Along with Powell’s and Strand, the Book House, with 130,000 volumes, is nationally acclaimed as one of America’s premier used academic bookstores. Join me in the battle to save the BOOK HOUSE IN DINKYTOWN!!! “The Book House is an idea that’s bigger than [the] Opus project,” Bute said.

The 37-year-old store will move to a smaller location in Dinkytown.

The Book House is relocating to a new home just around the corner, but it’s not done fighting for Dinkytown.

Its large collection of used and rare books will be moving to a small space above Varsity Bike and Transit in Dinkydale Mall. Owner Kristen Eide-Tollefson said they plan to open by mid-July.

Book House employee Matt Hawbaker said the compact space will be about one-third the size of the current store.

The new store will take over the space that the Dinkytown Antiquarian Books bookstore once occupied.

Because of the tighter space, the Dinkydale Mall location will be a more curated collection of books, and they’ll be focusing on more online sales, Hawbaker said.

Employee Kevin Sell said they previously considered moving to Prospect Park but decided to stay nearby because “they are an essential part of Dinkytown.”

Eide-Tollefson said the store needs to be out of its current 14th Avenue location by the end of June. The Opus Group plans to break ground on a 140-unit apartment building there in August.

Monte Bute — who’s been coming to the Book House once a week since the first day they opened in 1976 — said he’ll continue going to the new location, but he’s sad about the move.

“Book House is one of the anchors of Dinkytown,” Bute said. “What you find here is serendipity.”

The new location will allow the Book House to have a more selective stock, Eide-Tollefson said. But the new space may not be permanent.

Hawbaker said the Book House hopes to move back into a larger place in the future, but it seems unlikely if Fifth Street is rezoned for new construction, as Opus has proposed.

Developers open spaces in Dinkytown for their offices, he said, and small-business owners can’t afford the higher prices.

Although Book House employees said they’re happy the store will stay in Dinkytown, they’ll still be fighting against the development of the Opus project.

“This deal is not done,” Hawbaker said.

Community group Save Dinkytown’s petition for an environmental assessment of the Opus apartment project will be addressed at the zoning and planning committee’s June 6 meeting. The city of Minneapolis denied the application for an assessment, saying the group didn’t provide enough evidence that the project would negatively impact the environment.

There won’t be a public hearing, but a Save Dinkytown representative will have an opportunity to address the committee, according to the meeting agenda online.

Bute said these wars with developers aren’t new and Opus doesn’t understand the culture of Dinkytown.

“The Book House is an idea that’s bigger than [the] Opus project,” Bute said.

Former students are always asking me for reading suggestions to continue their lifelong learning. This list is random, composed primarily of fiction and essays. I will periodically add new lists in case you run out of things to read. I will follow up this reading list with a list of films not to be missed–however, be ready to read subtitles!

On Kindness

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Twenty Years at Hull House

Invisible Man

Man’s Search for Meaning

Tell Me a Riddle

Why Societies Need Dissent

Cat’s Cradle

Learning to Drive

A Pen Warmed in Hell

The Grapes of Wrath

Notes of a Native Son

Plainsong

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

The Road

Liquid Modernity

Go Down Moses

A Gathering of Old Men

Facing Unpleasant Facts

Fierce Attachments

Gilead

The Long Haul

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Under the Glacier

Bread Givers

The White Album 

Absalom, Absalom!

The twenty-first century is off to one hell of a start: wars and rumors of war, famines and plagues, terrorism and genocide, hurricanes and earthquakes. For “citizens” of the empire, these horrific events are usually little more than annoying background music, as ignorable as Muzak. However, for the “barbarians” huddled outside the empire’s “Green Zone,” the sounds of death are a ubiquitous funeral dirge.

The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation, as it were. Otherwise, they won’t be able to squeeze forth the world’s wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience. And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that augment his feeling of rightful ownership. These pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable wealth.

Why Read? Mark Edmundson                          

While most Americans are loath to admit it, we are denizens of a global empire. It is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile our standard of living with the disconcerting reality that an empire for the few requires the subjugation of the many. Consequently, we continue to “consume the kinds of pleasures” our empire offers as a way of warding off the “debilitating pains of conscience.”

Regrettably, too many novels published today are sources of such easy pleasures; we read them for escape. By contrast, these three prize-winning novels confront rather than comfort, each provoking our moral sensibilities with disturbing images of human motivation and behavior. Before reading these reviews, take a look at Milan Kundera on the“spirit of the novel.”

Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel. . . . The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off.

The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney

A winner of the 2006 British Costa Award, this tale has elements of both a murder mystery and an historical novel. Written by a Scot who has never set foot in Canada, the novel takes place in 1867 in the wilderness region of Hudson’s Bay. The novel opens in the tiny settlement of Dover River, a community of Scottish settlers who are dependent on fur trapping.

The plot is set in motion with the murder and scalping of an old trapper and the disappearance of his 17-year-old friend and lover, Francis Ross. Another suspect is a mixed blood trapper named William Parker. The authorities arrest him but he soon escapes.

Francis’s mother, sets off with Parker to track her son who, they soon discover, is tracking someone himself. Parker and Mrs. Ross gradually develop a gnarled bond, breed of physical necessity and emotional need. Mrs. Ross narrates most of the novel, providing a rich interior monologue of her conflicts.

A number of subplots, sometimes confusingly overlapping, involve conflicts between trading companies, between members of a puritanical Norwegian settlement, and between settlers and the native people caught up in this embryonic European empire.

Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson

In 2007, this Norwegian novel won both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Britain’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. This is the story of Trond Sander, a 67-year old grieving widower who retires to a desolate cabin in eastern Norway.

His only neighbor turns out to be the brother of Jon, his childhood friend. This evokes memories of his fifteenth summer, particularly of a single afternoon when he and Jon set out an adventure of stealing horses. It was also the last season he spent with a cherished father. The novel alternates between his current solitary musings and his reminiscences of his father’s mysterious wartime activities during that memorable summer.

The novel’s landscape evokes the timeless grandeur and power of pine forests. Petterson also masterfully moves back and forth between the consciousnesses of an adventuresome young boy and a contemplative old man. It is, most of all, a tale of loss and recollection, of reflection and renewal.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this is not a novel for those who fear bad dreams. I generally only read fiction for 30-60 minutes before falling asleep at night. While I slowly progressed through this novel, I began having nightmares every couple of nights.

The apocalypse has occurred, whether it is natural or man-made we never discover: “Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” It is a burnt-over landscape, devoid of animals, planets, and the sun. A nameless man and his son are trudging along the remnants of a freeway, heading for the coast. We learn that the boy’s mother could finally take no more—she committed suicide.

Snows falls gray and even daylight is little more than a shadowy haze. It is freezing cold and they are starving; every day is a desperate search for food and shelter. Even in these dark times, the father has constructed a narrative. He and his son are the “good guys” Among the few remaining survivors are the “bad guys”—roving bands of cannibals.

Even at the end of the world, McCarthy offers us a secular meditation on love, 1 Corinthians 13 after the death of God. In an unsentimental and stark language, McCarthy’s father and son reveal what it means to be human in a universe practically devoid of humanity.

So now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13