Forget Memory--A Trip to Sheboygan's Kohler Arts Center, and Inspirtation from Alzheimers (and Hey, a Plug for Alice LaPlante's Talk on Wednesday, July 13 at Boswell).

Last month I was excited to welcome my sister Merrill and her husband to Milwaukee.  Merrill visits periodically, but Gus had never been to our fair city.  It was a hot spell, and they'd already worn themselves out walking around Chicago.  On top of that, they warned me that they don't like to see movies on vacation (so no fabulous Oriental Theatre or incredibly-convenient-to-Boswell Downer Theatre) and that they were burned out on museums.  And even if they weren't, the Milwaukee Art Museum was between major exhibits--the Summer of China was not opening for another week. Oh, and they don't like big crowds, so no festivals, street or ethnic or music.

Of course we spent a good amount of time at the bookstore.  I had scheduled to interesting events during their stay, Danielle Sosin's The Long-Shining Waters and Arthur Plotnik's Better than Great.  Plotnik was a particular hit with Gus, a wordsmith himself, and they wound up having a very enjoyable conversation at the bookstore, and another at County Clare, where everyone had wound up staying.

Our downtown dining week experience was not so great.  My suspicion is that originally the idea was for restaurants to create a particularly good deal to entice customers, who would come back later at regular prices.  Then they realized that very few people came back, but that they could still make money off the crowds looking for a deal.  It turned out our $10 lunch was worth no more than $10, and the sandwiches were pre-made enough that I couldn't take the mayo off.  Instead, I spent a couple of dollars more and had a sandwich to my own liking.  No dessert this way, but them's the breaks.  We wound up having a particularly nice dinner at INdustri Cafe; I suspect the crowds were still chasing amazing downtown deals, leaving the restaurant to us and a few others who didn't hear the siren song. 

But the highlight of our trip was by far our visit to Sheboygan and Kohler, Wisconsin.  It's hard to admit that I'd never before been to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.  Renowned for their innovative exhibitions in a unique setting, I'd been wanting to go for years, but for some reason, something always got in the way, even though I'd been to Kohler several times.

You can't help but walk around the building before you enter.  It's such an exciting space, a mix of new and old, with even the gardens inspiring your creative juices.  Oh, and the other reason we walked around the building was because of some road construction. We wound up parking two blocks away, on the opposite side of the entrance.

Then we immediately headed to the legendary bathrooms. We all exited with our mouths agape.  And since it wasn't busy, we made sure the rooms were empty and then we took a peek in the opposite gender's rest room. Hope we don't get in trouble with that; I've talked to other visitors and heard that everyone does it.

But the main event was the exhibit, Hidden Places: Memory in the Arts. It's divided into four parts, Holding Memory, Shared Memory, Forget Memory, and From Memory. I'm a huge fan of Gregory Blackstock, whose book Blackstock's Collection was one of my favorite books of 2006. They have a very large collection of Blackstock works, which document anything from bird breeds to varieties of boats to the buses of a particular college league. I also really loved William Powhida's "Some People I've Met from Memory (that I Care to Remember)", a freeform grid of people from Powhida's life, linked by location and inked more darkly, the more vivid the memory, all with a Roz-Chast-like style.

The "Forget Memory" section was a true eye opener.  Walking through Deborah Aschheim's installation of other-worldly brain synapses that resonated back to the artist's caring for her mother and immediately spurred thoughts about my own connections to dementia in friends and family. It was wonderful to see works from local artists such as Anne Basting and Paul Cebar as well.

And I immediately thought (how could I not?) of Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind, her novel I've been touting that's told through the eyes of a woman with Alzheimers.  Like many of these works, LaPlante turned her caregiving (her mom) into art.  I am sure the folks at the Kohler would absolutely love this book.  If they are a little exhausted by my various phone calls and emails, it's for their own good, right?

As you know, it's hard to get photos from art exhibits, so I'm posting this without anything from the museum.  If they send me a couple of jpgs to use, I will add them to the post.

I was chatting with Jodie at Grove Atlantic, panicked about where all the reviews were. I forget that when I deal with indie presses, the reviews are clustered around pub date, not on-sale date. Once again, I jumped the gun. It turns out that LaPlante is getting the love I was expecting.

