I had the best history teacher in high school. Her name was Jean Murphy (actually, her name was Mary Jean, but she only ever went by Jean) and she loved teaching European history and music and choir. And the way she taught history was simple: she taught us the version that concentrated on sex. Abelard and Heloise! Henry II! Henry VIII! Christ, most of the Wars of the Roses and the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War and do not even get me started on the House of Habsburgs!

Yes. She taught European history-as-sexfest to a bunch of freshman girls at a private all-girls Catholic high school.

I have no idea how much of it was true, but man oh man, do I remember a lot of it.

There is something to teaching the fun stuff, because you just might interest people enough to find out the other stuff.

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A couple of days ago I saw this incredibly hot movie trailer:

I remembered seeing the book in the bookstores. (You know, when I still went into them.) It seemed to be the ultimate expression of what Terry Rossio calls “Mental Real Estate” — concepts we all know and are familiar with, turned on their heads just enough to intrigue us. Lincoln! Vampires! Lincoln being fearsome when it comes to vampires!

But I liked the trailer (because I am a nut for over-the-top action movies, always hoping they will have a coherent plot line), so I got the book and read it.

(Yes, I bought this book and immediately read it. I have hundreds of unread books on my Kindle and iPad that have sat there unread for a long time. Hundreds. I’m not saying that pricing your book at free guarantees I’m not going to pay much attention to it; I’m just saying there’s a strong damn correlation along that way of thinking.)

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith is what I call an “all-in” book — the author took his premise (that Abraham Lincoln was a secret vampire hunter, and that a major force behind American slavery was the needs of vampires) and Grahame-Smith went all-in on it. There is no winking to the audience, there is no “I know this sounds kind of stupid, but just go with it” passages. World War Z by Max Brooks is another “all-in” book — you are either along for that ride, or you give up early on. The conceit is that the author of the book in the present comes across Abraham Lincoln’s secret diaries and decides to write the definitive biography of Lincoln in regards to vampires.

That is how the book reads: a deadly serious biography of Lincoln, with descriptions of the time period and excerpts from the diaries, that describe everything from life on Indiana to floating down the Mississippi to butchering the horrible vampires that are preying on the people. No sparkly bits here, people, no really-cute-vampires-with-a-soul. No, these are monsters and Lincoln is going to put them down.

There are a couple of serious missteps: I read three passages relatively close together (I read fast) that were all dream sequences. (And that was before we get to the famous “the President has been assassinated” dream Lincoln had.)

The difficult thing about this book is the obvious slavery/vampirism metaphor. The obvious way of looking at this is that the entire concept of slavery gets cheapened by making it a vehicle for vampires to thrive. And, I guess that’s true.

However.

I was reminded of Jean Murphy while reading this book. Two reasons why:

1) It’s not Seth Grahame-Smith’s job to teach you history. I’m really sorry if you didn’t know this stuff ahead of time. He wanted to write a fun, crazy novel, and he succeeded, and he managed to get lots of info about the real Abraham Lincoln’s life in there. He does a very good job of making all of the details about the time period feel true (hey, how ’bout that Presidential bodyguard, eh?). So, as a readable history novel: good job, Grahame-Smith.

2) If this book gets one person interested in that time period, whereupon they discover that all this shit is true, it just didn’t involve any fucking vampires, it involved real flesh-and-blood humans doing this to one another then, you know, WINNING.

Because that’s actually where the real sense of dread comes in. Yeah, all of the over-the-top let’s-kill-these-fiends stuff is a lot of fun. The bad Photoshop jobs (sorry, they looked terrible on the iPad) are fun. But the descriptions of slave auctions and slave quarters and that half of the country was willing to fight the other half so that they could own people are all true, and you realize: this shit actually happened. And it doesn’t take a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the very name of which makes readers groan) — you can sucker readers in with Vampires! and bitch-slap them across the face with Not Really! LOL!

If they don’t get to the point where they realize, OMG, this is all real (except for the vampire parts), well… that’s not going to be fixed by one pop novel.

I wonder how many student term papers have talked about the vampire influence on the Confederacy.

