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Sep
05
Back-to-School Daze (Adventures in Bookselling, v.3)
2008 at 2pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
School started in Richmond this week, which means that teachers, students, and parents are all in super-squirrely mode, and they’re all coming to the bookstore to have The Book Lady solve their problems.
Issue #1: Summer Reading
By virtue of the fact that it is called SUMMER reading, it is meant to be done DURING THE SUMMER. It’s not difficult to comprehend. Most of the schools in our area require students to read just one or two books, and many of them select contemporary novels to keep students interested and engaged. As one of my favorite clients says, students don’t care about dead White Russian guys; they want to read something relevant and relatable. And the schools here are giving them that option, which is awesome….yet they still don’t do summer reading in the summer.
I’ve been hanging out on the bookfloor to help this week, and I’ve had several high school students approach me and ask not for the book but for the SparkNotes to the book. As in, they’re not even going to bother trying to read The Scarlet Letter, they’re just going to read the SparkNotes, as if their teachers don’t know exactly what those say. Riiiiiiight.
The other trend is to ask us to find several of the books they have to choose from and to then select the one with the fewest pages. This is often Of Mice and Men, which is very short and easy to read, and they still want the SparkNotes for it. I’m like, hellooooo, the SparkNotes are almost as long as the book. What part of this don’t you understand? What’s worse is when the parents come in to pick up their kids’ summer reading (even though it’s no longer summer and they are now complicit in their child’s failure) and ask us to select the shortest book. That’s a great message to send. You have to pass a test to drive a car but not to have children…..something is wrong with these people, and I just don’t understand. Shouldn’t you want your kid to read books?
I do have to say, though, that for every parent like this, we also see several good parents who encourage their kids to pick up more than the required number of books and to select the ones that really appeal to them. It’s reassuring, but not enough to make up for the people who are teaching their children to be lazy, irresponsible, and to do just enough to get by.
Issue #2: Do Your Homework
If you are a teacher, and you are planning to send 75 of your students over to buy their own copies of Crime and Punishment (even though 85% of them will say they’re looking for Pride and Prejudice), you might want to consider giving us a little advance notice. Because unless you’re teaching the latest Stephenie Meyer book (and if you are, then we really need to talk), we don’t have 75 copies just lying around. If you’re assigning the same book you’ve been teaching from for the last fifteen years, you might want to check and make sure it’s still in print because when your students’ parents appear in our store wondering why they can’t find it anywhere and the only used copy online costs $99, you’re going to get a snarky email from me, The Book Lady, informing you that it might be time to update your curriculum. And you’re not going to like it.
If you’re a student coming in to buy a book that’s required for class, bring your syllabus, or at least write down the title and author of the book. When you don’t, it turns into a total debacle. Remember the MLA/Emily misunderstanding from last week? If your teacher tells you that you need to pick a book that meets certain criteria, write those down or ask your teacher to recommend a few titles, or do both. Standing in the bookstore on the verge of tears and just hoping you’ll find the right book isn’t going to get the job done. There’s no crying in bookselling….and I do this job because I DIDN’T want to be a therapist.
Issue #3: Learn to Read
Perhaps the greatest irony of working in a bookstore is realizing that even bookstore customers don’t read. They don’t read the sign above the customer service desk that says “Customer Service” and not “Pay Here,” then they get mad at us when, during the holidays, they stand in line at the Info desk for twenty minutes only to say, when their turn comes, “I’m ready to pay for these” and be told they need to go to the cash wrap…at the other end of the store…where they have actual cash registers. Ditto for the restrooms.
Things that prove our customers don’t really read happen all the time, but my favorite recent example occurred last week in the cafe. We received the ingredients for our fall seasonal drinks a few weeks in advance, and our intrepid cafe manager decided to go ahead and sell those drinks to customers who wanted them. She uses a small whiteboard to advertise weekly specials, so she wrote “Ask us about our super secret latte” and drew a nice, large picture of a PUMPKIN. Underneath the picture, she wrote “We’ll give you a hint…it smells like PUMPKIN SPICE.” A woman and her teenaged daughter walked up, read the sign, and then asked Lauren, “So, what’s the super secret latte?”
Seriously.
That’s all the excitement in Book Lady land for now….back to work and later to Bridge of Sighs, which I’m hoping to finish this weekend. If you’re looking for something to do, visit the Book Blogger Appreciation Week voting booth and support your favorite blogs. The Book Lady’s Blog is up for Funniest/Most Humorous!
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This series is fantastic. Love it!
What a riot!! I love to hear your adventures in bookselling!
