Just call me Nancy Botwin (Adventures in Bookselling v.15)

2009 at 9am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

Before school lets out and we again enter that time of year where students perpetually ask for books like The Glass Menage A Trois and How to Kill a Mockingbird, I thought I’d share a few recent adventures from the bookfloor.

Overheard on the Christian Inspiration Aisle

Lady #1: Do you ever, you know, dig up dead things?

Lady #2: Dead things?

Lady #1: Yeah. You know, when you’re looking for something else and you find a dead thing?

(What else could she possibly be looking for?)

Lady #2: (insert awkwardness silence here)

Lady #1: I really like to dig up dead things. It’s like finding little treasures.

Just call me Nancy Botwin

Several weeks ago, a grungy looking guy in his mid-20s with a marijuana leaf on his baseball cap approached me to ask where the gardening section was. This happens occasionally and is usually followed by a question about whether we have books about hydroponics, so it didn’t really faze me. And it is always entertaining when the customer thinks that I have no idea what he’s up to. More entertaining, though, is when he, as this guy did, thinks I’m on to him and wants to convince me of his innocence.

As he picked up a copy of this book,

Grungy Dude turned to me and said that he was thinking about becoming a cop, and he figured the best way to start catching bad guy drug dealers was to know how they do what they do. Not a bad theory. But the bud leaf on your cap doesn’t exactly give you credibility, pal.

And don’t even get me started on the woman who rushed breathlessly up to the information desk and told me she’d been looking all over the place for this book for her 16-year-old son.

How am I supposed to hear that and not redirect the person to the parenting aisle? I mean, really. What kind of parent makes their kid feel comfortable asking for a book like this? Shouldn’t he have just ordered it online and hidden it under his mattress or something like other kids who know they have something to hide?

Acronymia

This conversation occurred between our children’s specialist and a boy who looked like he was about 15.

Boy: I’m looking for this book I heard about online. Supposedly, the guy who wrote Eragon copied pretty much everything from it.

Children’s Specialist (CS): Okay….

Boy: I think it’s called Loter?

CS: Loter?

(scurries off to computer and enters every possible spelling of a word like that, turns up nothing)

CS: I’m not seeing anything like that. Can you tell me more about it?

Boy: Well, it has dragons and trolls and stuff. The people on this one message board said it was a classic.

CS: (asking herself why she didn’t ask this sooner) Well, how was it spelled?

Boy: L-O-T-R

CS: Ohhhh. That stands for Lord of the Rings. It’s an acronym.

It’s not the size of the book…

It’s that time of year again when students start going crazy over last-minute projects and summer reading. An 8th grade student and his mother recently asked me to recommend a classic book for a school project; he was assigned to read a classic that was at least 100 pages and write a short paper about it. At the time we spoke, he had 4 weeks left to complete this assignment.

I always start this conversation by explaining that you’ll really be hard pressed to find a classic that is less than 200 pages, but that classic doesn’t always mean difficult, and you shouldn’t base the decision solely on length because there are some long books that are easy reads and some short ones that are really difficult (case in point: Heart of Darkness). I turned to the boy and said, “Well, what do you like to read?

Before he can respond, his mom jumps in and said “Sports Illustrated” with a smirk on her face.  Ah, okay, I know where this is going now.  “He’s not a very good reader,” she tells me. “He’s finishing 8th grade, but he’s at maybe a 7th grade reading level,” she says as he stands there looking mortified. “So he doesn’t really read much.”

Well, I figure, I have to find a book for the boy, not the mom, so I want to hear it from him. I turn to him and ask “Is it that reading is difficult for you, or that you just don’t like it?”

“Both,” he responds.

Fair enough.

“Okay, well, there are several classics that have really interesting story lines that boys tend to like and that aren’t too difficult. Let’s go take a look at Lord of the Flies.”

We walk to a table of popular summer reading titles, and I hand him a copy of the book and explain what happens. He seems decently interested. Then his mom takes the book and immediately checks the page count, which is just about 200 in this edition.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think he’ll be able to read this.  What about something like Cheaper by the Dozen? Isn’t that a classic? It’s on this list I found online.” (hands me the list of Classic Books for Young Readers. Riiiiight.)

“Well, ma’am, that is classified as a children’s book, and since your son is finishing 8th grade and preparing for high school, my best guess is that his teacher will want him to be out of the children’s department. When is the project due?”

“Oh, at the end of the month.”

“Okay, so the book is 200 pages, but if he has 30 days to read it, that’s less than 10 pages per day. And this is a great book.”

“It doesn’t have any weird symbolism or hidden meaning or anything like that, does it? He won’t be able to get that.”

(Bear in mind that the boy is standing there with us and hearing all of this and that the mother won’t let him answer any of my questions.)

“Well, there is some symbolism, but the plot is pretty straightforward, and I think it’s a great, interesting book for someone who doesn’t really like to read.”

“Well, what about Black Beauty? That’s a classic, right?”

“Again, that’s a children’s book, and I don’t really think a 14-year-old boy is going to be into it.”

(We walk to a display of classics and I hold up some other boy-friendly books that are good for reluctant readers, but she deems all of them too long without even letting her son look at them.)

“Okay.” (turns to her son and holds up Lord of the Flies) “Do you think you can read this?”

“Uhhh, I dunno.” (He turns back to the summer reading table, obviously scanning for what appears to be the shortest book.) “Is this any good?”

“That’s a perfect example that you can’t judge a book’s level of difficulty by its length. That’s a book that the 12th grade AP students are assigned for summer reading. It’s translated from French and deals with some very heavy philosophy.”

“Okay. Maybe I’ll take this one.” (Holding Lord of the Flies)

Mom looks at me and says, “Well, I still don’t know. I mean, it only has to be 100 pages, and that’s almost 200. That’s a lot of reading.”

I reiterate my point about it being less than 10 pages a day if he starts now, and she responds, “You don’t understand. He plays a lot of baseball.”

Way to encourage your child to pursue his education, lady. Wow. I mean, even for the slowest reader (and this kid didn’t actually seem slow, despite his mother’s insistence that he was stupid), ten pages per day is pretty do-able. And you’re his parent, so you shouldn’t be standing here telling a perfect stranger how dumb you think he is.

If I hadn’t felt so sorry for the poor kid, I would have given him Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—it’s short, after all—and sent him on his way.

And one last thing

When you ask me for this book just hoping to shock me with your crazy request for a book we both know you don’t want, I know what you’re doing, and I’m not surprised.