It has been said that books are a uniquely portable magic. I tend to agree and, I suspect since we are all here on book social media, that you probablIt has been said that books are a uniquely portable magic. I tend to agree and, I suspect since we are all here on book social media, that you probably do, too. In my love for books I also extend my love to the library, an institution aimed at removing barriers to books and education that I’ve made into my livelihood and I couldn’t resist checking out Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved the Library. Having been charmed by the previous novel, The Cat Who Saved Books, and its tender and quiet magical realism, I was excited to return to the stories of Tiger, the magical book-loving cat, and his quest to protect literature. Did it need a sequel? Maybe not. But was it worth the read? Most definitely, and as someone who rarely reads series I found a certain joy in returning to these cozy, familiar spaces on the page and smiling at the greeting of ‘hello Mr. Proprietor.’ This is a lovely defense not only of books but of libraries and the importance of literature that admittedly can be a bit twee and overly-precious yet altogether from a well-founded love for books and a plea for protecting them. This is especially pertinent in an era of mass book bans and while the fairly wooden dialogue can come across as rather unsubtle, it’s raising an important awareness and ultimately makes for a quick, heartwarming read. Books are a valuable resource and we must stand to defend them.
‘I’m not saying that it isn’t important to succeed…but books teach us that other things are more important. Like reaching out to help someone in need, listening to someone who is troubled, and understanding that there are things more valuable than money. They teach us ideas that can’t be explained by logic alone…’
I couldn’t help but find a fondness for this duology of books. Tiger has a sass that keeps it fun and there is softness of the novel that blends well with the magical personifications of the threats to books. There are moments when I’m reminded of the whimsicality of The Little Prince—though not quite attaining its equal—and it does feel a bit of a rehash having recently read Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor's Library, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Fiction. The fluid translation here by Louise Heal Kawai renders the book in rather cozy, mystical tones that makes it an easy book to sit down and burn through rather quickly. Though, speaking of burning, we will have to follow Tiger and newcomer Nanami, the precocious reader off on a magical quest with him, as they save books from threats of tyranny including books mass burned and ‘quickly swallowed up by orange, slithering vipers.’ It makes for quite the adventure. And one with libraries at stake.
‘Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better’ —Sidney Sheldon
Author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.’ What could be better than a library, a space where one can simply exist for free—a rare space these days—and have access to all sorts of knowledge and tools. They are ‘a free space, a democratic space,’, as Kate Atkinson once said or, as translator and author Anton Hur has stated ‘libraries are not just archives of books and digital media, they are the archives of our very communities, of our civilization.’ Yet libraries are underfunded and often collapsing under the lack of support. There have been around 180 libraries in the UK have closed or been turned over to a volunteer staff since 2016, and the US sees massive budget slashing and around 64 libraries close a year. The loss of libraries is a loss of social infrastructure and access, such as in the US 1 in 5 people use the library as their source for internet access. It also leads to a loss in public trust of the government, especially when US studies reveal libraries are one of the most trusted public resources with 78% of people stating they trust libraries and librarians. Ali Smith discusses the importance of libraries in her collection Public Library and Other Stories:
‘For me, the public library is the ideal model of society, the best possible shared space, a community of consent—an anarcho-cyndicalist collective where each person is pursuing their own aim….through the best possible medium of the transmission of ideas, feelings and knowledge: the book.’
Despite the widespread love for libraries, they are under attack. Here in the United States, the Republican controlled government just signalled to cut all funding for libraries in museums with an executive order to halt the Institute for Musems and Libraries (IMLS) issued to hide from congressional approval. And book bans are on the rise. The American Library Association (ALA) reported 821 attempts to challenge 2,452 unique titles in 2024, with the number of bans rapidly rising each year (for context, a challenge is a documented request to remove a title, a ban is an actual removal of the material). To ban a book is a violation of the Library Bill of Rights and the stated laws of US Constitution, such as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. said in ruling to uphold Freedoms of Speech in Texas v. Johnson that the burning of a flag in political protest was protected speech:
'If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.'
