While I should be writing

Full Circle Bookshop in Oklahoma City is that kind of shop you want to disappear into for a while. Or forever. Winding, with lots of different rooms, and shelves that reach all the way to the celing, and sofas and chairs and a classical guitarist playing on Friday Nights – it was a miracle I managed to leave at all!

They also had book ladders, you know, the kind of thing they have in the library of Beauty and the Beast, in what is no doubt the most romantic scene that’s ever appeared in a Disney movie. Usually, I blame Pride and Prejudice for me being single, but now that I think of it – maybe I’m just waiting for someone to present me with an amazing library (with book ladders, I need hardly ask) on our third date. Subconsciously, I might just have sat around there on a perfectly good date with some charming man or woman or beast and thought: “I don’t know, it’s just like… something is missing.”

If so, I can’t imagine a better reason to stay single.

Co-incidently, Julia of Full Circle Bookshop told me that a woman had come in the other week dressed exactly like Belle of Beaty and the Beast in order to take photos on the book ladders. I was a bit disappointed. I had hoped that she had come in dressed exacly like Belle just to sit around and read.

“So, tell me”, I asked the bookseller behind the counter while buying a book (impossible to resist). “Do you get to climb them?”
He looked sort of strange at me and said heistatingly: “Sure… I mean, sometimes.”
I nodded. “It’s a great job.”

So last Thursday I visited amazing Boswell Books in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (“Milwaukee” is one of few tricky names I seem to get instinctively right: I just start typing, and everything makes sense. As compared to Albuq.. etc). It was a glorious, dangerous evening.

Boswell Books is located on 2559 N Downer Ave, Milwaukee; a charming bookshop on a charming street. I think this bookshop has sold more of my books than any other bookshop in the country. They even have a Team Broken Wheel. Bookseller Jen Steele was its first member, and she then recommended/forced the other people at the bookshop to read it, and it spread from there, until they had sold an incredible 145 copies of my book.

Tragically, they combined my even with “Book Club Night”: they put together a guide for book club with interesting books of different genre that might make for good discussions in a book club, and they began the night by presenting some ten of their favourites. Daniel and Jane were amazing, and somehow managed to talk passionately about their ten favourites or so while still keeping it under 30 minutes.

I’m in so much trouble, I thought, as I sat and listened to them talk about great books. I wanted to read them all, but somehow I managed not to buy all of them that night. Their recommendations included The Residence (want to read), Between You and Me (want to read), Girl Waits With Gun (have read, great book), A Re-Union of Ghosts (want to read), At the Waters Edge (want to read), A Spool of Blue Thread (want to read), The Turner House (want to read), The Little Paris Bookshop (great book), Kitchens of The Great Midwest (want to read).

Daniel seemed like something of a writer’s saint. He discussed difficult second books, and mentioned one author who’s second book hadn’t sold as well as the first: “Because it’s not selling, he thought it not as good, so I keep forwarding comments from readers who have loved it.”

A lot of Swedes living in Milwaukee had also mananged to find their way here, so I got to speak some Swedish!

Through some amazing miracle of self discipline I managed to only buy two books: Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo, and House of Thieves by Charles Belfoure

I fell in love with Barnes & Noble Edina before the event even started. You might remember me picking up som cosy crime from Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Ohio? One of them was Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. I was immediately fascinated by the premise, and the courage of the author. I would definitely not have been brave enough to bring back Sherlock Homes and pair him with a feminist fifteen year old, eventually to marry him off to her.

There’s at least thirteen books in the serie, so now I am hunting them down in bookshops across the US. This often happens when I travel. For example, in Ireland I stumbled over a used copy of Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy, and fell in love right away. Fortunately for me, her books had just been reprinted, and they appear in no particular order, so I just bought eight or ten or twelwe and looked myself in a hotel room. I don’t remember exactly how many I bought in Dublin, but I do remember I had to constantly leave them behind because they didn’t fit in my suitcase. And in London only a year or two ago I read a book by Julia Quinn, and then I had to find the other books in the Bridgerton-serie, of course (while frantically sending text messages to Simona Ahrnstedt about it; my romance-writer friend).

And now it’s Laurie King’s Mary Russel. It’s a struggle, reading a serie when you’re on the road. The challenge of course is backlist: older books written by an author or in a serie. Not all bookshops have them. They might have the last book or the first book, and if they’re big, they might even have a few in between, but the chance of finding, say, number three in the serie? Or number five? You have to develop a determination bordering on obsession bordering on addiction to manage it. Oh well, who am I kidding? Crossing all borders well into addiction.

I mention these number because Barnes & Noble Galleria managed to find both for me.

I was visiting another Barnes & Nobles to sign some stock and asked about it, and the very kind woman took it upon herself to call all the bookshops close by to see if anyone had number three. The Galleria-one did.

“Thta’s great”, said Lathea. “Because we’re going there tomorrow. We can get it then.”
And then she saw my face, which must have been both incredulous and shocked.
“Or today!” she said, very quickly. “Let’s go today!”

Of course, by next day, when the event was, I already needed number five. And they had it!

Ps. The event was lovely too!

I was interviewed on MPR News by Euan Kerr, and he was charming. I made a good impression right from the start, with my serious preparation for the interview: he found me standing outside in the sun, smoking.

“No, no, you finish it”, he said, smiling. “I’m European, so I understand.”
This of course made me wonder what exactly he did understand. From what I’ve seen so far, very few people in Minnesota smoke, so maybe that was it. Or it might just have been a comment on me standing with my face towards the sun, as were I a lizard that needed sunshine to regulate my body temperature. He was from Scotland, so he should understand.
Apparently, he had first came here as a teacher on a summer camp, teaching archery. “Very boring, archery”, he said matter-of-factly.
“I think it sounds very exciting”, I said while trying to smoke faster.
“Five, six hours a day of teaching kids archery is very boring. Or boring, at best. Then someone walks in front of another’s bow and arrow and you age ten years in two seconds.”
“So boredom intersected with heart attacks?”
“That’s archery for you.”

Anyway, I continued to impress. The format called for me to read something from my book, for around four minutes. “I know just the scene”, I said, and then proceeded to look for it.

And look for it.

And so on, for an embarrasingly long time. I was looking for the scene where Sara re-organizes the bookshop and changes the categories. It’s fun. I’ve read it before, so I thought it might be good, lenght-wise. It’s just that the darn scene had somehow disappeared from the book. It was the only explanation I could think of for not being there, somewhere between when Sara opens the bookshop and when she sets out to convince Hope that Broken Wheel is a very literary town.

“Well, I guess you might not have worked with this edition before”, Euan said very generously as I was desperately turning pages.

But I managed to find it eventually, and the interview was great fun, and you can listen to both the interview and my reading from the mysteriously missing scene here: https://twitter.com/thethreadmpr