A Disappointment

Went to the big Kinokuniya bookshop over the weekend. I found myself still in possession of some book tokens (from the Lit Seminar last year), which I'd tried unsuccessfully to pass on to some of the youngsters in the family, and intended to trade them in for something that felt reasonably urgent for me to read. I had three books in mind related to historical concerns, but not a single one of these was on the shelves. Oddly enough I chanced upon a copy of Citizens, my current reading, and was surprised at the price - a good one-third more expensive than the copy I picked up in the UK in December. In its way that made me feel pretty good at the 'saving' I'd made.

But in general the expedition to the shop involved negative feelings, and not just about the fact that the books on my list weren't available. What bothered me most was the general sense that the place was getting pretty run-down. A surprising number of the books I browsed looked less than brand new. I came across two copies of Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad both of which looked as if some careless owner had been reading them and putting, possibly dropping, them down with no regard for their general well-being. If either one had looked reasonable I would have bought it.

But more than this it was the odd way that the general 'literature' shelves often featured multiple copies of a single text by a writer but simply ignored, or almost so, their other works that grated. Anyone glancing at the section devoted to Dostoevsky would conclude that by far his most significant work was Crime and Punishment with The Brothers Karamazov coming in a very poor second. And most egregious of all, the three rows of shelves devoted to Donna Tartt (which strikes me anyway as two and two-thirds shelves too many) featured multiple copies of The Secret History, implying this is the single most important novel in the English language, and just two of The Goldfinch (and none of her other novel, whose title escapes me.)

I'm guessing this weird stacking has something to do with our old friend 'the dictates of commerce' but I'm not at all sure how exactly this works in the mind of whoever decided what might best occupy the spaces available. None of this speaks well for the modern world, but then few things do.