Category Archives: book reviews

Comfort Books

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I hope everyone had a safe and happy Fourth of July yesterday. Ours passed comfortably in a swelter of heat, a nice cold plate of veggies and cheese for supper, and gorgeous fireworks with friends on the lawn. (They taught my newly-American husband–a native of Scotland–to say “Oooooh” and “Aaaaaah” at the right times, and presented him with a stars-n-stripes baseball hat.)

We returned to find our neurotic younger dog Bert had chewed his way through the baby gate that keeps him from the bookshop floor, to huddle quivering under the table. Apparently, his firework reactions were less “Oooh! Aaaah” than “Nooooo! Aaaaaagh!”

In righting the destruction Bert had wrought, my mind turned to the rituals and readings we use to comfort ourselves in such situations; had Bert been able to pull his favorite children’s book off the shelf–Wind in the Willows, of course–and read it (as opposed to shred it) he might have been able to forget the noise outside and find his happy place.

I have a few “my troubles can’t get to me here” books to which I return when my heart is uneasy, my brain a hamster wheel of all-go, no-forward-motion. Let me just share five here, and then you tell me yours.

Psalms: as in Old Testament Bible. The letters in the New Testament are also pretty calming, and for those of us who believe the back story, they return the balance of seeing the Big Picture versus the immediate events of the day.

Except for Me and Thee, Jessamyn West. Such a happy story, even when it’s bittersweet. If you’ve not read this tale of a Quaker family and their daily-life silly adventures, it is funny and charming; you can feel your blood pressure dropping as you read.

Bert and I share affinity for Wind in the Willows. My two favorite parts are the visit from Pan when they find the lost otter child, and the return to Mole’s house for Christmas. This sweetness comes wrapped in warm brown fur.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Call me crazy. A friend who works in a prison says she once asked the shrinks there, who visit ax murderers and people who killed women and children, “What do you do to relax?” A lot of them watched that serial-murder TV show “Dexter,” because “as bad as it gets here, it’s not that bad.” I think The Road is like that for many of us. No matter what’s going on, it ain’t that bad.

Anything by Louise Rennison. If you’re unfamiliar with this British writer, she turns out faux diaries of a “typical” English girl’s madcap adventures in love and family. Lines like “7 pm: I shall never think of him again!” and “7:02 pm: I hate him. I shall call and tell him so” intersperse with bad hair days, deciding what to wear to those all-important dances, and other stuff that makes one laugh out loud. Rennison is hysterical.

So, I showed you mine. How about yours?

We Happy Few, We Band of Booksellers

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Sometimes the little guy does win. Or at least holds her own.

I’m not quite sure what’s happening with bookstores these days – small, independently owned bookstores, I mean; we can all see what’s happening to the giants; Amazon is closing them. But what I begin to suspect (okay, hope for and daydream about) is that we’re gaining ground.

Bookstores are magic places, but I don’t have to tell you that. The watering holes of like-minded souls, the gathering spot for the tribe, they come pretty close to sacred. And it seems to me that, like farmers markets ten years ago, small bookstores are entering a period of rejuvenation and revitalization, even as people decry their loss.  Readers have begun noticing how much more fun it is to shop with real people than online. Realization is dawning that—like breaded, fried fast food versus a slow-cooked home supper—faster and cheaper is not always better (and that the price difference might not be as high as one might think, either).

That’s why I wrote The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: to celebrate this way of life that some proclaim dead or dying.  And that’s why I cried in the middle of Ann Patchett’s acceptance speech for “Most Engaging Author” at BookExpo America, when she recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V while all these pictures of people who run bookstores flashed on the screen. Sweet people. People standing behind messy counters, in front of orderly shelves, hippies in scarves and skirts standing next to well-coiffed people in tailored suits, people who dress and think completely different from one another, arms entwined and smiling.

God love us, we are the ones who keep the barbarians from the gates. We keep a stall in the marketplace for stuff that lets people think for themselves. We take the financial risks of hand-selling things we think are good, even if they’re not commercially viable. We take trade-ins; we make staff pick shelves; we listen, listen, listen to our customers, and offer suggestions based on what they said, rather than who paid us for  a pop-up ad.

We can’t be bought, but boy-o can we sell.

I cried the whole time those pictures flashed. We are the little guys, the reeds still standing in the wind because we’re flexible, smart, and fast. What we do is so important: we help people think; we help them express themselves. And when they express themselves in particularly charming, compelling ways, we give other people a chance to hear those words that never will get made into movies.

What Ann Patchett and William Shakespeare say is true; sometimes the little guys win. Here’s tae us!