Though this is not confined just to the US and removals have been widespread and more devastating in other places. Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor's Library was inspired by her time as a bookseller as sweeping book bans hit Kuwait. ‘The system was arbitrary and irrational,’ she wrote in an article for Lit Hub, ‘a bureaucracy with neither head nor tail, like a poem by Baudelaire.’ Her novel serves as a warning against the loss of public agency under authoritarianism and a plea to protect books.
‘Over the past ten years, it has become clear to me how many of our freedoms have been curtailed. What the censor used to approve in the nineties is banned today. The state has rolled back decades of progress while society—with the help of the latest platforms and technology—has gained access to content so vast it’s impossible to censor. It’s our exclusively homegrown version of Alice’s Wonderland, absurd and devoid of logic. The only difference is that it’s far from what any of us would call fun.’
The Cat Who Saved the Library stands in defiance of book bans and the fearmongering of literature as “dangerous” that prop up the arguments against them. It comes pretty heavy-handed through rather direct dialogue, but it is still empowering to see it on the page in a book that could reach readers of any age.
‘Go on. Show me the power of books now!’
Tiger and Nanami face hordes of soldiers destroying books and government officials like a general, Prime Minister, and King set against books in this cozy sequel. It is pretty hamfisted personifications of the common arguments against books and claims of danger that, as we see here, are mostly just a stranglehold for power.
‘It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. Those with power kick those weaker than themselves to the ground, and then trample all over them. It's a new era where winner takes all. If you show too much kindness to others, someone will seize the opportunity to take advantage of you. In other words, imagination is a terrifying force that can only destroy your rich potential, Nanami.’
Imagination is seen as ‘the worst evil of all,’ so says the Prime Minister who is ‘simply trying to eliminate things that are harmful to human beings,’ by his perspective on things. There is a sense that plurality in society is seen as the real threat, a competition of ideas snuffed out, and an attempt to keep the populace ignorant and oppressed.
‘Imagination is the ability to think about others. To put yourself in their shoes, to be able to sympathize with those weaker than oneself, to become someone who can occasionally offer a helping hand. That’s the power of imagination.’
There is also a nefarious plan to flood the market with bad media while removing media that points people towards thinking. ‘The key is quantity, not quality,’ explains the villainous General. ‘We aim to completely fill people’s lives,’ he says, ‘so they won’t bother with the older, dangerous books.’ Which, perhaps, is a moment that dips into a preciousness about books. It reads as a neglecting to value the chance of new books achieving greatness that is influenced by a placing upon the pedestal of books already vetted and retained over time through a canonization that, it must be stated, occurred during a period where the works Othered by white, patriarchal gatekeeping either struggled for recognition on were altogether suppressed or silenced. Consider the discussions around the CIA’s backing of The Paris Review to manipulate the stories that would be told, though the idea of flooding the market with mindless media to keep people from thinking feels straight out of Ray Bradbury's anxieties writ large in Fahrenheit 451. It does make for an exciting story though.
The Cat Who Saved the Library is a quick, fun, and rather charming read. The tone implies a greater depth than the book actually delivers, yet it was lovely to return to this narrative and gives me hope to read such heartfelt plea for literature. 'Libraries are the backbone of our education system,' author Karin Slaughter once wrote, 'a library card in your hand is your democracy,’ says poet Jackie Kay, and these are things worth fighting for. Keep books alive, my friends, because they are our friends, too.
3.5/5
‘Sooner or later, you will come face-to-face with the vortex of desire. When that time comes, will there still be a book in your hand? Or will you, too, in the name of freedom and self be seeking more and more?’...more
‘Reading fiction is important,’ American author Ann Patchett once wrote in the New York Times, ‘it is a vital means of imagining a life other than our‘Reading fiction is important,’ American author Ann Patchett once wrote in the New York Times, ‘it is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.’ Books capture the human experience and pass on our stories, our emotions, our memories. They chronicle history, they keep the dead in their pages and bring the living in communication with the world. Books connect us and, like James Baldwin once wrote‘it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’ Books are a refuge, a companion, an escape, and while reading can ‘take us away from home,’ as Jean Rhys wrote, more importantly reading ‘finds homes for us everywhere.’ This is why libraries are important hubs offering a free space that provides both community and cultural services where anyone regardless of race, religion or class can be. The importance of reading cannot be overstated yet there are many who would silence the voices of authors, restrict the stories we can tell and block our connections to our own history.
