Ann Patchett "This is the Story of a Happy Marriage"

ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming the great aunt Patrick hi Yomi thank you all for coming out after that weird piece in the post this morning I wasn't expecting it just really wasn't expecting to see anyone here today um I would I would like to say that I normally don't look like this I just came from doing a little segment on the NewsHour which they promised once there was peace on earth they would actually run um so I I have enough makeup on right now that if you wanted to scratch your initials in my cheek you could do so without hurting me um I loved I love this store and I love this city and I'm always so happy to be here and I'm going to tell you how this book came to be and then I'm going to read an essay and then we'll do the question thing and that'll work um I have this friend named Nicky castle Nicky castle was the babysitter for my sister's children when she was sophomore class president at Converse College in South Carolina and my sister was the vice president at the college and my family really loved Nikki and we sort of adopted her and when she was finished at converse I talked her into going to the Columbia publishing program in New York and then I got her a job with my agency ICM and she moved to New York and she worked at ICM for four years and at the end of that time she started calling and she was crying a lot and she said she just couldn't take New York anymore she couldn't take being broke she couldn't take everybody being you know New Yorkers and um and she wanted to move and she wanted to move to Nashville and the only person she knew in Nashville was me and um I was a little overwhelmed I really loved Nikki but I don't have kids and so the idea of one of my kids moving back home when I don't have kids was was confusing and I kind of kept saying ah let's talk about other cities you might want to live in oh she wanted to live in Nashville she didn't have a job and she didn't have any money and she moved to Nashville and she lived in my basement she found an apartment pretty quickly but I told her that she could work for me until she found a job and I had never had an assistant and after about a day and a half I ran out of things for her to do she had reorganized all the wrapping paper and you know and I started teaching her how to cook and then she was going through the closets I mean like looking for something to do and she found this great big Tupperware bin and this is the bin where I kept all of the articles and essays that I have written and I have written a lot because this is how I made my living for a great deal of my life and the magazine's would get very heavy because I moved often so what I would do is every time I would write for 17 or bridal guide or mercedes-benz magazines or all of those other magazines that I'm sure you were reading when I was writing for them I would just rip the sheets out and put them in the bin and close the bin so Nikki who is young and inclined towards technology in a way that I am NOT said they had to be digitalized that it was scandalous to think that this my whole non-fiction career was contained into Tupperware bin and so I bought her a scanner which was only like $80 and I still don't know how to use it and she began to scan and then she bought these nice binders with plastic sleeves and she organized them and while she was doing this she read them and she came to me and she said okay I know what I'm going to do now with my time we're gonna do a book of essays and I'm going to put this together and I said who no interest no interest in a book of essays and she said well that is what we're doing Nikki and I as this will become clear we have a very symbiotic relationship and we're both very bossy and we're both very bossy with one another and I really love Nikki and she's one of the few people in my life that if she says you know will you do X and I say no I don't want to do that she'll come back and say you know what you're wrong and you are gonna do this and and there's not there's not that person anywhere else in my life really and and when she says that which is rarely but she's always right so she said I'm gonna go ahead and do this she put the book of essays together and it turns out of the many psychological problems I have one of them is I can't read my own work I've never read any of my books and and the reason and that's true I think of a lot of authors you have to read your book so many times when you're finished you've got to go over it again and again and your friends read it and they make notes and you have to read it and put their notes in and the editing and the copy editing and the proofreading and the last page proof and by the time it gets to a point where you can't make any changes you never want to see it again same thing is true with the essays if I write an essay for a magazine I will read it 20 times I'll just go and comb at comon comon comon comon and then I never never want to read it again there was that but there was also this fact that I realized later when I did read the book and what made it so hard to read the book is that the way my psychology works and I hadn't realized this is that something would happen to me something sad something difficult something joyful something wonderful something funny something boring and I would write a piece about it and then I would take it out of my life and I would put it in the Tupperware bin and I honestly don't know how people who aren't writers live you know like my grandmother died or my dog died or I got divorced you know these things that are hard and this is not a book full of things that are hard necessarily but I don't know how to carry that around and I also don't want to let it go and so I put it someplace and that place was the bin so it took me a very very long time to be able to read this book that Nikki had made and when I read it I hated it and and yet at the same time I could see what was really good in the book and what