Books I bought in Omaha.

We’d love to live in Omaha. It’s fun to visit a big city, and we like the understated Midwestern hipness. You can shop in the Old Market area, visit the Joslyn Art Museum, go to concerts, and, best of all, browse at Jackson Street Booksellers.

Will we drive three hours to a bookstore?  Yes, we will. We passed yellow soybean fields and  windmill farms and finally crossed the bridge from Council Bluffs to Omaha. We headed straight to the Old Market so we could browse at Jackson Street Booksellers, a great used bookstore.

Jackson Street Booksellers, Omaha

I picked up several books and carried them around the store because I couldn’t decide which to buy–a lot of Anita Brookner, an adorable Penguin omnibus of mysteries, and some nice editions of Trollope–but iI limited myself to four books. I am so disciplined!

So here’s what I bought!

1.  I’d never heard of the Brazilian writer Rachel de Queiroz, but was intrigued by the cover art on this 1975 paperback of Dora, Doralina,  translated by Dorothy Scott Loos.  De Queiroz (1910-2003) was a novelist, journalist, and translator who, in 1966, was a Brazilian delegate to the UN.  She won many awards, including the Camões Prize in 1993.

And she has a statue in Brazil!  I do want to go to Brazil.

2  Kate Braverman is a poet and fiction writer.  Her 1979 novel, Lithium for Medea, used to be in every bookstore. Somehow it never appealed to me.  Did I even know what Lithium was?

Anyway, I was drawn by this 1989 Penguin Contemporary American Fiction edition, because I was always fond of this “yuppieback” series.  And her prose is stunning!  I’m racing through it.

The Goodreads description says,

“Lithium for Medea is a tale of addiction: to drugs, physical love, and dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent his waking hours in the garden cut off from his wife’s harangues. Now an adult, Rose works her way through a string of unhealthy love(less) affairs. After a brief, unhappy marriage, she slips more deeply and dangerously into the lair of a parasitic, cocaine-fed artist whose sensual and manipulative ways she grows addicted to in the bohemian squalor of Venice.”

It is depressing, but somehow I can take this now that I’ve Lived a While and Seen a Few Things I Would Rather Have Not.

3.  I missed Virago Month, but here’s the good news:  I found a Virago at the bookstore, Fanny Burney’s Cecilia.  I am fond of 18th-century novels, and enjoyed Burney’s Evelina, so look forward to this.

4.  We were  very excited to find an Everyman copy of John Updike’s The Complete Henry Bech, sans book jacket, for $6:   Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), Bech at Bay (1998), and the short story His Oeuvre (2000).  My husband and I are both fans of Updike.

Here’s the Goodreads description:

“From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike’s most endearing confection-a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike’s limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.”

HERE’S WHAT MY HUSBAND BOUGHT IN OMAHA!  Only one book.

1.  Uwe Johnson’s Speculations about Jakob.  My husband is mad about this award-winning German writer, and recommends Arrivals. Here is a link to an article about Johnson in The Millions.

What We Bought in Omaha!

We live in a small, beautiful city on the prairie.  Nobody knows it’s here; nobody understands why we live here. It’s not glam, but it’s Paradise in the summer, and  has livable urban neighborhoods near shops, almost no traffic, and everything you need to be a well-adjusted 21st-century American.   A woman who moved here from California observed  in line at Starbucks,  “I can live anywhere there’s a Starbucks and Target!”

But we do lack bookstores, except for B&N, so today we headed to Omaha, the nearest big city, to browse at Jackson Street Booksellers, a huge used bookstore, and The Bookworm.

Jackson Street Booksellers, Omaha

First up:  I found an  irresistible Library of America volume with three of William Dean Howells’ novels, The Minister’s Charge, April Hopes, and Annie Kilburn.  Have you heard of these?  We have not, but I love Howells!

And now for ’50s pop!  I could not resist this cover.  According to Kirkus, Ilka Chase’s 1951 novel New York 22 is “a chaise longue coverage of marital friction, feminine calculation and upper bracket racketing, this should have good rentals on the distaff side; and substantial sales to the gilded glamor fringe.”

There is very little about Chase online.   The daughter of Edna Woolman Chase, the editor of Vogue from 1914-1952, Ilka was a member of the Smart Set and an actress who starred in many Broadway plays, including the original Broadway version of The Women.  Ilka adapted her novel In Bed We Cry, the story of a self-made career woman in the cosmetics business.  And she had  her own  TV show called Fashion Magic!

I’ll be happy if this novel is readable in the style of a trashy pageturner like Faith Baldwin’s Skyscraper or Susann’s  Valley of the Dolls (a truly great trash classic!).  There’s hope:  The characters are drinking cocktails, and the heroine, Georgiana, leaves her husband and daughter  to chase a writer who is 12 years younger than she.

