Mary Kay at D.C.’s Lambda Rising Bookstore has thwarted my fiendish plan to one-up Famous Author Rob Byrnes. I know that she has met and likes (?!?!) FARB, so I was trying to get a photo of her for MY LiveJournal before he could get one for HIS blog.
Mary Kay diplomatically evaded my trap by sending both of us a photo of her reading The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist by Diane DiMassa. You know what’s hot? Booksellers who love the books they sell. You can find them at the big stores and the indies, and people who get excited about what they read ROCK MY WORLD! Here’s what Mary Kay has to say about her favorite book one of her favorite books:
I love it not just because of the…reactionary nature of Hothead, but because she’s actually much deeper than that. When she’s not killing bigots and idiots in the most fun and inventive of ways, she really does ask the big questions in life and the stuff she ponders (and melts down over) reminds me of the stuff I ponder as well. That and it’s hard not to love the “big blind Buddha named Roz”. Chicken is also awesome…
Though every author is delighted with all the online sources for buying books, there’s nothing like a few hours in an actual bookstore. If it’s a smaller one, you’re sure to find someone on the staff who can make lots of recommendations. If it’s a larger store, you can probably find a place to drink coffee, read, and people watch.
And you just may find a hot someone of your own there.
I’m glad you posted this picture. That book over her left shoulder, Love Stories, has an interesting cover, to me. Me and James, we were talking last night about James Baldwin and the pre-Stonewall era.
I keep seeing that book here and I have to agree with you. It’s a wonderful cover. It makes me wonder how same-sex love worked back in those days. I find it fascinating to learn about GLBTQ life 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. The similarities and differences. All of that jazz.
Eventually, I should get around to reading it.
One of the only problems with working in a bookstore is that your “to read” list grows by a factor of 10 within the first week that you work there, and only gets longer over time. At this point, I have so many books I have to read, I can NEVER DIE. (And the stuff that gets added on here is only GLBTQ books. Not to mention all the “straight” books I want to read. [Just worked my way through the entirety of the original Sandman comics/books {which are just amazing and some of the stories within have GLBT characters, sometimes crucial to the plot} and I just started reading Hellsing today.])
Neil Gaiman pops out of a crowd to me… something very interesting about him.
I love the way you describe a relationship between books and a reader, the compulsion and the need, and all. : )
w00t! Thanks for the plug, Becky!
And, you know, I’d love to meet you, too, sometime. Drop by our DC store and have the floor staff call me downstairs. (I work upstairs in our administrative office.)
What’s great about working here is that everyone does read something or other. We have a staff picks page up on our website, and the books that go up on there are picked by those staff members themselves as their favorites. We’re not paid to push any of those books… I just go up to them and say “hey, tell me about some of your favorite GLBTQ books” and put the results up on the website.
A small correction, though. Hothead isn’t my favorite book (that honor would go to a non-GLBTQ book, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland) but it is one of my favorites. For more of my favorites, check out my Staff Picks page. That page contains some of my absolute favorites and I was psyched at the chance to share them with everyone!