Here's a great excerpt from Glenn Altschuler in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"The debut novel of Alice LaPlante, a teacher of creative writing at San Francisco State University and Stanford, Turn of Mind is an artful, ambitious and arresting attempt to capture the thoughts and feelings, by turns confused, conspiratorial, canny and clear, of a person in the throes of mental illness. And by using Dr. White as her (riveting, revealing and eminently unreliable) narrator, LaPlante reminds all of us, passionately, that no matter what the state of our health, reality can be elusive and subjective."

Read the rest of the review here.  I'll save the rest for our email newsletter.  And don't forget, LaPlante is discussing and reading from Turn of Mind next Wednesday, July 13, at 7 pm, at Boswell.

Our day wasn't over yet.  We walked a few blocks to Field to Fork, Trattoria Stefano's local-focused breakfast and lunch place.  I didn't do too much research beforehand but Stefano had been in Boswell several weeks before, asking me about sourcing books for his restaurant, and I recalled talking about this place.  It was great!

Afterwards we went over to the Kohler Design Center. Honestly, the place usually wows visitors, but after seeing the toilets at the Koher Arts Center, these bathroom installations were just ok. Plus they had discontinued several styles that were still on display, including some on the Great Wall of Fixtures. It was sort of like me doing a display of books and saying that a third of them were unavailable.  Hey, I think I do that all the time in our curio case. 

That memory is finished. And now, it's time for me to make some more, as I read from Samuel Park's This Burns my Heart, which Sarah Waters called, "a delicate yet powerful story of love, loss, and endurance."  The novel is coming out next Tuesday, July 12.  I'm trying to work with a few different groups on this one.  Wish me luck!

Turning On to "Turn of Mind," LaPlante's Great New Novel. She's Appearing at Boswell on Wednesday, July 13, 7 pm.

Happy July to everyone. The new Indie Next List is out, and I'm very excited that we are hosting the #1 pick from independent booksellers around the county, Alice LaPlante's novel, Turn of Mind, on Wednesday, July 13.

It's the story of a retired surgeon, Jennifer White, who lives in Chicago with her caretaker.  Her husband has passed away.  She has two kids, and both relationships are rather difficult. Her best friend and mentor lived on the next block.  I say "lived" because she's now dead.  Murdered.

So here's the hook. The story is entirely from the perspective of Jennifer White's and she is living with Alzheimer's disease.  Aside from the dialogue (which is all in italics), everything is what's going on in her head.  She has good days and bad, so sometimes she recognizes her kids and sometimes she doesn't.  And the disease progresses--early on, she's coherent enough so that she can put the caretaker in place and assign guardianship to one of her kids.

I've been talking it up to folks who liked Room, which I am finally, finally reading for our in-store lit group discussion on July 4, 11 am.  It just goes to show that a bookseller doesn't have to read every book to know what you should read, and everyone who read Donoghue's novel on my suggestion can vouch for that. And of course we sold a lot of Room by comparing it to The Curious History of the Dog in the Night Time. 

This is a bit different, as this is an adult we're talking about. The other likely comparison is Lisa Genova's Still Alice, another book we sold very well in 2009 and 2010.  There are some differences to the two books--I would say that Genova's is more plot-driven and LaPlante's is more stylized.  It's also a bit like a puzzle, and I don't mean that in the mystery sense, as I think the story works better as a novel than a thriller.  I mean "puzzle" in the sense that you need to put together all the stray details of White's story and you get this fully realized life, which is just so well done.

I was a little late on reading Turn of Mind, as I always seem to be.  I first met LaPlante at the booksellers' Winter Institue, where she was one of the Grove Atlantic featured authors. After a wonderful conversation with the author, the publisher, and several booksellers who read Turn of Mind, the novel went to the top of my list. 

Then a whole bunch of other books got in the way, and I wound up taking the book to the big Book Expo America convention.  Now I always take a few books to the show, but there are always more there, and there's no time to read, and you start kicking yourself.  I was so absorbed in Turn of Mind, however, that I found myself reading it everywhere--in buses and subways, waiting for buses, while walking on crowded sidewalks, and even just slipping away from the show to get in another ten pages.

