This First Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare

So, this is part of the New Year overhaul attempt: the Tuesday morning-ish installment of Unpacking My Library, which I have codenamed "This Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare", in which I will have something to say about my adventures as a person who thinks about books, and Shakespeare in particular, more often than the other "guys seeking friendship" on Buffalo craigslist. I imagine that this series will have a lot to say about bookstores. And this installment, in fact is going to be all about bookstores, as well as The Economy, because that's what the whole internet is talking about and who am I to disagree. It doesn't actually wind up having any Shakespeare mentioned, though I did look at a few books about him at the bookstore. Maybe I could do with a better segment title? Thoughts?

Yesterday I talked to one of my friends who had recently decided that she didn't know anything about the economy, because she talked to people from Barclays and found herself conversationally adrift. Rather than sniffily call economics the dismal science and get back to Bolano, which is what I would have done, she trooped out and got Alan Greenspan's the Age of Turbulence, which is what I would have done if weren't lazy. She also bought the World without Us by Alan Weisman, about what would happen if we homo sapiens turbulent ourselves right off the planet. So, bleak. Anyway, that was yesterday.

Today, I got hustled out of bed in the EARLIEST HOURS of the morning, in order to take one of my brothers to school because the other brother had made off with his car. Being up then, with no plans for the next five hours, I decided to go to Starbucks and read, and from there I decided to go to Barnes and Noble and see what was up. It was bleak there, too: all of the holiday-fattened displays had slimmed down, and even the once proud front display, where mere weeks earlier I had seen Paul Krugman's new book about Depression economics rubbing spines with A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O'Reilly now was all fitness books. And not entirely new fitness books -- books that people already deludedly bought when they were going to really change their lifestyles in 2006. This was depressing: not enough books. We hear about that all the time, of course; print media is always in crisis, and why not? The number one way to deal with a print media crisis is to write about it, and that gives a lot of us something to do, and some people even something to do in print.

What struck me the most about these two days, though, was the way in which the latter undercut the former: that is, the problem that one of the ways in which people try to understand Our Troubled Times is to read books, while one of Our Time's Troubles is that books are getting sparser. I can't imagine that the kind of information that my friend sought in her books by Alans will go away (or at least not before we are in much deeper trouble than that), and I suppose that kind of faith in things to get written is something on which to hang our collective hat. But it's more troubling to think about slimmer bookstores, offering less comfort to the only recently ungroggy who go to just wander around among all that heft of words.

Of course, I could just go in my room, where there is a shit ton of books sitting around, too. So I've got options.