The Local Book Store is Dead!

That title is kind of an overstatement, but still....  I realised today that an institution I have been very fond of is no longer what it used to be and I'm sad.  This has been coming for a long time and I should have realized.  Today was just the day it hit me. 

To put today in context, I need to explain something and it's special enough to put in fancy letters:

Our daughter wrote a novel and today is the official publication date!!!

 David and I are just a wee, tiny bit proud....  😊

In case anyone is reading this and doesn't know our family, I will protect our daughter's privacy by referring to her by her pseudonym, which is Ada Hoffmann.   Her book is called "The Outside". I read an advanced copy of the first couple of chapters and it was about interesting characters in an interesting Sci Fi world and crazy things were happening and I can't wait to find out what will happen next!

So this afternoon we drove over to our local version of a big book chain. 

This store happens to be a new one, part of a renovated section of a local mall.  We used to patronize their old store, which was huge, and there were lots of helpful people in there who wanted to help us find things and get ideas.  I have never forgotten a year when our youngest child was in Grade 8 and we wanted to find him some new books for his birthday.  I wandered into the old store and started browsing the "young adult" section and an employee immediately saw me and asked if she could help me find something.  I told her I was browsing for ideas and she asked a couple of questions about our son and what he'd been reading and she said "oh, if he likes those I bet he'll like...." and started pulling books off the shelves.  I chose several of them and it was a very successful birthday.  That's what book stores are supposed to be like -- a place where you can browse and get suggestions and generally share the love of books.

This new store is less than half of the size of the old one and a great deal of its space was devoted to knick-knacks and cutesy stuff, some of it relating to books and some having nothing to do with books.  It was almost like the bookshelves were afterthoughts.  We ran to the rather small Science Fiction section and looked for the H's.  Not a single copy of this novel or her previous book of short stories.  (It would have been really cool too, because she would have come right after Heinlein!!!)  I thought maybe books didn't always arrive in the stores by the official dates, or maybe we weren't looking in the right place, so we talked to a very bored clerk.  She said basically "oh yeah, I don't know if we're going to stock that".  We said "she's a local author" and she said "we usually don't stock local authors unless they reach out to us".  It was almost like she was stifling a yawn while waiting to go back to selling t-shirts.  She directed us to the little computer where we could order our copies -- just like we could have done from home. 

I'm probably being a little ridiculous about this.  We'll get our copies pretty soon and it will be exciting to read them, and that's what really matters.  I understand that Internet shopping is changing everything and it is a great convenience.  To be perfectly honest, this new book store has been open for months and I'd never been in there before.  Usually we hear about books online or from friends and order them online.  I haven't been supporting local book stores, so I'm part of the problem.  Why should I have expected that that wonderful sort of big book store I remembered would be there waiting for me when I decided to go back?  And maybe with the Internet we don't actually need that kind of great big book store anymore.  Still, I wasn't ready to walk into that store and find something so different from what I had expected.

I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.  The online "bookstores" make it so much easier to order books by new authors that not every store might carry.  

There is still a little independent book store downtown, run by people who love to read books and help people find good books to read.  We're going to patronize it more in the future and consider ordering books through them instead of from the big names if they get a cut.  Even if their books cost a little more than books from the big box store we would like to do business with a place that offers real service and gives back to the community.

And the good news is that you can still get a copy of Ada's book no matter where you live.  You might have to go online, but it's available everywhere.

Politics (eek!)

I try not to be a very political person, but today I'm making an exception.  I want to make this a general reflection about things that have been going through my head, rather than a specific political rant.  I'm not sure if it will end up making sense to anyone except me, but I need to get this off my chest.

For anybody who reads this and doesn't know, I grew up in the U.S. but have lived in Canada for more than half my life now.  This gives me a bit of a split viewpoint as I follow recent news and provides a lot of interesting material for conversation with my Canadian husband.  History and Civics were never my best subjects in high school, but I'm finding myself able to remember things from those long-ago classes.  I don't have a comprehensive set of details filed in my brain, but I do remember some of the basic principles we talked about at length.

