Ed Conklin grew up in Detroit with 10 brothers and sisters and has lived in Venice, Calif., with his wife, Cathy, since the early 1980s. His two sons (23 and 19) spent much of their early years in a backpack or the back office at Dutton's Brentwood Books in Los Angeles. Conklin's bookselling life started part-time in 1986 at Dutton's and he served many roles (full-time manager, buyer, accounts payable) until the store expired in April 2008. Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara became his new bookstore home. Chaucer's celebrates its 40th anniversary this month.
On your nightstand now:
My "nightstand" is a village of books in multiple stacks on the floor on my side of the bedroom. I dip into my obsessions (e.g., Henry Demarest Lloyd, Thorstein Veblen, Gustavus Myers, Lewis Mumford, Benjamin Hunnicutt, Thoreau and Gilded Age history) often for solace and fodder. I recently finished Paul Beatty's The Sellout, a provocative satirical novel with much to say about American society, culture and racial attitudes. It's wildly entertaining and a fine antidote to the prevailing nonsense and noise.
I'm currently reading Lila (Marilynne Robinson), Political Order and Political Decay (Francis Fukuyama), This Changes Everything (Naomi Klein) and Global Capitalism & the Crisis of Humanity (William Robinson). I'm rereading You Can't Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe), which is a beautiful and wonderfully written book with prescient insight into where America finds itself today.
I'm looking forward to many great books including Laughing Monster (Denis Johnson), Publishing (Gail Godwin) and Lincoln's Political Thought (George Kateb).
Favorite book when you were a child:
My uncle gave me Davy Jones' Haunted Locker by Robert Arthur when I was in fourth grade. It is a wonderful collection of sea stories that fired my imagination, but it was also special because it was chosen for me by my uncle, whom I admired and greatly respected. The gift of a book can be a lifelong and treasured memory.
Your top five eight authors:
Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, Alice McDermott, Haruki Murakami, Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe.
Book you've faked reading:
Why bother? I learned a long time ago (shortly after beginning work at Dutton's) that you can't know or read everything. I proudly (and often) display my ignorance--ask anybody who knows me!
Book you're an evangelist for:
All the Living by C.E. Morgan. It is a quietly powerful book by a sensitive and gifted writer and thinker.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I can't really think of one, but I certainly do appreciate good covers and am always sad to see good books with horrid covers (which often causes them to be ignored--that is where our job comes in).
Book that changed your life:
Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume 1 by Jean-Paul Sartre. I bought this as a British import when I was in college, and it still has the penciled price on the inside cover ("$30.00 net"). The ambitious project of developing a theory tackling the intelligibility and "truth" of history was alluring to me and set me off on an often-frustrating intellectual journey that continues to this day.
Favorite line from a book:
I often read lines that levitate me. One phrase that comes to mind immediately is "agenbite of inwit" from Joyce's Ulysses. I love its playfulness and the ambitious daring with language. Don Gifford in Ulysses Annotated notes that it means "remorse of conscience," which you can get a sense of if you toy with it (your inner wit bites you again).
Which character you most relate to:
A difficult question for me, but I think Tom Sawyer, mainly because of his appreciation for the power of the imagination and the idea of the "eternal boy." I have come to realize that I will never feel "grown up." Some call it arrested development; I prefer to see it as youthful passion.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Instructions by Adam Levin, a hilariously funny and fantastic literary work. The book is long but sadly breezes by too quickly as you read and laugh and wonder at it all. An incredible book. It slayed me.