Here’s a quote chosen at random:

Georgiana sat in her office at Tang, her desk spread with manuscripts and correspondence waiting her attention, but she ignored them.  She was engrossed in reading the first review of Reams’s book, The Shadowed Path.  Reams had sailed according to schedule, but Barnstable had published it that week and Georgiana read the clippings with a sense of triumph and a sinking heart.  As she had expected, Reams was accepted into high company.  Thomas Wolfe,Hemingway, Faulkner, in reference and comparison–the great names dotted the columns.

I may save this for Thanksgiving:  I like to read old pop novels while the turkey is roasting.

Next up:  Maurice Baring’s C (1924).  I’ve never heard of it, but I do love a good novel about Edwardian house parties.  Goodreads says, “Baring’s homage to a decadent and carefree Edwardian age depicts a society as yet untainted by the traumas and complexities of twentieth-century living. With wit and subtlety a happy picture is drawn of family life, house parties in the country and a leisured existence clouded only by the rumblings of the Boer War. Against this spectacle Caryl Bramsley (the C of the title) is presented – a young man of terrific promise but scant achievement, whose tragic-comic tale offsets the privileged milieu.”

Last but not least,  Tama Janowitz’s A Certain Age.  I loved Janowitz’s new memoir, Scream (which I wrote about here), and look forward to reading this  modern retelling of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.

I bought nothing at the Bookworm today, because I had exceeded my limit at Jackson Street Booksellers.

And, by the way, here’s the sky  snapped from the car as we tooled down the highway:

                                             Old Market District, Omaha

Omaha is a  hip Midwestern city (by our standards), with a splendid art museum and trendy shopping in the Old Market District.

It was, however, 91 today.

“It feels like 100,” I said.  It really did in the sun.

My husband says he doesn’t feel the heat till it’s 95. “It might be 92.”

The warehouses in the Old Market District in Omaha are now shops, restaurants, and lofts. You can browse at antique stores, glass stores, art galleries, and junk shops.  We drink coffee or iced tea on “dog-friendly” terraces:  a small bulldog had stepped out of Colette; surely it was Fossette from The Vagabond!.

But the question was whether to shop at a bookstore or an iron lawn ornament store.

We love to pop in at Jackson Street Booksellers, one of the best used bookstores in the U.S.

My husband says I buy too many books.  And the shelves at home do seem to be full.  Time to donate to the Planned Parenthood Book Sale again.

Iron Decor and More, Omaha

“You want to go to the lawn ornament store?” I have a hankering for a tacky ornament for the backyard.  They have an iron cow on a bicycle and colorful cats with springy necks.  I must admit the chicken in the picture at right is too much.

‘NO!!!!”

So we went to Jackson Street Booksellers.

Jackson Street Booksellers

You know the kind of bookstore. It’s huge, and they recently expanded, and they need to expand again.  The shelves are so tall you can’t possibly see what’s on top. The store is deep and dark, with occasional spotlights.  There are also piles of books on the floor.  You can’t find the Wyndham Lewis books unless you move a tall stack of books.  (Too much trouble.)  The owner and employees sit up front and read the paper.  They don’t chat to us.  My husband thinks it’s because we’re from out of town.  I explain that the staff at used bookstores never talk to customers.

J.C. at the TLS has confirmed this.  He said of Skoob in Bloomsbury:

Here are the overflowing shelves, the arcane subject headings, the musty smell, the foreign languages on the floor, the grumpy staff…

Very like Jackson Street Booksellers..

It is crammed with literature, genre books, Americana, biographies, memoirs, art books, history, theater books, women’s books, foreign language, politics, travel, vintage books, and several shelves devoted to the coveted Folio Society editions and Heritage Press editions (books that come in a box!).

And then we went to The Bookworm, an indie bookstore in the suburbs.

Did I buy books?

Yes!

At The Bookworm:  Modern Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford).  This beautifully designed book is one of a very clever “A Short Introduction” series of tiny paperbacks.  I almost bought one on Nothing.  (“Cheeky Brits,” said my husband.  Sorry, Brits!!)

At Jackson Street Booksellers:  Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (a Brazilian classic).

Kay Boyle’s Three Short Novels:  The Crazy Hunter, The Bridegroom’s Body, and Decision.  (Boyle is an excellent American writer, and I was introduced to her books  by Virago.)

Phyllis McGinley’s A Pocketful of Wry.  This remarkable poet won the Pulitzer for her light verse.  I posted her “Ode to the End of Summer” here.

3 More Novels by Ronald Firbank:  Caprice, Vainglory, and Illuminations  (I may have read these long ago, but my Firbank is missing!.)

Robert Grave’s Good-Bye to All That (I love his historical fiction, but not his autobiography)

(My cat is considering what to read next.)