So here's the scoop, this is a book you're going to want to read, and afterwards, you're going to have questions and who better to ask them of than Alice LaPlante herself.  She'll be at Boswell on Wednesday, July 13, at 7 pm. LaPlante teaches writing at Stanford and San Francisco State.  She grew up in Chicago, where the story is set.

There are a lot of folks that share my enthusiasm for Turn of Mind.

Kirkus gave Turn of Mind a starred review.  They said, "Despite the near stream-of-consciousness, Faulknerian Sound and Fury presentation, the narrative is easily followed to the resolution of the mystery and White’s ultimate melancholy and inevitable end."  Faulkner! Read the rest of the review here.

Publisher's Weekly also starred their review. "Mystery fans should be prepared for a subtle literary novel in which the unfolding of Jennifer's condition and of her past matters far more than the whodunit." More here.

Here's author Beth Kephart on her blog. "Turn of Mind will have readers emphatically talking, bloggers opining, book club members up late at night. It's a chilling story. Dementia is chilling. LaPlante brings its fog and smear to vivid, shivering life." She also compared the book to Carole Maso's Ava. Read more on Beth Kephart Books.

While Rob Bunner in Entertainment Weekly wasn't crazy about the thriller angle, but enjoyed the writing enough to give Turn of Mind a B+.  He mentions a particularly great passage when Dr. White is watching someone to see how many times they punch their phone, to see if he is calling a number or 911.  Read the review here.

And of course the IndieBound quote, which is from Susan Wasson of Albuquerque's Bookworks. "This is a remarkable, heart-wrenching, and utterly compelling debut novel." More here. 

Quite the collection of recs, and that's without all the bookseller enthusiasm that is sometimes hard to track down.  Should I dig through every bookstore's staff rec pages? Yes, I should.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Here's a list of our upcoming events.

A Visit to Politics and Prose, a Dinner with Authors of Upcoming Books

It's our first full day of Winter Institute and already I'm feeling excited about books. Everybody's running around telling everyone else what to read. I'm embarrassed because I'm reading a lot of reprints (already confessed) but I can talk up the Hannah Pittard, which many other booksellers have enjoyed.

Last night Jason and I attended a dinner with Grove Atlantic and two authors, Alice LaPlante, who has a novel coming out in July called Turn of Mind, and Francisco Goldman, with a new novel called Say Her Name. Goldman's had some highly touted novels before (and at least one stop in Milwaukee in the Schwartz years) but this one seems to have more bookseller buzz about it. It's based on Goldman's own short-lived marriage to a woman who died while body surfing. Of course I immediately thought of Rafael Yglesias' A Happy Marriage, but honestly, I didn't read either. Before the dinner, both Lanora from Next Chapter and Mark from Politics and Prose told me how much they liked it.

And yes, Sheryl Cotleur of Book Passage has quotes on both advanced copies. Plus she also has a great advance read on Life, on the Line, the new joint memoir by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas. The Journal Sentinel reported that we're having a ticked event with Achatz on March 13th. Tickets go on sale soon. Check in with Stacie for details. I could be a happy camper just reading Sheryl's recommendations. I'm sure there are folks in Marin who do just that.

Yes, we spent the afternoon visiting Politics and Prose, one of the great bookselling pilgrimages. All of our former DC customers get all excited while talking about the store, and news that partner Carla Cohen passed away in 2010 made national headlines. There was a sadness to be in the store without Carla, but a happiness that the store looked great and bustling. I bought a delicious sandwich in the cafe, a copy of The Three Weissmanns of Westport (coming momentarily in paperback and for some reason, I don't own a copy), and a set of Moleskine green volant notebooks, a discontinued color. Thanks, Mark, for the tour, and I hope you don't mind if I copy an idea or two.

Oh, and I brought along my camera and didn't take any pictures. What's that about?

Tomorrow is lectures, meetings, sales rep presentations, authors, and lots more conversations with booksellers, publishers, and writers. Hey, I don't want to look stupid when you ask me that stumper about a book you just heard about.