was really bad and I immediately took out everything that was bad and then time would pass by and I would get an assignment and I would think well you know what do I want to write about if there was going to be a book what would I want to write about if there was going to be a book I would want to write a really long piece about writing and if there was going to be a book I would want to write a really long piece about my nun I have my own nun and I would want to write more about the Los Angeles Police Department and so you know as assignments kept coming in I would I was working on the book even as I felt like I would never be able to publish it it was a good project the the reason and this is odd because all these pieces in this book were published the new ones the old ones everything was published somewhere but I publish in such various places that no one could possibly have read all the pieces and the way it works is kind of like this that if you go to a party and somebody takes your picture and you're wearing a dress with no sleeves and it has a high neck and it covers your knees but there are no sleeves and your arms are bare and someone takes your picture and then the next week you go to a party and you were dressed and it's got long sleeves and the neck is high but it's short and you're showing your legs and then the next week you go to a party and the dress is long and it has long sleeves but it's kind of plunging and someone takes your picture and then somebody puts all those pictures together and whoa you're naked and all these things that didn't seem too embarrassing by themselves seem very embarrassing when they were put together so I couldn't I just couldn't overcome the block um even as I kept getting these assignments for longer essays and I was writing pieces that I felt really really good about and continually taking out pieces that I thought you know what my thing was the weak sister I would read through the book what's the weak sister pull it out put something else in what changed everything was opening the bookstore and and that was the point in my life where I went from being an indoor person somebody who was very protective of my privacy and kind of kept a big wall up and was quiet and lived this life that was controlled so I would have plenty of time and space to write books to being an outdoor person because I opened this bookstore and it was something that I really really believed in and all of a sudden I was standing up on benches giving Peach's I was doing interviews all the time I was constantly harping about the importance of independent book selling and what I've realized actually just through the process of talking about this was there is a great similarity between my relationship with Nicky and my relationship with the bookstore because when I opened the bookstore I thought I was doing a good deed I thought that I was doing something Civic for my community because our bookstores had closed and I didn't want to live in a city without a bookstore and everybody told me I was going to lose my shirt and I thought okay I'm willing I'm willing to lose my shirt because this is really important and I'm just going to have to do it same with Nicky I thought you know I don't want to do this but this is somebody that I really love and she's really up against it and she's a kid and I need to just be there for her and let her move in and let her work with me and I found her a job at the Public Library Foundation where I'm on the board and um and then to make all of Nicky's dreams come true I opened a bookstore and now she is our events and marketing director and and here's the joke you know that Nikki gave me this book and there's no way in the world I ever would have done this without her thinking of it without her starting it and without her going along behind me like one of those Australian cattle dogs biting my ankle going you know go go go go you're gonna do this you don't have any choice I'm telling you you have to do this and she was really right because I I have to say I'm I'm really proud of this book and I'm really proud of the bookstore and it didn't turn out to be a great Civic gesture it turned out to be something that I loved now there's something that I forgot to ask you about that I need before I start I will never be able to get it unless we pass it over our heads copies do you have the day at the beach and the all of it did you get those copies I I had asked Jane Byrne to order copies of all anyway if if it happens that they can be yester does anybody have a copy of the all of it see all of it okay you know what I can talk about it with that showing it to you Lee Yeah right there's a point madam hang on you will have to wonder no more okay so I'm going to read um the feel-good article of the year called the bookstore Strikes Back when I opened this store it was hysterical to me that I would have liked everybody I'd ever written for called me up and said would you write a piece about the bookstore and I was like no very much I'm going to write my piece about the bookstore for the Atlantic and it's going to be really big and on my terms so here it is and this isn't the really big version I trimmed it down so don't be frightened in late February of 2012 I am in my basement which is really a very nice part of the house not done justice by the word basement for purposes of this story let's call it the Parnassus fulfillment center i have hauled 533 boxed up hardback copies of my latest novel state of wonder from her Nasus the bookstore i co-own in nashville into my car and driven them across town three trips there and three trips back okay friends you can't read along it really freaks me out okay because I screw things up and I'm thinking they know what I'm skipping okay alright sorry I should have said that in advance I did the audiobook so I can read it to you without mistakes later um then lug them down here to the Parnassus fulfillment center along you can text you can talk on the phone while I read just can't