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-Hello, and welcome back to "Book Lust."
I'm your host, Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Brad Craft,
long-time bookseller
at University Bookstore here in Seattle.
Brad, it's so nice to have you on the show.
Thank you for coming.
-Oh, it's my pleasure.
I'm delighted to have been asked.
-Brad, when I say "long-time bookseller,"
how long actually have you been working at University Bookstore?
-I've been here -- this will be my 22nd year.
-I see a lot of changes in the publishing world.
What do you see?
-Well, I mean, not to be frivolous,
but suddenly, they've all fallen in love
with dyeing the page edges of everything
and putting patterns and fish and starbursts.
I don't understand it myself. But, yeah. That's a big thing.
But, oh, it's changed enormously in my --
I mean, I've been selling books since 1986, I think.
So, yeah. Long time.
And consolidation was the first thing that happened.
-Right. -There were so many people
that are just one person now or two people or five people.
Companies, I should say, rather than people,
but it feels that way.
The disappearance of representation on the ground
to independent bookstores,
there are fewer and fewer reps in the world.
And just the way books are sold to us
and that we sell them to the public have changed quite a bit.
The device that we're speaking on right now
is responsible for the majority of the changes,
both in publishing and book selling.
-In what way? What do you --
-Well, because people buy them off the computer now.
Orders are placed on the computer now.
I don't get to call Tennessee while looking at microfiche
and talk to nice Southern ladies
to ask for books with naughty titles,
which was one of the delights of my earliest career.
For anyone who doesn't know,
Ingram used to have a warehouse
that you called on the telephone to order books from.
-Right. Yes.
-And the bookstore I was working in,
in those days was in San Francisco.
So often I had to request titles that would --
would make a church lady blush.
-[ Chuckles ] I remember those because,
when I was at the bookstore in Tulsa,
I was the person who used to call Ingram.
And I loved those Southern accents
of those very nice women,
and you would read off a list of titles
that you ordered for the bookstore.
And, yeah. Those were the days, huh?
Now it's all done.
-Yeah, the conversation consisted of them
saying the title back to you and then go ahead,
so it'd be like, "Five copies of The Boys of Vaseline Alley.
Go ahead." -Yeah.
-In a sweet accent. So, yeah.
-Right. Love it. -Yeah. I missed that.
But, yeah. There have been lots of changes.
But, you know, the other part of that is, is that,
for all the changes that I've experienced
and that are ongoing, I mean,
even the institution where I work is changing as we speak,
the relationship between books and readers
has not changed in my experience.
And, therefore, the relationship
I have to those readers hasn't really changed in that period.
-So I'm pretty clear on what role librarians have in the --
in the whole interchange between readers and books
and you as the librarian.
And I think that booksellers have that same closeness,
develop that same closeness with their return customers.
-Readers' commercial cousin is what we are, yeah,
because we're selling the books.
We're not just handing them to people.
-Right.
-And so that means that we have to -- I mean,
I know a lot of librarians,
and I know that they spend a lot of their time
accommodating the tastes of other people
that they might not share.
And that's something we very much have in common.
It isn't my place to tell you
that you shouldn't read that book.
It's to get that book for you,
whatever that book happens to be.
And then, if you're lucky --
and it happens with some frequency still --
you get to talk about books that you like with people
who may like them as well.
And that's the pleasure of the thing.
-I mean, I think also that one of the pleasures
is that kind of excitement of finding a book for that customer
or for that library user
that's a book that they might not know about
but that you feel like, oh, that's a book for you.
-Yeah.
Well, and it's just a --
I mean, there are lots of ways to do that.
It isn't all just personal interactions
with individual people.
Displays are a way that we get to express ourselves,
and they can reflect our current circumstances.
One of our most popular cables right now is dystopias.
But they needn't be, you know, just gifts for mother.
They can -- they can all be on pretty much any topic.
And the nice part is that this is
Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage Month.
So we have not one but three separate display --
four separate displays up for that --
one, books of cinema and entertainment and music,
a fiction table, table of memoir, and a food table.
-I think I would head to the food table, actually.
-Yeah.
Just a way for us to bring books to the attention of people
that they might not have seen otherwise.
Some of our most popular displays in recent days
have been women in translation,
which I've just left up for two months
because it continues to sell wonderful books
that we have single, slim copies of that
would otherwise disappear into the shelves.
-One of the displays that I've --
that I've loved at University Bookstore
recently is the display of books where there are
disagreements about whether the book is good or not.
And good, I've always believed
that a good book is a book that you like.
That's all.
-That's absolutely the right definition.