Kuwaiti author Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library imagines a near future of extreme censorship where words are stripped of content beyond the surface, where imagination and interpretation is criminalized and the government rules all. Believing that books ‘had sinister protocols to take over the world, to colonize and conquer,’ Al-Essa’s book censor is tasked to ‘confront imagination’s monsters,’ scouring novels to detect any banned content, any obscenity, any imagination, queerness, any mention of the Old World or anything that opposes the “official” reality as dictated by the government. But when tasked to censor a new translation of Zorba the Greek, the book censor finds his mind awakened to meaning and metaphor and begins a dangerous transformation into the underworld of readers and contraband books. Shortlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Translation for its fluid and engaging English rendering by Sawad Hussain and Ranya Abdelrahman, The Book Censor’s Library is a powerful look at censorship and the importance of books for a healthy society that, while it may occasionally feel too similar to its source material, manages a fun balance of serious and whimsical for a thought provoking and timely read.
'You're a typical citizen in Big Brother's republic, stuck in a nation that's slowly killing you, trapped in the whale's belly, its stomach acid eating away at you, with no way to escape.'
The near-future in The Book Censor’s Library is a world not unlike George Orwell’s 1984 where the government oppresses the citizens understanding that ‘who controls the past controls the future.’ Al-Essa’s novel does read similarly to 1984, with a bit of absurdist playfulness as if it arrived by way of Fahrenheit 451 and The Little Prince. In fact. both Orwell and Ray Bradbury’s books figure into the novel along with others such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Pinocchio, with the texts lending a lot of thematic aspects to the story as well as key quotes inspiring or haunting the book censor. The idea of “following the white rabbit,” for instance, becomes both a literal event here as well as a symbolic idea of resistance:
‘He imagined the rabbits were leaving behind little tokens of love, doomed souvenirs to remind humankind, forgetful by nature, that their organizations were always susceptible to penetration.’
Its a story that reminded me a lot of the dystopian works we read in high school and would likely work quite well for teen readers. I did feel that at times it hung too close to its inspirations and was overly reliant upon them, though the connections were usually pretty fun. The slogan against imagination here is:
HUMAN EXISTENCE IS SUFFERING. THE ROOT OF SUFFERING IS DESIRE. THE ROOT OF DESIRE IS IMAGINATION.
Which is, as you likely already guessed, a play on the slogan from Orwell’s 1984, ‘War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength’ But it works for the most part and is building towards a reveal occurring at the end which I suspect will work better for some readers than others. But The Book Censor’s Library can also inspire readers to check out those book. I myself have purchased a copy of Zorba the Greek since starting this one. Which is the novel achieving its goal of spreading literature to others and any book that inspires reading further books is always in win to me.Plus the illustrations from artist Mohammed Al Mohanna add a nice touch.
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‘Banning books give us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.’ —Stephen Chbosky
The idea for the book, Al-Essa said in an interview for Words Without Borders ‘came to me because I am also a bookseller who has to deal with inspectors and censorship every day.’ Owning her own bookstore in Kuwait has been difficult due to the rampant censorship of publishers and journalists there. Between 2014 and 2018, 4,390 books were banned in Kuwait by the Ministry of Information—a 12 person committee (six Arabic readers and six English readers) not unlike the book censors in Al-Essa’s novel. Al-Essa recently spoke with Lit Hub about the difficulties of censorship and the Ministry’s decisions, such as banning a picture book of Disney’s The Little Mermaid due to the mermaid’s seashell bra being “too promiscuous”:
‘The system was arbitrary and irrational, a bureaucracy with neither head nor tail, like a poem by Baudelaire…Over the past ten years, it has become clear to me how many of our freedoms have been curtailed. What the censor used to approve in the nineties is banned today. The state has rolled back decades of progress while society—with the help of the latest platforms and technology—has gained access to content so vast it’s impossible to censor. It’s our exclusively homegrown version of Alice’s Wonderland, absurd and devoid of logic. The only difference is that it’s far from what any of us would call fun.’
‘But what was he supposed to do? Approve a book that was full of bacteria and nourishment, or let the human race die of starvation.’
