selection. Still, I would give my vote to Coffee Tree Books in Morehead. It's near the campus of Morehead State University, has a generous collection of books beyond the typical best sellers, and it behind the best named coffee shop in the world -- The Fuzzy Duck, which, by the way, also has a great selection of teas.

The second -- the Book Loft in Columbus, Ohio -- is without doubt the top bookstore in my neighboring state to the north. I wrote about this gem in a previous blog post about the the best independent book stores I have visited. It remains true.