read my book along with the hardbacks I brought in countless paperback copies of my back list as well I sign all these books and I stack them up on one enormous and extremely sturdy table and then I call for backup nikki and patrick from the store my friend judy my mother form an assembly line tanking orders off the bookstores website addressing mailing labels writing tiny little notes to tuck inside the sign copies and then bubble wrapping and taping and packing them all up to mail we get a rhythm going we have a system and it's pretty smooth except for removing orders from the website what I don't understand is that no matter how many orders I delete from the list the list does not get smaller we are all work and no progress and I'm sure that something has gone seriously wrong after all we've only had this website for a week and who's to say that we know what we're doing we know what we're doing nikki says and patrick who set the website up in the first place confirms this they explained to me that the reason the list isn't getting any shorter is that the orders are still coming in you may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead that books are dead that maybe even reading is dead to which I say pull up a chair friend I have a story to tell the reason I am signing and wrapping books in my basement is that more orders have come in than the store can handle and the reason so many orders have come in is that a few days before I had been a guest on The Colbert Report after a healthy round of jousting about bookstores versus Amazon mr. Colbert held up a copy of my novel in front of the cameras and exhorted America to buy it from Amazon to which I without a moment's thought because without a moment's thought is pretty much how I fly these days shouting no no not not Amazon order it off Parnassus books dotnet and I'll sign it for you and America took me up on my offer that explains how I got stuck in the basement but fails to answer the larger question what was a writer of literary fiction whose new book was already 10 months old doing on The Colbert Report in the first place hang on this is where things start to get weird I was on the show not because I am a writer but because I am a famous independent bookseller let's go back to the beginning of the story a year before or the city of Nashville had two bookstores one was Davis Kidd which was our much beloved locally owned and operated independent before selling out to the Ohio based chain Joseph Beth ten years before Joseph Beth had moved Davis kid into the mall provided it with 30,000 square feet of retail space and put wind chimes and coffee mugs and scented candles in front of the books we continued to call it our local independent even though we knew it wasn't really true Nashville also had a borders which was about the size of Davis kid and sat on the edge of Vanderbilt campus in December of 2010 Davis kid closed it had been profitable declared the owners from Ohio who were dismantling the chain just not profitable enough then in March of 2011 our borders closed also profitable it went the way of all borders stores and we woke up one morning and we found we no longer had a bookstore how did this happened had digital books led us astray had we been lured away by the siren song of Amazon's undercut pricing had we been careless failed to support the very places that had hosted our children's story ours and brought in touring authors and set up summer reading tables our city experienced a great collective gnashing of teeth and rending of garments but to what extent was Nashville to blame our stores had been profitable every month they were open despite the fact that they were both the size of small department stores and bore enormous rents they had been making their numbers every month Nashvillians I would like the record to show had been buying books my secret was that I did not much miss those mall size Gargantuas the story I really missed had been gone much longer than they had Mills was the bookstore of my youth my sister and I used to walk there every day after school stopping first to check out the puppies at the pet store across the street and then to go admire the glossy covers of the Christian Lavin's Daughter series which is what girls read after the little house books were finished back before the Twilight books had been written Mills could not have been more than 700 square feet and the people who work there remembered what you and what you had read even if you were 10 if I could have that kind of bookstore one that valued books and reading above muffins and adorable plastic watering cans a store that recognized it could not possibly stock every single book that every single person might be looking for and so stocked books the staff had read and liked and could recommend if I could recreate the bookish happiness of my childhood then maybe I was the person for the job or maybe not I wanted to go into retail about as much as I wanted to go into the army you're like a really good cook who thinks she should open a restaurant my friend Steve Turner told me over dinner I had gone to Steve for advice because he has a particular knack for starting businesses which has led to his knack for making money he was trying to talk me down from the ledge anyway you already have a job I wasn't thinking of working in the bookstore I said he shook his head don't ever think you can start a business and just turn it over to someone else it never works in truth I left that dinner feeling relieved I'd been to the Oracle and the Oracle had told me that mine was a bad idea which must have been what I wanted to hear in fact it was exactly Steve Turner's advice I was thinking of when I met Karen Hayes the next week we were introduced by our one friend in common Barry gray James Karen had been a sales rep for Random House and mary gray had been a rep for Harcourt and they had both worked at Ingram a large book distributor outside of Nashville Karen is tall and pale and very serious in a way that brings