From Broadway Books in Portland, OR:
Bill Holmes is our second featured customer of the month, another Broadway Books regular we look forward to seeing often on his near-weekly visits to the store. You can check out his book picks via this link or in the store on the shelf above staff recommendations. To preview other customers of the month please go to our website.
Q & A with Bill
Carrie: Have you always liked reading?
Bill: Yes! My father was a retired Army officer and high school vice-principal, and education was a top priority for our family. We always had a good stock of books and magazines to read when I was growing up. My mom was an avid reader as well, focusing on detective mysteries. Some of my happiest memories are of visits to our local libraries with my father; I learned to love that “library fragrance,” and we always came home with armloads of borrowed books.
Carrie: What are you currently reading?
Bill: Too much! I read books depending on my mood, and I am apparently very moody. I usually have a small group of books I am reading hard, and a lot of others I am just dabbling in from time to time. Top-of-the-stack now includes Justin Gregg’s Humanish: What Talking to Your Cat or Naming Your Car Reveals About the Uniquely Human Need to Humanize, Samuel Miller McDonald’s Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, Collin Woodward’s Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America, and Geoffrey Ward’s The American Revolution.
Carrie: Is there one genre you like more than others?
Bill: I especially enjoy history and archaeology. As the saying goes, the past is a foreign country–they do things differently there. But I also read a lot of science, economics, thrillers (Preston & Child are favorites), horror, fantasy, and science fiction.
Carrie: Is there a book you read recently that surprised you?
Bill: Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse did a marvelous job of organizing world history around the concept of Goliaths, great states that make life miserable for everyone. It’s one of those books that makes you think, regardless of whether you agree with the author’s premise.
Carrie: All-time favorite book?
Bill: Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage, the first volume of his and Ariel Durant’s nine volume history of the world. Published in the 1930s, it’s a little dated but beautifully written and highly quotable. To some extent it’s a product of its times, but even then it was an interesting choice to start a nine-volume world history with a focus on non-Western civilizations.
Carrie: If you could have coffee with any writer(s) or historical figure(s), who would it be?
Bill: Will Durant and his wife Ariel Durant.
About Bill Holmes: Bill was born in San Antonio, TX, a long time ago, and grew up in a house filled with books. He attended college at the University of Texas in Austin, then went to University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. He clerked for Judge Louis Oberdorfer in DC, then moved out to Portland with his then-girlfriend, now wife, Lynn Partin. He started his legal career at Stoel Rives, then moved to global law firm K&L Gates in 2013. Bill started shopping at Broadway Books when it opened in 1992. He was greatly inspired by his late friend Larry Anderson, who taught him to love books even more than he already did–Larry had accumulated a 10,000 book library by the time he was forty! In Bill’s words: “I’m still envious, and still working on my library (to which Broadway Books has contributed enormously).”
