The bookshops of Rockhampton are not places to browse in. They're where you go if you want to order something in - though I did find a copy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles on the shelf. The only copy I might add.
Where you go to browse are the newsagents, who bring in remaindered books by weight. "Give me a couple of hundred kilos of popular paperbacks, &, say, fifty kilos of those larger-sized ones. Oh yeah, & a tonne of sports books." Books appear which would otherwise never come within 700 kilometres of Rockhampton.
I picked up Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace in such a bin a month or so ago, for a fraction of its original price. She's a writer I've liked ever since I found The Woman Warrior in a similar chance fashion in Sydney, maybe in a second-hand shop. I started reading the new book a couple of days ago, & was struck by an image a couple of pages in where she describes rushing back to find her house burnt down in a firestorm in the Oakland-Berkeley Hills. "Someone once told me about a child who lived at the time of the burning of a great library. He caught pages of burned paper, and read Latin words."
I suppose what made this image so poignant for me was the recent fire at Michael Rothenberg's home in which he lost his books & his archives. When I returned to writing a few years ago Michael was the first editor to encourage me & give me a place to publish. I mourn his lost library.
1 comment:
Read it, enjoyed it for all sorts of reasons - Monkey, SF in the 60s (one of those romantic destinations) - also enjoyed China Men. But The Woman Warrior will always be clothed in that exultant sense of discovery that you get when you come across something / someone who really moves you, who gets in at those hidden bits inside you. (Sort of like when I first came across Negative Wingspan......
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