From her first book, Objects in the Mirror Are Closer than They Appear (just reissued by Broadway Books) to The Music Room, The Little Women, Triangle and True Confections, she has created an impressive body of fiction.īut now Weber has written a memoir, The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities (Crown, July 19, 2011). Katharine Weber is a novelist, and an acclaimed one at that. I'll take the mug from the kitchen coffeepot, please I'm saving up for my next book. One week's worth of venti skim lattes from a coffee shop equals a new trade paperback. What I am suggesting is that we be mindful about where we choose to distribute our dollars. I am not scolding anyone who can't make the month's rent for neglecting to buy a shelf of hardcovers. Now, let me carefully say that the people I'm talking about do have disposable income. I have friends who will gladly accept books that I give them and read them eagerly-but will never spend money on buying their own.

So I ask myself, as I have many times before, why we value books so little that we will do anything we can to avoid paying for them. Faced with a 50%-off-all-books sale, how many of us could resist filling a shopping cart? (I've seen the fast-moving hands at my local bookstore's periodic 'galley grabs' and rifling through the hardcovers on that store's discount trolley.)īut while readers may be consumers, they are also participants in a creative process, one in which books are more than products: they're art, they're dialogue, they're information, entertainment, beauty, despair. Readers are also consumers, and consumers love a bargain. Fiction? 10% (although the Shakespeare shelf was offered at 20%).

Besides, the only real bargains were on romance paperbacks and greeting cards. I didn't buy any books, but that was because I was conflicted, not because I couldn't find any I wanted. I felt sad and guilty: it was like attending an estate sale before the funeral. Over the weekend, my family and I visited our soon-to-be defunct local Borders to check out the clearance sale.

Forged in Fire by J.A. Pitts