-So this is where people take, like, you know,
well-reviewed books, you know,
what we would say five-star books, five-star reviews,
and say, I hate this book
and then give like a one-sentence reason for
why they hate it.
-Yeah. I made the signage for it and put --
and contributed selections, but it wasn't my idea.
It was one of my younger coworkers.
And we always --
staff recommendation cards are common to any bookstore
in which you write up
why you think people should be reading this title.
And we have a staff favorite selection.
Every bookstore does usually.
But this time somebody else said, Well,
why don't we ever write up the books that we don't like?
And so then they started doing it.
And it became enormously popular, may I say,
not only with the staff but with customers.
And the best part about it is, is that these are opinions
that we do not generally express in a retail environment.
We don't tell somebody
that we don't particularly approve of Gisele Bundchen's
cookbook in which she poses attractively with jars of beans.
If somebody wants to buy that from me for $50,
I'm happy to sell it to them.
But, yeah.
But this was an opportunity for us.
And there's a level of engagement with customers
as a result of I think the honesty of that.
And then plus they get to argue with us.
That's the most fun. -Right, right.
-We have books where somebody likes it;
somebody doesn't like it.
And then you can just hear the umbrage from across the room,
which is delightful, frankly.
-Yeah. Yes.
One of the big changes that I've noticed is that
we're seeing a lot more horror novels coming -- coming out.
-Horror novels of a caliber
that I -- you know, I'm a child of the '70s, mostly.
So I was reading all of Stephen King and Peter Straub
and all those old American masters.
Bless them.
And so I was there for sort of
the pulp mass market era of horror
where every week, there was a new, you know,
Flowers in the Attic sort of thing.
And it's fascinating to watch the enormous diversity
of writers that are now working in a genre like that.
So I just read Buffalo Hunter Hunter, for instance,
which is a brilliant -- spoiler alert -- vampire novel.
Sorry. He used desanguination about 20 pages in,
in case you're wondering.
So that was your first clue that there might be vampires.
But he writes these brilliant books
with a Native American perspective
and grounded in what feels like --
I mean, I'm not qualified to say,
but it feels like very well-researched history,
you know. And a lot of that,
a lot of the sort of elevation of genre
has very much happened in my lifetime.
There are people who are writing romance novels
that are reviewed in the New York Times.
-Right.
-That just simply was not a possibility when I was younger.
And science fiction and fantasy have conquered the culture.
-Right. And also reviewed in The New York Times
and horror novels in The New York Times.
So that -- -Yeah.
-There's been a lot of that.
And, also, there's a whole genre of publishing
that simply did not exist when I began.
There were children's books.
Now, librarians, as I understand it,
had these categories before they came to bookstores;
but bookstores are a little slower to catch up with.
But, like, I didn't know what middle grade was a decade ago.
That was very much a librarian's terminology.
And now it's something
that's been adopted pretty universally
in the book business, too,
that you organize books based on --
young people's books based on their readership,
and also that YA, young adult, does not mean high school kids.
It means, you know, 12 through apparently 48.
-Or at least 48.
-Based on their readership. -Right, right.
-And that's a mental adjustment for somebody like me.
I grew up -- kids' books were what you read
when you were a kid.
And you, you know, waited eagerly to have access
to the adult portion of the library.
I think I was 10 when I tried to take home Don Quixote,
and the librarian objected
because there was a prostitute in it.
But I'd seen Mr. Magoo on TV, so...
-In my library in Detroit,
you had to be 13 or in the ninth grade to be able to --
it was an old, like, Carnegie Library.
And you had to walk past -- the children's room was on one side,
and the adult and teen books were on the other.
And to walk across that space was like you had come of age,
and now the whole world was yours.
But I think, Brad --
and I wonder what you think about this.
Sometimes I think that all of this emphasis on what --
this emphasis on genre,
what it does is it -- it makes it -- see,
my feeling would be that we should arrange books
in a much bigger --
in a much kind of bigger philosophically -- you know,
philosophically bigger category because there are, for example,
fantasy novels that I know people
who love historical fiction would love those fantasy novels.
And I'm thinking particularly of the novels of Guy Gavriel Kay,
which are fantasy historical fiction,
I mean, really historical fiction with a kind of
elastic realism, you know,
where he stretches the boundaries.
But you can't get to them, and -- and you --
there -- it's not a natural -- it's not a natural movement
from, you know, the novel section
or the fiction section to the fantasy section.
And I think that that does readers a disservice.
-Well, part of it is a repercussion
and unforeseen consequence, I think.