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You want to know the tidbit that’s really stuck with me from this book?

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas dated the same chick.

Okay, it was called “courting” and wasn’t the same thing at all, but…

I’m still that high school freshman, apparently.

Many spots around the interweebs have mentioned this insanely stupid interview by Jonathan Franzen, in which he says such brilliant things as

“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.”

and

If printed books do become obsolete in the next 50 years, Franzen is pleased that at least he won’t have to see it. “One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’.”

Here’s to hoping that Mr. Franzen was quoted wildly out of context, because there’s nothing to say to that other than, “Oy gevalt.”

Let me help you out with this, Jonathan: the medium is not the message.

A physical book is just a thing.

(Also, Luddism isn’t nearly as cute as Luddites seem to think it is. But I’ll save that for another time.)

When Darin and I moved from Los Angeles back to the Silicon Valley, I think we donated about 30 boxes of books to whatever charity organization we were gifting with our things. When we moved from the house into the rental house at the beginning of the remodel, I think we got rid of another 30 boxes. When we moved from the rental back into the house, we were so determined to get rid of physical objects that even though we’d started to move to mostly e-books, we still had another 20 boxes of books we gave away.

We didn’t give away the ideas.

We didn’t give away the amazing writing (or lack thereof — you know who I’m talking about).

We gave away the things.

We had several bookcases built into our house, mostly by the front door and in my office), and that’s pretty much all the bookcases we need. If I really went for it, I could get rid of at least a third of the books in my office and not even notice.

Here’s the thing, Jonathan: in today’s brave new world, you can still have a book on paper if you really need it. There are tons and tons of print-on-demand places — in fact, your big fancy-schmancy publishers are probably using the same POD outfits that self-published authors are. We just don’t have to, anymore. Now I can have my books any time, anywhere I want.

You know what else I can have, Jonathan?

• Bigger print anytime, if I want it, without having to pay the exorbitant large-print edition prices.
• A copy of the book seconds after I hear about it.
• Books that have been out on the market more than 3 months. Try that in a bookstore, these days.

I don’t want to fill my house with more stuff. I still want to read lots of books. E-books are an awesome way to fulfill both of those needs.

Besides which: bookstores are not really great places right now. For one thing, they’re hard to find: here in Silicon Valley, where we’re all living in the future, there’s a Barnes and Noble at the Pruneyard, and a Barnes and Noble over on Stevens Creek and…uh…yeah, that’s all I got. The biggest independent bookstore in the area I can think of (actually, to be honest, its the only indie bookstore I can think of) is Kepler’s, which closed once in 2005 and, now with the retirement of the owner effective today, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it went out of business again real soon now. There are NO Barnes and Nobles in the entire city of San Francisco (although they do have more independent bookstores).

I knew Borders was going to go out of business when I realized that their entire floor design was built around their bargain books giveaway, which was always placed right inside the front door, no matter what Borders I went to. Barnes and Noble, which I always liked better because they were far, far more likely to actually have the book I was looking for, has replaced its yards and yards of bookshelves with games and caps and other knickknacks most decidedly un-booklike.

Making it far more likely that they don’t have the book I’m looking for anyhow. Chain bookstores haven’t made discovering new books a better task for the past number of years. An independent bookstore like Kepler’s is great for that (always found something on their tables), but they’re 25 miles away. And I don’t like to be the kind of person who discovers something in a shop and then buys it online — if I discover it in your store, you deserve the sale.

And as I’ve said: I don’t want physical books any more.

So we’ll keep our collections of Terry Pratchett books and Patrick O’Brien books and the Harry Potter series on paper. And a really kickass beautifully laid-out and photographed cookbook collection. But 99% of the time I don’t need actual physical books to enjoy them, Jonathan. I read them for the words. That’s what I remember about the experience. Not how whatever device — Kindle, iPhone, or paper and cardboard — felt in my hand.

Oh, and that book smell people are always yammering on about? Glue and mold, among other things. You’re welcome.

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Update: There’s an article in the paper about Kepler’s challenges and how they’re planning on facing them.