So how could I not pick up Zorba the Greek—a book that had been banned and unbanned back and forth in Kuwait—after such a loving depiction of it here, the book that had words ‘quivering inside him, like seedlings breaking through dry earth,’ and leading him to question everything. Until then he believes the government’s teachings that ‘language is a smooth surface’ and to never dive into it, wanting to become another cog in a machine ‘like wooden dolls in a puppet theater, their invisible strings controlled by a faceless man.’ We learn that ‘ the System’s aim was to create a human being who, after a long day’s work, wanted nothing else but to go home,’ and all joy is drained from life. The only books he doesn’t ban are those that are hellishly dull to read and, once awakened, he cannot resist the call of banned books.
‘Underneath the thin shell of erring language—guilty of indecency, blasphemy, inciting coups, and more—there was a delicate, strange world he was dying to touch.’
But to be a reader is a to be a criminal here and he risks his own freedom to obtain ‘real books with catastrophic influence, equally able to create and destroy.’ Yet there is also his daughter, ‘the only unpolluted thing in this place,’ whos habit of expressing imagination threatens to find her “reeducated” by the authorities. Yet to have her imagination stifled she grows ill and the censor realizes ‘reality is poisoning her blood.’ What is one to do? It all makes for a rather engaging dystopian society that is rather charmingly constructed to center metaphor, meaning, and reading at the heart of resistance.
‘Because they’re changing the past, and we need to protect our collective memory…We’re trying to save the past to make the future possible.’
Censoring books, as we see in this novel, is not only a way to control the populace but to corrupt the past and leave people without the words they need to understand themselves or each other. With a government control over history books, the book censor realizes ‘nothing existed today that could prove—or disprove—any story about what had happened back then,’ and who can be sure of the truth about the revolution that brought about their authoritative government, a good reminder about the importance of the free press. It also erases the memory of those now gone, especially the figures the government might not want you to know about.
‘If it were destroyed, everyone who’d survived in the story would be gone too. There would be no one left to remember the ones who had died. The balance of the world goes horrible askew when a story is confiscated, it becomes a darker, more ominous place.’
He learns ‘the alternative is resistance, but you’re too busy reading novels,’ and action must go beyond words. Yet words and books are a good start because, as Orwell wrote ‘until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.’ I did rather love the idea of this underground network of rebel booksellers and librarians collecting and distributing banned material and it made working all day in a library and all night in a bookstore seem pretty awesome. Because shoutout to librarians (‘A library was the closest thing humanity had to the idea of the Absolute,’ Al-Essa writes in a rather lovely scene leading into a labyrinth of books that the censor sees as a sort of paradise and reminded me of a quote from Jorge Luis Borges ‘I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library’) and those who fight ‘to keep their collective memory from being bleached away in a world where brains were washed with the strongest of detergents.’ Resist censorship, my friends.
‘All language is a surface, and what lies beneath. on the bottom, is more of a rippled riverbed—made so by the force of a poem, for example...The most ridiculous war you can ever wage is the war of one metaphor against another.'
While there were moments where this felt a tad slight or cornball, I rather enjoyed The Book Censor’s Library. I might have enjoyed this more as a teenager but I also really appreciated its focus on the power of reading and the importance of books. A rather quick, engaging, and whimsical work, it reminds us all to protect our freedoms to read if we can and that books are an important tool to cherish. So protect them, lest we have them censored into oblivion.
3.5/5
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‘A thought sprang into his head: every story was a retelling of older ones and a harbinger of tales still to come. It’s been the same story since the beginning of time, and it will live on forever,giving birth to a new version of itself every day. He had never felt so close to understanding the Divine as he did at that moment.’...more
I’ve always said that bookstore employees are rockstars but I’m a bit biased.
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I love my job Having spent many years working bookstores—in botI’ve always said that bookstore employees are rockstars but I’m a bit biased.