By enabling people to --
by telling people consistently for at least two generations now
that whatever they read is right,
that whatever choice they make is right for them
and that there isn't --
that it isn't my place or your place or anybody's place
to tell them that what they read is bad
or that there are better books than what they read,
one of the things that does is, in my experience,
is quite often it slots people into whatever genre they adopt.
And it makes it twice as hard, in a way,
to come out of it
because there's nobody that ever says at any point,
apparently, in their reading lives, you know,
if you like a science fiction or fantasy writer,
there are writers who are considered literary writers
who also write historically.
I mean, one of the things I have on the pile right there --
and now I will butcher this poor lady's name,
Vera Moutafchieva -- she is writing about Ottoman Turks.
Okay. And she's writing about this character, Cem,
who's a real historical person.
And it's a novel told from his perspective and
perspective of other people.
And it's this big,
beautiful, bold thing with a bisexual lead
and with the sudden conflagration
of so many different cultures because, you know,
the Ottoman Empire was this huge thing.
And one of my first thoughts
when I started reading the book was there were so many people
who could enjoy this who would not be --
her style is not opaque,
and the only thing it lacks is dragons.
-[ Chuckles ] Right. Yeah. Totally.
-...that I wish I could give books to,
but the books I'm going to give them don't have dragons.
-Right. -And, therefore, you know.
-And I think that the solution in some --
in many -- a good solution
to that particular issue of grouping books
together from different genres in a -- is displays.
-Yeah. -You know -- you know,
you could do a display of everything but a dragon
or something like that.
That would --
-...allows people to discover things
that they -- for instance, the book -- Women in Translation.
It's a very simple premise,
but what it does is it puts covers
in front of people's eyes.
And, if the cover catches their eye,
it also tells you that it's a perfectly legitimate thing
if you like, say, Japanese cozy cat in a coffee shop novels,
that there are 100 other possibilities.
And, if you put them cheek by jowl,
as you say, then somebody who does that
and does that pretty much exclusively,
they may think --
contemporary Japanese publishing in English
seems to divide itself neatly into two boxes,
the sort of cozy, delightful cat in a book shop kind of thing,
usually the romantic element; or crazy people.
And I love the crazy people books where you have no idea
where the story is going.
You have no idea what they're going to do next.
And a lot of those books would never be picked up by the people
who read the other ones.
-Right?
-But if you put them all in a display,
as you say, and jumble them up together,
there's nobody telling them that they can't read that other book.
-Right, right.
And that they might pick it up,
open it to the first page, and say, Wow.
What's going on here? This sounds great.
-Yeah, yeah.
And then there's also the aspect of it
that does trouble me a bit,
which is that, at a certain point in life,
I'm not interested in coming of age.
It happened so long ago to me
that I am no longer particularly moved by the protagonist
who is discovering life.
And so there are writers like Sigrid Nunez, for instance,
whom I love who I desperately want to press
into the hands of adult people because I want them to see
that not every protagonist needs to be 16 years old
and discovering for the first time what love is.
I want a protagonist not only not necessarily even my age.
I want somebody in their 30s at the end of their first marriage.
I want all this experience that has nothing
to do necessarily with my life. -Right?
-One of the reasons
why I think I'm drawn more to female writers
than I am usually to men is because I'm guaranteed
that there's a different experience just by the fact
of sex and gender.
And in an age where gender, for instance,
is very much a factor in a lot of people's reading
and a curiosity,
there's so many opportunities to read on that subject,
around that subject,
and through that subject without reading just about that subject.
-I know you have a book -- you have a book club that you lead,
and it's a big-book book club.
-Now, Nancy, you have to use the proper name.
It's Brad's Big Fat Book Club
because I had to argue to include the word fat.
It took a little -- it took some convincing.
But, I mean, it was a reference not only
to my waistline but to the fact that they're weighty
and daunting objects, you know?
And it started pretty much during the pandemic
because I needed something
that I could do through devices like this.
And then it proved popular.
And we've done a lot of classic --
our very first book was The Count of Monte Cristo.
And so we've crossed a lot of genres over the years.
In fact, a number of things in the stack are from that.
Olga Tokarczuk, the winner of the Nobel Prize,
we did her gigantic -- The Books of Jacob,
which is a historical novel set in the time of Hasidim.
We just did The Family, Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
We've done Anna Karenina.
-And I know you're doing one of my favorite books,
Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood, right?
That's the one you're doing?
-Yeah, sort of the current selection is
The Books and the Brotherhood.
And one of the reasons I picked it is
because I've wanted to do an Iris for a long time,
and I couldn't remember reading that one, you know,
which is -- which is automatically a pleasure.
