Books Worth Pining For

Chapter I. June

In a desperate attempt at trying to regain my understanding of the current publishing situation and thus overcome the resurgence of impostor syndrome – the curse of the furloughed bookseller – I've started to take notes about recent or upcoming releases and books in the media. At work, I usually flip through the Bookseller, and at home, I have my trusted TLS subscription. This, with spending my days at the store, talking to people and looking through social media is usually enough to feel myself not entirely lost. Which I am now. Gone are the days when I could gracefully slide towards a table and place the coveted obscure title into the palm of a dazed customer. This particular selection of books are all finds I happened upon while desperately trying to consume as much information as possible while sitting on my bed, petting one of my neighbour's disturbingly similar cats and drinking sugar-free Red Bulls for some reason.

The Fire is Upon Us by Nicholas Buccola

Princeton University Press

I remember reading Buckley's vile Why The South Must Prevail for the first time. It's truly astonishing how much ignorance, privilege and hate one can fit inside one article. It reads like one of those alt-right youtube videos from the previous decade in which half-witted basement-dwelling white people masquerade in ill-fitting suits in their best attempt at seeming rational. This is how Buccola puts it: “Buckley’s position was hostile to both democratic and liberal values. He was far less concerned with the demand that all human beings should have a say in their political destiny, or that all individuals have rights that ought to be protected than he was with the idea that those who were best suited to preserve civilization were authorized to do what was necessary to achieve this goal.” Three days after the Cambridge Union debate Malcolm X was murdered and Baldwin's cries, addressed to white reporters echo horribly in the wake of the murder of George Floyd: "You did it! It is because of you – the men who created white supremacy – that this man is dead!"

Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens

Penguin Classics

On the 9th of June, it's going to be the 150th anniversary of Dickens' death. Yes, I am a Dickens person. And I'm a Dickens person primarily because I'm a London person. I have a fascination with London that has inspired many hours of aimless walking, visiting and probing around as well as some reading about the metropolis. Dickens was astonishingly observant about London, its variety, poverty, wealth and its inhabitants. Night Walks and Sketches by Boz are both odes to this city of complexities. Every time I see a working gas-light or pass by an old-fashioned curved shop window, I almost expect a shady pawnbroker or feisty dairymaid to emerge from the vapours of old London and complain about the incessant noises of construction and traffic – a concern that unites Londoners past and present.

But to return to the red cab; it was omnipresent. You had but to walk down Holborn, or Fleet-street, or any of the principal thoroughfares in which there is a great deal of traffic, and judge for yourself. You had hardly turned into the street, when you saw a trunk or two, lying on the ground: an uprooted post, a hat-box, a portmanteau, and a carpet-bag, strewed about in a very picturesque manner: a horse in a cab standing by, looking about him with great unconcern; and a crowd, shouting and screaming with delight, cooling their flushed faces against the glass windows of a chemist’s shop. - 'What's the matter here, can you tell me?' - 'O'ny a cab, sir.' - 'Anybody hurt, do you know?' - 'O'ny the fare, sir. I see him a turnin’ the corner, and I ses to another gen’lm'n "that's a reg'lar little oss that, and he's a comin' along rayther sweet, an't he?" - "He just is,” ses the other gen'lm'n, ven bump they cums agin the post, and out flies the fare like bricks.' Need we say it was the red cab; or that the gentleman with the straw in his mouth, who emerged so coolly from the chemist's shop and philosophically climbing into the little dickey, started off at full gallop, was the red cab's licensed driver?

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Graywolf Press

One of the reasons I have reservations about the Instagram-tuned poetry of Rupi Kaur and the likes is that they and their readers have a tendency to assume the role of some kind of delegate for female poets of colour, while frankly, there are plenty of much more accomplished and complex authors around to be upheld. Natalie Diaz is one of them. From the New York Times's review and what I remember about her first collection, Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those works that is grounded in wide reading and a firm sense of resistance all expressed with lush, musical language. In The First Water is Body she writes:

Jacques Derrida says, Every text remains in mourning until it is translated. When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief. But who is this translation for and will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation?

My inner comparatist is rejoicing from the level of skill and artistry in these poems, and my very outer bookseller is glad to have this volume to spread the word about.