Patreon Letter - 23 May, 2019

Hi everyone, this letter is absolutely an entire week late, and I apologize. I've been trying to take some more time to relax lately, not just constantly run myself into the dirt overworking, and it's been hard to restructure my time management in a way where things don't slip. The letters? They've been slipping. In my defense so has the laundry, but you don't have to worry about that.

I keep telling Jackson we should start a book club, but they won't let me. This is absolutely the right answer, for the record, but they should still let me. Lately when I'm feeling especially down about games and the internet and ... everything, I just want to sit back and enjoy a good book or two. What's wrong with that? It would be so much easier if I turned it into a podcast so I had to read and yes, this is why I have problems with overwork. They're right, like I said, but I still think about it all the time nonetheless. 

I'm a long time enjoyer of ebooks, because they're cheaper and easier and you can read in bed without a light on and you can fit an entire library into a device only slightly bigger than your phone. Everyone knows the benefits, but lately I've been finding myself thinking a lot about BOOK book culture, the act of going and browsing shelves and pulling off books and looking at covers and blurbs and remembering this is a terrible way to pick any book but doing it anyway because what else are you going to do?

Part of this was spurred by going to the library more often, which everyone should do if you're within a reasonable travel distance to your local library, even and especially if they're kind of bad. The more people use them the better, especially when it comes to deciding what gets purchased for circulation. Just go and check out like a manga or something. Grab a popular short story collection that's on a bestseller list. They usually have those. I recommend Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, which I recently borrowed from my local library. It's good! 

But like I said, maybe your library isn't great. So you're left book hungry after reading a thing or two, and now you want to go browse a book store. I'm broke pretty much all the time, so I like used book stores, but almost every book store in the city has been closed down by the one Half Priced Books which is constantly full of people and just packed with bullshit in a way that's hard to describe. Yeah, they have books, but at what cost? Well, the answer is half off, but also a small piece of your soul as you walk down the character-less aisles of remaindered garbage and English course sell-back churn in between the few good finds. 

There are indie bookstores, and people should support them. My local one is extremely just okay, a very overpriced establishment that clearly caters to people who make four times more than me and really love books on military history and gardening. I feel like I'm going to be asked to leave just for existing poor in it. So I don't really like to give them money, even if I know independent book stores are important in the abstract. I just would need them to be good first!

Which leaves the chains. Or chain, because all that's left is the good ol' Barnes & Noble, of which 25% of their floor space is devoted to overpriced anime figures and educational toys for kids now. It's hard to really feel passionately about Barnes & Noble, because it's such a constant monolith, but every time I go into one it's with some level of concern about their future. I always half expect a going out of business sale, but they keep trucking on. I'm glad, I guess, but mostly I lament that they aren't Borders every time I step inside one, and then about buying the exact same books I would have gotten at a Borders but feeling way crappier about it. 

Borders was the book buying wonderland of my childhood, a place where they seemed to have everything and I was constantly surprised by something I had never even heard of before. Part of this is that Borders was much broader in what it stocked than Barnes & Noble (a thing that bit them in the ass), but also for my burgeoning media obsessed teenage years and early 20s, they were where I could go to get cool obscure movies (they also bet big on DVDs, which again ... bit them in the ass). I got into Murakami because I stumbled across him in a Borders. I went through an entire phase of being into Stephen King. I was at a Borders for three Harry Potter midnight launches. The local Borders was two stories, each the size of the bigger of the two Barnes & Nobles in town, and it was dense with books even for the era before all the vinyl figures and LEGO moved in.

All this is to say that I have a strange sadness when I go into a Barnes & Noble that often supersedes my excitement over browsing for books. I don't particularly like nostalgia, or holding onto the past, but with buying books physically it's impossible to ignore the reality that things were actually better than before and we live in a shitty time to shop locally (this is a lot of retail, I recognize, but books are the thing I've reliably bought my whole life). I really want to be enthusiastic for getting into books again, I am enthusiastic about books again, but it's still a struggle over the inertia of witnessing late capitalist collapse to get to the material enjoyment of art and learning and all that other stuff that comes with reading.

Which is a lot of ink to spill for talking about shopping, but honestly I think it's worth getting into the weeds about your feelings about, especially when you're like me and buying stuff is sometimes a band aid on feeling really crappy and you want your buying things to be as rewarding to your spirit and comfortable to your wallet as possible, because we do indeed live in a society and it suuuuuucks.

That being said, there's a 20% sale this weekend, and tomorrow for the holiday me and Destiny are going to go get some books for the hell of it, and that will hopefully be very fun. 

Until next time,

Em