to mind pilgrims or homesteaders or other indefatigably hard-working people meant to open a bookstore her plan was to quit her job and devote her life to the project all she lacked was the money I suggested having never considered investing in a bookstore and never having been asked to do so that I could pay for the store and promote it Karen and I would be co-owners and Mary Gray would be the general manager thus solving the problem of how I could have a bookstore without actually having to work in a bookstore we hammered out a tentative plan in the time it took to eat a sandwich then Karen pulled a prospectus out of her bag and handed it to me it's called Parnassus books she said I looked at the word struck me is hard to spell and harder to remember I shook my head I don't like it I said how many people knew what it meant in Greek mythology Mount Parnassus is the home of literature and learning and music and some other valuable things I had wanted a store called independent people out of the grafter the great Hal d'Or Laxus novel about Iceland and sheep or perhaps Red Bird books as I believe that simple titles especially those containing colors were memorable I always wanted a bookstore called Parnassus Karen said I looked at this woman I did not know my potential business partner I wanted a book store in Nashville why should I get to name it you're the one who has to work there I told her that night after talking it over with my husband I called Karen according to her numbers three hundred thousand dollars would be needed to open a 2,500 square foot bookstore I told her I was in this was April 30th 2011 in two weeks I was to leave for the UK leg of the state of wonder book tour the US leg of tour started June 7th Karen was working for Random House until June 10th should I announce this on book tour I asked her I knew I'd be giving interviews all day long for the entire month of June should I tell people what we had planned over lunch that we had a name I didn't like but money in the bank that we were strangers hmm sure Karen said after some hesitation I guess when I look back on all this now I am dazzled by the blitheness that stood in place of any sort of business sense the grand gesture of walking over to the roulette table and betting it all on a single number anyone I mentioned this plan too was quick to remind me that books were dead that in two years and our two-year anniversary is in three days I have no idea where two years came from but that figure was consistently thrown at me books would no longer exist much less bookstores and I might as well be selling 8-track tapes and typewriters but somehow all the naysaying never lodged itself in my brain I could see it working as clearly as I could see me standing beside my sister in mills I was a writer after all and my book sold pretty well I spoke to crowds of enthusiastic readers all over the country and those readers were my proof moreover I was partnering with Karen Hayes who wore the steely determination of a woman who could clear a field and plant it herself and Mary gray my dear friend who had already opened a bookstore moreover our two giant departed book stores had been profitable every month and there was the roulette ball bouncing up again and again until finally coming to land on the number I had chosen so without anything like an opening date I left for book tour and on the first day in DC on the Diane Rehm Show I announced that I along with my partner Karen Hayes would be opening an independent bookstore in Nashville I was vague on every detail but when asked the name I managed to say the word or Nasus while I was flying from city to city karen was driving around the south and a u-haul buying up shelving at rock-bottom prices from various border stores that were liquidating I had written one check before I left for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars I kept asking her if she needed more money no she didn't need more money at the end of the summer we settled on a former tanning salon a few doors down from a doughnut shop and a nail Emporium unlike the property managers we'd encountered Laer the one responsible for this location was a business savvy Buddhist who felt a bookstore would lend class to his l-shaped strip mall and to this end was willing to foot the bill to have the tile floor is chipped out the tanning beds recording of what carted away but the sign stayed over the door for a ridiculously long time Tan mm actually all of my friends said we should just call the store and mm I went to Australia on yet another leg of tour leaving all the work on Karen's head the word had spread to the southern hemisphere in Australia all anyone wanted to talk about was the bookstore journalists were calling from Germany and India wanting to talk about the bookstore every interview started off the same way had and I heard the news had no one thought to tell me bookstores were dead then one by one the interviewers recounted the details of their own favorite stores and I listened they told me confidentially and off the record that they thought I might just succeed I was starting to understand the role that interviews would play in that success in my 30s I had paid the rent by writing for fashion magazines I found Elle to be the most baffling because its editors insisted on identifying trends since most fashion magazines closed three months before they hit the newsstands identifying a trend especially from Nashville required an act of near clairvoyance eventually I realized what everyone in fashion already knew trend is what you call a trend this spring in Paris fashionistas will wear fishbowls on their foreheads in my room in Australia this insight came back to me more as a vision than a memory the small independent bookstore is coming back I told reporters in Berlin and Bangladesh it's part of a trend my act was on the road and with every performance I tweaked the script hammering out the details as I proclaim them to strangers all things happen in a cycle I explained