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I love my job Having spent many years working bookstores—in both a Barnes and Noble and currently at a delightful indie bookstore, Readers World— I was eager to check out Evan Friss’ The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. Books are part of the lifeblood of a society, they are a comfort and a friend when in need, they open your mind, expand your horizons, they frame the past and speculate the future, the show you the possibilities of life, language, they are ‘a uniquely portable magic’ as Stephen King once wrote. ‘Books and doors are the same thing,’ Jeanette Winterson—my favorite person to write books—said, ‘you open them, and you go through into another world,’ and by opening the door to a bookstore you are transported into a realm of possibility and potential magic behind every cover. Also shoutout to libraries (I must add as I type this from my desk in a library) where this potential of possibility does not come at a cost. Friss writes that ‘a city without a bookstore wasn't a city worth calling home,’ and I’m proud to work in our city’s indie bookstore which was, in fact, the very first place I went to check out when I moved here. One day, after being a regular for years, I walked in to pick up a book I had preordered (Flights by Olga Tokarczuk) and they offered me a job. Best job I’ve ever had. But librarian s.penkevich would like to consider some nuance missing from Friss’ statement that, sure it’s fun to say and all but some communities are unable to support one which is compounded with the issue that so much of the goal behind book ban attempts is to disenfranchise support for public institutions and dissolve libraries and free access to books, moving everything behind privatized access with a price barrier. But moving along.
'The right book put in the right hands at the right time could change the course of a life or many lives.'
In The Bookstore, Friss takes us through a history of American bookstores from early collections by Benjamin Franklin to noteworthy stores like The Strand or The National Memorial African Bookstore, into the chains of Barnes & Noble or Amazon that have dramatically reshaped the book industry into the digital age. Friss pauses along the way to celebrate the ancillary heroes to bookstore, like the UPS driver and bookstore cats that ensure the books are flowing or improve the vibes. It is a rather cherry-picked and anecdotal history that feels more like a collection of essays full of fun tales than, say, an exhaustive or academic history, but it made for an interesting read that is sure to delight anyone with an interest in bookstores.
‘You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places.’ —Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
As Friss tells us, ‘the right book put in the right hands at the right time could change the course of a life or many lives,’ and I rather enjoy this loving view on bookstores, booksellers and the customers who frequent them. While this book focuses specifically on bookstores in the United States, the history of bookselling reaches all the way back to ancient times. Around 300BC, the founding of the Library of Alexandria created a need for obtaining books and brought about a robust bookselling practice amongst Athenians. The Abbasid Caliphate and Caliphate of Córdoba encouraged the trade of books across the Muslim world with Damascus, Baghdad, and Córdoba becoming major centers for book dealers. Meanwhile, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press brought a surge of bookselling into France and across Europe in the mid 1400s, and the Librairie Nouvelle d'Orléans which opened in 1545 is still in operation and makes it the oldest bookstore in operation across Europe. Friss’ tales begin with the personal book collection of Benjamin Franklin and move into stories about the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, which is unfortunately no longer in operation.
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'A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.' —John Milton, Areopagitica
The book is rather anecdotal and skips around to highlight some cool places, such as Parnassus books started by author Ann Patchett who ‘saw herself as more of a benefactor than a capitalist. It was about protecting an endangered species,’, though one might not necessarily find this to read like a history of bookselling in general. Though there are some rather interesting things to note, such as the legacy of radical bookstores like Drum & Spear, founded in 1968 as a space for Black activism in literature and were investigated by the FBI. One story shows they had been accused of providing communist propaganda after an agent failed to purchase Chairman Mao's Little Red Book there and bought it at another store, but still submitted it as evidence against them.
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Another fascinating history here was the chapter on sidewalk vendor bookstores which were vilified by city officials such as a 1993 bill to remove them that was pushed by the same councilman who had once passed a law giving booksellers freedom to sell without a license. There is a sadness, however, as many of the bookstores included in the history of 20th century bookstores have now shut down. ‘The Old Corner helped launch American literature and the American bookstore,’ Friss writes, ‘Now it’s a Chipotle’. So it goes. The historic Denver bookstore Tattered Cover a historic bookstore in Denver that is regrettably absent in this book was recently purchased by Barnes and Noble. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and co-founder of City Lights Bookstore, once stated:
‘Don’t patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he’s stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.’