I particularly remember a lot of discussion about "checks and balances".  For non-Americans reading this, the U.S. federal government is divided into three branches -- legislative, executive, and judicial (i.e. Congress, President & Supreme Court).  These checks and balances consist of a lot of rules in the constitution and later amendments, spelling out rules for how these three branches work together.  That includes things that each branch is supposed to do, things each branch is forbidden to do, and ways in which the three interact in both positive and negative ways.  I just found a nice little easy-to-read overview of this at https://bensguide.gpo.gov/j-check-balance. 

Setting aside personal political feelings, I'm reflecting that we're living in "interesting times", seeing a lot of these principles being demonstrated and tested and speculated about.  The president has the right under vaguely defined sorts of circumstances to declare a state of emergency and do an end run around congress to get something done.  The current president is certainly not the first one to do this.  The president has the right to veto bills passed by congress and the congress has the right to override those vetoes if they have a strong enough majority.  (And the Congress is divided into two houses, which sometimes cooperate and sometimes fight like cat & dog.)  The president appoints Supreme Court justices but Congress has to approve those appointments and Congress can impeach justices.  The Supreme Court can "interpret" bills and consider precedents set by presidents and congress.  

The principle behind all this is to spread power evenly between a large number of people so that it's harder to have one person or a small group of people hijack everything.   One can think of it like a three-legged table; when all three legs are working well the legs provide stability and make it harder to tip the table over than if it were balanced on just a single pedestal or two legs.  Or like a responsible adult sitting down with three squabbling children and telling them "you are going to have to find a way to calm down and work things out between you".

If you look at it another way it feels like a recipe for chaos.  Anyone who has tried to get even something small done by a group of people with vastly different opinions and backgrounds knows how difficult and unpleasant this can be.  So much simpler to have a single leader or small, homogeneous group that makes the hard decisions and for everyone to follow them.  But also much more dangerous.  

I remember some discussions about politics with my parents many years ago, agreeing that the ideal form of government might be a benevolent dictator -- someone wise enough to take all the hard decisions off of our hands and save everyone else the hard work of those messy decisions.  But the conversation went on to the obvious question: where do we find one of those? And if we miraculously found the perfect parental figure to lead us all in a perfect way, what happens when he or she dies or wants to retire?  

I'm thinking that the current state of the U.S. is a perfect example of this whole dilemma.  The government is looking like a jigsaw puzzle that just won't fit together into a whole.  Different individuals and groups within it have very different ideas of what is right and what should be done -- not just about immigration but about many other things as well.  It's chaos and it's hard to watch.  We all wish for wisdom and unity in high places.  Although if we examined that wish we would almost certainly find that we have widely different opinions about what wisdom (or even unity) would mean at the present time.

I'm kind of meandering towards a point here.  When power is shared between many people, it can be very messy and inefficient and frustrating and nobody may get exactly what they want.  But when power is concentrated in one person or one small homogeneous group, the risks are obvious.  So as upset as I am to see my country of birth floundering around and in-fighting as they are right now I will take it over the other options.  And I suddenly realised that I've run right back to Winston Churchill, who said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

David and I just happened to finish watching the Ken Burns documentary about the Roosevelts and I was fascinated with FDR's time -- the depression and World War 2 and all of the changes and disagreements in those times. We are living in "interesting times" right now, but there have been interesting times before and there will be again and as long as we have the right to interact and discuss we'll get through it.   History is an extremely messy process and I don't see a way around that.

If anyone reading this doesn't like what I've written, that's OK.  That's what life is about.  We all see it in smaller scales -- in families, workplaces, churches, local organizations, etc.  Sometimes the fighting and disagreements are very hard to take, but they seem to be a necessary part of life.  The most we can hope for is to manage it with some degree of courtesy towards the other points of view.  If you know me personally I'd be happy to talk.  If you've just stumbled onto this page there's a limit to how much online arguing I can manage at the moment, but you still have the right to disagree.

OK, it's time to move from generalities to the current situation.  I've got Trump's speech recording right now and I need to be a big girl and turn on the DVR and watch it from the beginning and find out what is going to happen next in this great drama.  And then try to take deep breaths afterwards as the commentators argue about what it all means and what might happen next.  And remind myself that although North America is going through an extremely difficult time right now  the system is flexible enough that we're not stuck here.  There is potential for compromise and for corrections.