the little bookstore succeeded and then it grew into a bigger bookstore seeing the potential for profit the superstore chains raised up and crushed the independence then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us we realized what we had lost our community center the human interaction the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had bought I promissed whomever was listening that from those very ashes the small independent bookstore would rise again say it enough times and it will be true build it and they will come in Melbourne I gave a reading with Jonathan Franzen I asked him if he would come to the bookstore sure he said I'd like to do that down in the Antipodes my mind began to flip through my rolodex I know a lot of writers meanwhile back in Nashville Karen and Mary gray hired a staff and they washed the warehouse borders bookshelves again and again while they waited for the paint to dry and the new flooring to arrive in a burst of optimism we had hoped to open on October 1st lights were still missing when we finally did open on November 15 we'd forgotten to get cash for the cash register and I ran to the bank with my checkbook which was actually hysterical I went to my bank and I was like how many quarters do you need to open a business that morning the New York Times ran a story about the opening of Parnassus along with a photo of me on page a1 imagine a group of highly paid consultants crowded into the offices of my publisher HarperCollins their job is to try and figure out how to get a picture of a literary novelist me on the front page of the New York Times she could kill someone one consultant suggests the other consultant shake their head would have to be someone very famous she could hijack a bus or she could restructure the New York public school system they sigh it would not be enough they run down a list of crimes and stunts and heroically good deeds but none of them are page one material I can promise you this if kept in that room for all eternity they would not have landed on the idea that opening a 2500 square foot book store in Nashville would do the trick the bookstore that does in fact open in Nashville is so beautiful I can't even make sense of it well I have spent the summer talking Karen has taken her dreams out of the air she's made the ideal bookstore of her own imagination into a place where you can actually come and buy books I realize now that my business partner is something of a novelist herself she attended to the most tedious details and then went on to make a work of art through every color choice every cabinet every twinkling hanging star she is conjured a world that was worth inexpressibly more than the sum of its dazzling parts the kind of store children will remember when they are old themselves Parnassus I could finally see was perfectly named every time I walk through the door I think Karen was the only person I met who wanted to open a bookstore and how did I know when I met her that I should sign on for life when we had our grand opening the following Saturday an all-day extravaganza that stretched from early morning puppet shows to late night wine and cheese an estimated 3,000 Nashvillians came through the store devouring books like locusts sweeping through a field of summer wheat all of us who worked there had waited so long for customers that once they finally came we could not stop telling them what wanted them to read I'm going to stop there for a second and this is almost over I've just got a page left but as I said earlier when I open this store I thought I was doing a good deed and I never thought about all of the ways that the store would be fabulous for me that it would be full of people who were my friends that I would get to come and see but that my dog would really love it and I could just drop him off in the morning and he could work there all day by himself and I could pick him up at night um that we would have all of these amazing authors come through you know when you live in Nashville it's a lot of songwriters and and I miss having a literary community but now all of my friends come to Nashville because they are all on book tour plus I get to meet amazing writers I've never met before but the thing that is the greatest thing about the store that it never occurred to me is that I could force people to buy the books that I love and you guys are all here your readers you know when you read a book you love there's nothing else like it it's a fabulous feeling but the but the companion feeling the thing that must happen the next moment is to force someone you love to read the book is to say ah Karen joy Fowler zwi are all completely beside ourselves you have to read this book you've got to read the good Lord bird by Jim mcbride you absolutely have to read the Goldfinch it's big it doesn't matter you're just gonna love it and that I've been doing that to my family and friends forever but now every day there's like a whole new group of strangers and I can come in and and they're just like trying to find the bathroom and and I can be like hey I just saw you walk past Tony Mara's the constellation of vital phenomenon that's the book for you please come back and because I am Ann Patchett and people are actually kind of scared of me um they they buy it I mean it's the people who work in the bookstore are always standing there going Burger ah I also take bad books away from people when I see somebody buying a book they should not be buying I'm like miss can we talk about this for just one minute my favorite stories I saw a young woman carrying a copy of the beautiful and the damned she was like 22 and I was like wow the beautiful and the damned man you must really love Fitzgerald and she was like oh no I'm so excited this is my first one the only people who read the beautiful the only people who should read the beautiful and the damned are people who are doing their doctoral thesis on on Fitzgerald and so I said no no you need to read The Great Gatsby first she said well my