Vilnius Poker in the B&N Spotlight

The Barnes & Noble Review continues to impress me by covering books/movies/CDs that aren’t best-sellers, such as Christopher Byrd’s piece on Vilnius Poker:

While reading Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker, a line from Joyce’s Ulysses surfaced in my memory, “Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end.” On at least six occasions, Gavelis (1950-2002) name-checks the Irish Zeus who commemorated the capital of his homeland by besieging it with the distorting optics of his prose. What Joyce did for Dublin, Gavelis has in mind to do for the capital of Lithuania: chide it, gossip about it, and bore it into the memory of those who may never visit it.

I know there are a million reasons why this would be a logistical nightmare and would never actually happen, but something clean, elegant, and weekly, like the B&N Review would be a perfect addition to the IndieBound program. The monthly Indie Next List is fine, but rather than providing bookseller blurbs about a dozen books each month, a weekly e-publication with five 250-word reviews (could even be in sections: a mystery, a children’s/YA book, a small press title, a nonfiction book, etc.) that could then be “pushed” out to readers via a blog would—in my opinion—be even more effective for bringing attention to smart booksellers and the unique books that they love.

Just my two cents . . . I really wrote this post because I think Christopher Byrd’s review is great, and he has a slightly different take on the novel than the other people who have written about it.