I will admit to being one of those customers that frequently asks for directions to a particular section that winds up being right next to (or behind, or occasionally in front of) me. I’ve asked for books that were on really obvious endcap displays not ten feet away! I think that bookstores give me visual overload… too many potential things to read… and so my brain just doesn’t always process the various signs. I don’t think I come across as angry, though, just embarassed.
Fyrefly: Believe it or not, those questions don’t really bother us…it’s the totally ridiculous ones like, “the cover was blue with green writing, but I don’t know anything else about it” that are truly maddening.
Mmmmm…pumpkin latte.
I love ‘there’s no crying in bookselling’.
1) Random moment of the day:
Woman: I saw a children’s book on the internet. It had a rabbit on the cover. Have you got it?
2) Oh, wait. Here’s another:
Woman: I’m looking for a young reader’s book.
Me: Okay, do you know the title or the author?
Woman: It’s called Chows.
Me: Chows? (prods despairingly at the computer) Erm, I’m not really seeing anything with that title. What’s the book about?
Woman: I don’t know. The author writes religious fiction. He did a series of books called Red, Black and White.
Me: Ted Dekker?
Woman: Yes! So, do you have Chows?
Me: Erm, is it this one? (points to a book called “CHAOS”)
Woman: Yes!
Me: …
3) One of my pet peeves, which happens at least once a day, is when a customer comes up to the information desk and only imparts the vaguest of details regarding the book they’re looking for. (Ie, “The title beings with the letter A!” or “The author’s last name is Smith and it’s a novel!”) Only after you’ve spent five minutes desperately seeking that one precious raindrop in an entire ocean of possibilities does the customer say, “Oh, I’ve got an ISBN number, will that help?”
Why, no! Keep that unique identifier that can pinpoint any given book—usually within 3 seconds—to yourself!
4) It’s always amusing when students mix up the notes they’ve made for their summer reading requirements. I had some girl come in asking for a book called “Allende”, but it had to be one translated by Constance Garnett.
I asked her if she meant Isabel Allende’s “House of Spirits”, but she looked at me as if I’d just pissed in her Cornflakes and said it was definitely called “Allende”. Do you know what it’s about, I enquired. Nuh-uh, cameth the response.
Some digging around revealed an ancient, out-of-print biography about Salvador Allende that was going for about $200 used. That wasn’t it. I looked up Constance Garnett and found that she had translated just about every major work of Russian literature into English. I asked the girl if she was looking for “Anna Karenina”. Nuh-uh, etc.
I asked her what school she attended. Sure enough, on her school’s reading list, for her grade level, were House of Spirits and Anna Karenina.
Still she refused to believe she’d mixed up the two books and walked away empty handed. Oh well. Good luck with your English classes, Little Miss Nuh-Uh!
haha
as one of those teachers who assigns summer reading… let me tell you that the other end of it isn’t pretty either. I once assigned The Lorax for an Environmental Science class. I told my kids that they didn’t even have to BUY the book… they could actually read it in about 5 minutes standing in the aisle. I also found on an online version for them.
Still had kids who couldn’t tell me if the Lorax was the good guy or the bad guy.
Mark, I, again, love that you’ve chimed in and just might have to pull that for its own post. Yay for bookselling.
And kcshiker: I can only imagine the carnage on your side. Who doesn’t want to read The Lorax? Those kids should be glad they have a teacher cool enough to assign Dr. Seuss.
Congrats on the nom – You so deserve it!
[...] 10, 2008 by Rebecca As I mentioned last week, things at work have been interesting, to say the least, since school started. Now that the [...]
I was in Borders a week or so ago and overheard a woman asking for help finding her book clubs most recent selection. She couldn’t remember title or author, but it had a flower on the front cover. Clueless Party of 1 !! How you bite your tongue and don’t say anything back to these customers shows great restraint. I just have to laugh. When I go looking for a book I have the title and author (it may not be spelled perfectly, but at least its a start.
I do love your bookselling adventures!!
[...] experiences at work in my Adventures in Bookselling series (which can be found here, and here, and here, and here), and I love it when you guys chime in and share your own funny stories. So, here’s [...]
Our local Cape Cod newspaper actually printed a letter from an irate mom spouting off about how outrageous it is for teachers to assign summer reading. Her rant was that the kids have to read all year long and moms don’t need to be nagging their children in the summer. Summer is supposed to be FUN. She actually said this AND signed her name to it! I had two elementary aged patrons come in and we got talking about this. They had seen the letter. Their response was to feel sorry for kids who had a mother like that.