roommate says the beautiful and the damned is the best one I said your roommates a fool you know you I just read Gatsby maybe Tender is the night if you're on a roll come out I'll hold this one for you and I'll give it back to you so when I was going out with state of wonder and we didn't have a bookstore but we were about to have a bookstore I wanted to see what kind of a bookseller I was and I'm and I probably did this here with the all of it which is the number one best-selling title in Parnassus books we keep a huge stack on the counter somebody's checking out we say and do you have the all of it and they are like no and we said well you might as well buy it now guy oh no because you're going to have to buy it sooner or later and then you're going to come back and buy ten more copies and everybody does it was a book that I found that was out of print and I I wrote an introduction for it and when I was on book tour last time it actually hit several regional bestseller lists because I am a good book seller so when I went out I was going at this time I thought I want to do this again and I wanted to find another out of print book that I really really loved get it back in print write an introduction and take it with me and on the book that I have with me is Jeffrey Wolf's a day at the beach now this is the most perfect book of essays that I have read you might wonder why it is that somebody who is on book tour for a collection of essays in hardback would be saying this is a better book and it's paperback it's cheaper uh I can't tell you if you have you read Duke of deception Jeffery Wolf's memoir a lot of you have Jeffy wolf is Tobias Wolf's brother he wrote this boy's life about growing up with his mother the parents divorced very young Jeffrey wrote Duke of deception about growing up with his father but this is really the great book and the fact is books are like lemmings and and there's a crowd of them on the cliff and they're all these lemmings coming behind and pushing them off lemmings apparently don't jump they are shoved and a lot of really great books get lost because there's only so much shelf space most writers which you realize when you read this book and you will most writers are boring people as was so recently proven in a large profile of me in the Washington Post hi and they stay home and they don't do much and they write um there and when they do interesting exciting things it's usually because somebody is paying them to go on excite an assignment and do something interesting not Jeffrey Wolfe he is an interesting person who let an amazing life has a phenomenal mind and an unparalleled gift for writing and I just don't know almost anyone else where those things come together there are people who are great adventurers who are fearless who live fascinating lives but they either can't write or they just wouldn't waste the time to sit down and write because they're having such an interesting life Jeffrey Jeffrey is living that life and writing about that life and I I love this book okay so let me just polish this off was the end of my pitch ba ba ba the shelves that we had so recently washed and dried and loaded down were startlingly empty Haren kept running back to the office to order yet more books while I kept climbing onto a bench to make yet another speech every news program every local news pay along with People magazine came to interview us so many times at someone walking past the window of our bookstore on his way to the doughnut den might think that we had won the Derby or cured cancer or found a porthole to the South Pole you know I had told Karen early on you're going to wind up doing all the work and I'm going to get all the credit and that could get really annoying but she didn't seem annoyed either by the abstract concept or later by the omnipresent reality you just do your job she told me I'll do mine my job has become something I could never have imagined and while surely it benefits Parnassus Parnassus is not exactly the point without ever knowing that such a position existed let alone that it might be available I have inadvertently become the spokesperson for independent book stops people still want books I've got the numbers to prove it I imagine they remember the book stores of their own youth with the same tenderness that I remember none they are lined up outside most mornings when we open our doors because I think they have learned through the journey we've all been on that here's the here's the sentence to listen to if you're napping wake up that the lowest price is not necessarily the best value Parnassus books creates jobs in our community and contributes to the tax base we've made a place to bring children to learn and to play and to think those two things are one in the same we have a piano we have a dachshund we have authors who come and read and you can ask them questions and they will sign your books the business model may be antiquated but it's the one that I like and so far it's the one that's working and maybe it's working because I'm an author and maybe it's working because Karen works like her life depends on this bookstore or because we have a particularly brilliant staff or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent maybe we just got lucky but my luck has made me believe that changing the core of the corporate world is possible Amazon doesn't get to make all the decisions the people can make them by how and where they spend their money if what a bookstore offers matters to you then shop in a bookstore if you feel the experience of reading is valuable read a book this is how we change the world we grab hold of it we change ourselves thank you you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 23,111

Rating: 4.7677422 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Ann Patchett, Parnassus Books, Bel Canto, Writing, State of Wonder, Essay Collection, Essay (Literary Genre)

Id: EfTVcD-zTNk

Length: 40min 20sec (2420 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2013