This weekend was high time for me to get to New Haven to see “Searching for Shakespeare,” which traveled to the Yale Center for British Art from the National Portrait Gallery in London. No one ever promised it would stick around for ever and a day! This is the short and long of it: it closed yesterday! If you couldn’t get there, you’re not in a pickle. As good luck would have it, you can simply get the companion volume, published by Yale University Press. It is glorious, and essential for any Shakespeare collection. It will allow you to scrutinize intimately many of the most lustrous items in the exhibit, including some that were not permitted to travel to the U.S.

The book also conveys the joys of studying Shakespeare through its very focus on his face, his biography, and the material culture of the era, whereas a book of lit. crit. might serve to impede and set your teeth on edge! This way, readers might move on to contributor James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599,  which is great for placing WS firmly within the politics, wars, and court intrigues of his era. Then readers, their qualms vanishing into thin air, may venture to Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which enchants from its first sentence to its last, never losing a reader on the journey.

Regardless of all the scholarship above, some critics have not been  disheartened from proposing other figures as the actual writer of Shakespeare’s works. Wherever you come down on that topic (or even if you feel equivocal), it can be fun to read the books they write. At first glance, you can find yourself persuaded by arguments that are in fact flawed, circumstantial, even zany!. A good overview is John F. Mitchell’s Who Wrote Shakespeare. The newest gossip in the debate is in Brenda James and William Rubenstein’s The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, due out in October, about Sir Henry Neville, politician and diplomat and distant relative of Shakespeare, who, they claim, didn’t want to besmirch his court career by writing under his own name.

As you’ve leapfrogged through this piece, have you wondered about the parts in bold, where I seem to lay it on with a trowel? They are words and phrases coined by Shakespeare. Where would we be without him — whoever he was! 

In “In the bookroom,” it should be mentioned that our bookroom has recently had a bit of a face-lift (in actuality, a paper-lift, pulled off by myself and a few other diligent workers here at LJ that got to stretch their legs and rest their computer-glazed eyes for some good ol’ manual labor). In reorganizing, I was struck by the number and variety of interdisciplinary titles. Sorting books by category is getting harder than ever. On one hand, it gives me a good excuse to spend a few extra seconds flipping through each book we get and scanning the press materials. On the other, things can almost get sent to two different reviewers in different subject areas, and reviews get moved from one section to another and back again. Some other things have added to this idea in my head as it rolls along, picking up another layer of thought from another medium. Clayton A. Couch, our magazines reviewer, praises the Journal of Consciousness Studies in the Sept. 1 issue: “As knowledge of the universe is increasingly plagued by isolated, subject-specific academic discussion, there is a need for more publications that encourage interdisciplinary exchange, like the JCS…. [in which] the editors emphasize clarity of thought over jargon-laden language.” I also recently got an amusing Onion article, “Dewey Decimal System Helpless To Categorize New Jim Belushi Book,” delivered to my inbox by a coworker. (We categorized Real Men Don’t Apologize! as humor/lit in the May 15 issue.) Talk here about whether 9/11 books could be considered for the history category and a recent galley I opened that called a book “current events/history” are other things to think about. An intern said, “Well, it will be history one day.” Ain’t that the truth? I move to categorize everything as history from now on, and we’ll never have to change a thing.

I’m not going to pretend that this blog is anything but a blatant and tacky attempt to get that coveted commodity, reader feedback. Any librarian who posts at least a sentence-long comment on how we can improve the blog and/or LJ’s online Book Review content gets a free book of her/his choice. Hankering for some Elvis? I’ve got your medicine. Craving a first novel? I can set you up with the best. Just give me some love, people, and you’ll get some back. P.S. God bless Karl Helicher.

I just realized that I got ahead of myself in my last blog (see Snake on a Plane). Before I leave the Midwest (metaphorically, of course), I’d like to offer up an ode to used bookstores. Because of my job, I often forget what a luxury a book is. On days like today especially, as publishers bomb the Bookroom with package after package of big fall galleys, books seem to have it out for me. No joke: I’ve often dreamed of suffocating under a heap of health and medicine titles.

That sentiment seemed a lifetime away when I visited Huntington Books in Mandan, ND (sorry, they don’t have a web site). While munching on a maple cream from the candy shop a few doors down, I came across cherry hardbacks of Alex Haley’s Roots and a Flannery O’Conner short story collection, both with dust jackets in tact. My sister called my attention to a 1960s travel guide to New York City with dining advice that’s still relevant. These books did not symbolize “work,” but art. They’re human artifacts, infused with dirt, must, oil, and gratitude from their former owners. I like to think when I buy a used book, I’m promised a more intense reading experience, that whatever previous readers learned will be passed on to me through osmosis. The sad part is that not all books even make it to used bookstores—some are destined for landfills and return warehouses. The trick during this fall downpour is to convince myself that there are books worthy of second and third lives. And, of course, there are. Wait until you read our annual Editors’ Picks feature in the Sept. 1 issue.

While sitting sandwiched between strangers on a flight to my hometown last week, I couldn’t help but marvel at my ridiculousness. I’m a book review editor who hates to read books on planes. Long flights, short flights–it doesn’t matter. So anxious am I to arrive at my destination that I can’t involve myself in a good novel or work of nonfiction. Air travel and that kind of concentration seem incongruous, even dangerous. Why would I want to plunge into another world, only to be torn out of it by a rather surly stewardess’ voice and suffer whiplash? I like to dictate the length of my sittings, thank you very much.

My only refuge is in magazines. Give me a Vogue, an Allure, and a GQ, and I’m suitably happy–until I look down the aisle to spy an eight-year-old reading a five-hundred-pound Harry Potter installment. Or better yet, a 90-year-old woman reading the same book. “Something must be wrong with me,” I thought after I made my connection at Minneapolis. I was, I decided during my descent into Bismarck, ND, a kind of pervert (magazines being the equivalent of a motel with hourly rates). Apparently, I like to “check in” and “check out” of a narrative cheaply, lest it encroach on the thrill of my homecoming. That emotion takes precedence over anything a book would conjure. And if it made me slimy, I’d just have to deal with it. I’ve never pretended to be a “normal” reader.

Once I’m where I need to be, however, the story changes. I’m in the right frame of mind for reading. On my sister’s bookshelf one sweltering afternoon, I came across a hardback of Ann Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, complete with gold-foil dust jacket. A quick glance at the copyright page told me it was a first edition (!!), a feature that my sister had failed to notice when she bought it for 25 cents at a garage sale. Just then, I felt the old jolt–I had chemistry with this book–but family called, and you can’t shut family out, as the man reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections on my return flight would’ve told me.