This appeared on the break room wall sometime Sunday. It’s a layout of the Bookstore, showing the new shelf arrangements and section changes we’re going to have, beginning in the next few weeks. It in a very real way marks the end of the almost continuous re-shifting caused by the building’s renovation project, a renovation which left the store, for four or five months, with no windows and greatly reduced floor space on the main level.
This is no minor re-shelving, either. This is going to cause a lot of sweat and blood from the overnight crew and our opening staff: big bookshelves have to be moved and repositioned. Magazines will be located past the Information desk on the upper level, while Reference and Science books move downstairs, with Psychology and Religion coming up. Cooking stays where it is, but Romance is going where Self Help is now. The kids section will be nearly empty, as the Independent Reader shelves come out onto the floor proper, with Popular Fiction ringing them. Computers will shift back past Music, and Travel will be condensed to make room for History.
I’ve worked at the Bookstore for nearly fourteen months, and it had finally gotten to the point where no matter how obscure the section, I knew where it was — and we’ve got some obscure fuckin’ sections. And now I’ve got to relearn it all over again.
I know that at least some of the people who read this blog shop at the Bookstore I work at: although I work days in Bethesda, I see one or two of you every now and then, and let me warn you about what’s going to happen when all this shifting takes place:
I read The Time Traveler’s Wife about a year and a half ago, and it’s an incredible book. I’d initially hesitated to pick up a copy, despite all the great things I’d heard about it, largely because folks like Jennetic (now damn, there’s a blogger I miss) … well, it’s not that I don’t trust her opinion, it’s just that romance is not necessarily what I look for in a book?
(I mean … like I like romantic books, in the sense that The Princess Bride is a romantic story. With albinos, and six-fingered men, and giants, and Wallace Shawn, except that’s a lie because my favorite old Ferengi is in the movie, not the book. But let me just take this opportunity to say that if you’ve seen the movie and you’ve never read the book, you’re missing out. And if you’ve never seen the movie, seriously, why not? It’s a great fun movie with sword fights, giant rodents, mawwiages, and, dare I forget it? Perfect breasts. (Yes, there are perfect breasts in The Princess Bride, why are you still not adding it to your Netflix queue?))
Back to the subject matter — okay, so The Time Traveler’s Wife is getting the good old “let’s fuck up a perfectly good book by trying to cram it into a two hour movie” treatment — it hits theaters in August. Incidentally, and because I can’t seem to not interrupt myself, The Princess Bride is a great example of a great book being made into a great movie.
Anyway, so here’s the trailer to The Time Traveler’s Wife:
Having read the book, I was completely and utterly confused by its genre. I mean, there’s a whole lotta romance in it. Like, seriously, I was getting a fucking hard-on at points. Ew. On the other hand, there’s also time travel, which is totally sci-fi. This explains why at the Bookstore, we shelve it in Literature (but hurry, we only had like five copies left last I saw). Just on a side note — have you seen the covers of some Romance books? It’s a good thing we label the books what section they go in because the covers that have starships and vampires and guys with big guns really scream out to me to go into Sci-Fi, but half the time, nope, Romance. Because what’s more romantic than loving your conflicted vampire second-in-command after slaughtering the Warebeasts of Cyprus IIX with laser rifles, right?
Okay, back to the book. So, our main characters are Henry and Clare. Henry is afflicted with chrono-displacement disorder which tends to cause him to jump around in time, and due to the nature of how time travel works (in this, at least), Henry is “anchored” to Clare in a manner which made me initially uncomfortable, as what’s comfortable about a 40-year old man appearing buck naked in front of a 5-year old kid? Begin snark. Oh, nothing, nothing at all. End snark. Flash forward through the trials and tribulations as their relationship is really weird — Clare meets Henry first, as a kid, and he knows all this stuff about her because in the future they’re married. Then, when Henry first meets Clare, she knows all this stuff about him because his older self has been visiting her for years, but he has no idea who she is except she wants him in bed fast, and they’re doing the nasty and he’s like, “Wait a second, just because this is the first time I’ve had sex with her, this is clearly not the first time she’s had sex with me.” Disturbing! But cool!
Are you confused yet?, because I sure am.
I’m going to wrap this up, because, y’know, work. But if you’re looking for a great summer read, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Do it.
