A Decade in Books Miriam R. Kramer This month is my tenth anniversary of writing this column. In 2007, I began penning reviews here while working part-time as an employee of Old Town’s Olsson’s Books & Records, which once reigned on South Union Street in the former warehouse where the restaurant Virtue Feed & Grain now holds court. I continued writing after it shut its doors, thriving with the Old Town Crier as it has grown and expanded while remaining a local cultural institution. I remain proud of it and what we offer to our community of long-time locals and people passing through. The surrounding D.C.–area literary landscape has changed significantly in the past decade. My beloved Olsson’s disappeared. Many of my former colleagues and I still miss it greatly for its unique literary and musical culture. Big box stores like Borders folded, leaving a Barnes & Noble here and there, although it also closed it doors in many local locations. The Books-a-Million chain has also disappeared from both Old Town and the District of Columbia. Our area has luckily retained other treasured independent institutions such as Kramerbooks & Afterwords, which is expanding its footprint by taking over neighboring space in Dupont Circle. In addition, the powerhouse Politics & Prose has expanded its scope under the ownership of Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, offering classes and its own printing press while continuing its unparalleled calendar of author readings and book signings. The biggest change in this past ten years has been the advent of the e-reader along with smartphones and tablets. The Amazon Kindle has dominated that market from its incipience in July 2007. My own reading habits have changed as a result. I read both hard copies and books on my Kindle, which offers some distinct advantages in allowing…
I am a naturally eclectic reader. How fun it is to browse: to go on vacation in a rented house and randomly pick out a book from the ever-changing bookcase in the living room, or find an unexpected steal in the books on discount trolleys outside a used bookstore. Lately I have been looking for amusement or lightheartedness, however, and the “serious” books just sit there. I know I should get to them, but somehow they don’t make it into my hands. On a recent weekend, I traveled a different route and picked out The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2010. It had sat on my bookshelf for some time. I started it early one Saturday, and finished it one day later without sleep. It may be the best and most absorbing book I will read this year. It is certainly one of the best histories I have ever read. Wilkerson is a former Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times—in 1994 the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. The child of migrants, she started doing research in the 1990s on an underreported subject, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern or western cities from about 1915 to 1970. Over time she interviewed thousands of subjects who had either escaped from the difficulties of the Jim Crow South or had descended from those who did. This astounding work is the tiny tip of a colossal iceberg of research: time spent criss-crossing the country and talking to social groups, church members, members of senior centers, the children and grandchildren of African-American migrants. In the process she examines the interwoven ideas and…