-I sort of went on an Iris Murdoch kick in the --
in -- when I -- in my 30s. And I remember,
as I was going through them all,
I kept regretting the fact that I would never have enough time
to reread them because, you know,
when you're looking for gorgeous writing
and complicated characters, Iris Murdoch is somebody.
-Well, I mean, I just literally started that.
And because I used to be a used book dealer,
I can't write in books.
So one of the things that I've adopted,
of course, is post it notes and things.
And I don't know if you can see this,
but there are already, you know, 200 pages in,
which is when I made myself stop
because we do a book over the course of three months and --
but there are probably a dozen Post-it notes in here
to mark just -- for the most part,
what I'm marking are just things
that she said that were so beautiful and quotable.
"It is possible for a girl to have too long a neck,
and Lily's could be said to be on the border
between the swan-like and the grotesque."
Everything about Iris -- and this, for me,
is the deciding factor.
It isn't genre, and it isn't age of the -- the writing.
For me -- I know it's an obvious and rather cliché thing to say,
but people who write beautifully can write about nearly anything.
And so we've covered a lot of historical ground
in the book club in part
because I'm just drawn to people who do things on the page
that are interesting and surprising and gorgeous.
-Mm-hmm. I always want to run across a sentence
and stop and say, "Oh, my God.
How did that person know to put those words together
in that particular order?" -Yeah.
And just it really doesn't have to be --
there are great writers who do not write about beauty,
but they write beautifully about ugly things.
One that's going to be on my list at some point
for the book club is this particular book
by Halldor Laxness, another Nobel winner,
who I -- his most famous book I don't like.
It's, it's sad people raise goats is what that book is.
-Tell us the title.
Tell us the title of that one, Brad.
-Salka Valka is the name of it.
And it's the story of a girl who shows up in a village
with her mother because their money runs out.
So they end up in this fishing village,
even though they're trying to get to the one --
well, the one city in Iceland.
And it's rough. It's such a rough book.
It's from an earlier period in Laxness' --
it's more didactically Communist than a lot of the things
that he wrote later so that, when you meet the minister,
you know he's going to be a hypocrite.
When you meet the store owner,
you know he's going to be exploitative.
All those sort of clichés of Soviet realism are here,
but it's so funny.
I mean, at points it's almost vicious in its satire.
Well, that's something new at 600 pages,
which is kind of the minimum of the book club.
-Right. Oh. So I was going to ask you.
So that's the minimum? -Yeah.
I think we've done maybe one book that was a bit shorter,
but -- and we've certainly done books that were longer.
Like, I'm --
at some point I have to do Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy.
-Uh-huh. Oh, that's a wonderful book.
-I love that book so much,
and it's available in paperback again.
And I just -- everything about it tells me
that that's a story we need to fall into
and not come up for air for a long time.
And the other reason to do big books is
because people are intimidated by them.
They think, Oh, God.
I'll never have time to read, you know,
War and Peace or whatever.
-Right?
-And if you tell them, you read it at your own pace.
We've got three months.
You can put it down and pick up other things.
And one of the things that I do is that, you know,
it isn't just summarizing the action of the book.
We're here to talk about two things.
We're here to talk about the person
who wrote it in the way they write and then their ideas.
Now, if you read fiction for ideas,
that's like reading soup cans for philosophy.
It's not really what writers -- you know what I mean?
It's not their job necessarily to convince you
that the world is different than you believe.
Some of them do, but it isn't really what their intent is.
Their intent is to capture whatever it is they're writing
and to do it better than anyone else could.
And so, when they do, then I -- you know, I love them.
And some of the best writing in the world
is in some of the longest books. -Yeah.
-And long books can be defined a lot of ways.
I'm also reading these.
I don't know if you've seen these.
But it's kind of a thing, and they've done the first two.
And the next to come out -- it's part of a septology,
which I -- I wouldn't even have known that that meant seven.
-Right.
-It's called On the Calculation of Volume.
This is book number one,
and it's by -- I'm going to mess that up too --
Solvej Balle, I guess,
is how you say it, translated by Barbara Haveland.
And it's sort of a woman,
a bookseller wakes up,
and it's the same day over and over and over again.
And I'm already in volume 2,
which is all that I have access to.
But that's another way to read a long book.
-Right, right.
Or we're going to have to stop in a minute,
but I just wanted to put in a suggestion for a long book
that's actually a quartet.
And it's Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet.
-Oh, my God. They're so lovely.
-It's so wonderful. So please do that.
-I'm easily convinced. -Okay.
Well, Brad, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
And good luck with the book club.
Good luck with keeping up with everything
that's happening in the publishing world,
and I'll see you soon. -See you soon.
Love you. -Bye.
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