Hopefully people have an indie bookstore available to them, which is a struggle especially in a lot of rural communities where having an alternative to Amazon or Barnes and Noble just isn't available. Many indie bookstores have been struggling too and I was surprised to learn that The Strand nearly closed during COVID. As the book progresses, we see more about how indie bookstore began to compete with chains, and now those chains compete with Amazon. Alas, Borders has gone away and Amazon purchased many of their storefronts for their physical Amazon stores like a psychopathic murderer wearing the skin of its victims. Amazon will also buy up entire first print runs leaving indie bookstores unable to stock certain new releases (or have an additional copy stuck on backorder for months), and so ideas like Ingrams Indie Vault that reserves books for indie bookstores and doesn't allow the big chains to take the whole print run have been helpful. Its always sad to me when a bookstore closes and makes me think of a favorite poem by James Tate:
Memory
A little bookstore used to call to me. Eagerly I would go to it hungry for the news and the sure friendship. It never failed to provide me with whatever I needed. Bookstore with a donkey in its heart, bookstore full of clouds and sometimes lightning, showers. Books just in from Australia, books by madmen and giants. Toucans would alight on my stovepipe hat and solve mysteries with a few chosen words. Picasso would appear in a kimono requesting a discount, and then laugh at his own joke. Little bookstore with its belly full of wisdom and confetti, with eyebrows of wildflowers- and customers from Denmark and Japan, New York and California, psychics and lawyers, clergymen and hitchhikers, the wan, the strong, the crazy, all needing books, needing directions, needing a friend, or a place to sit down. But then one day the shelves began to empty and a hush fell over the store. No new books arrived. When the dying was done, only a fragile, tattered thing remained, and I haven’t the heart to name it.
I found this poem on my last day working at Barnes and Noble so it hit hard. And so, of particular interest to me in this book was the section on Barnes & Noble and the recent acquisition of the company by James Daunt of Waterstones bookstores in the UK fame. I spent several years as a keyholder in a Barnes and Noble in what felt very much like a slow spiraling decline under Leonard Riggio, who’s life and legacy gets a rather positive and inspirational treatment here. Not that I have anything against him but I’m fairly certain when he passed recently he probably vanished as a cloud of bats and unpaid debts (anyone else remember the BN credit card scandal?) but he certainly did build an impressive chain from humble beginnings and Daunt has very much improved on the design. Under Daunt, as Friss points out, BNs have come to feel much more localized by giving the stores more control over title acquisition and displays to present a more indie bookstore feel.
‘So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.’ —Vincent van Gogh
Friss does give Amazon a lot of positive spin while glossing over their legacy of union busting and anti-worker policies, though he also does champion physical spaces over online retail. I enjoyed the section discussing the #BoxedOut Campaign organized by the American Booksellers Association to promote buying through physical indie retailers as opposed to Amazon. I wish it went more into how Amazon harms bookstores and strategized to push indie retailers out through things like loss leaders. According to census data more than 50% of US indie bookstores closed between 1998 and 2019 and (as reported in The Nation in 2024) Amazon now sells over 300 million books a year to generate $28billion each year and owns more than half the US print market.
‘ People may not realize the cost and consequences of ‘convenience’ shopping until it's too late… Closed indie bookstores represent the loss of local jobs and local tax dollars; the loss of community centers; and the loss of opportunities for readers to discover books and connect with other readers in a meaningful face-to-face way.’ — Allison K Hill, CEO of American Booksellers Association
Of course there are many reasons such as mobility issues or lack of access to a bookstore that lead to people purchasing books through Amazon, but the slogans for the campaign which included things like 'Buy Books from People Who Want to Sell Books, Not Colonize the Moon' were pretty great.
‘I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.’ —Tahereh Mafi
Bookstores are such a lovely place and books are a necessary part of society. As we are all here on goodreads, I suspect most of you feel similarly. I love indie bookstores but, again, I'm a bit biased. But Readers World in Holland has been my happy place and going into work always feels like coming home. You can support us by following us on instagram or tiktok at @readersworldholland and you might see a familiar face since I do all the social media.
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‘Bookstores also stimulate our senses. Being surrounded by books matters,’ Friss writes, ‘sociologists have found that just growing up in a home full of books—mere proximity—confers a lifetime of intellectual benefits.’ Long live books, long live bookstores, and long live libraries. While being a bit lighter than expected, The Bookshop was a fun and fascinating read and those with an interest in the subject matter will certainly enjoy it.
3.5/5
‘Whether in mysteries or memoirs, travelogues or true-crime tales, romances or rom-coms, horror or history, bookstores can be more than just passive backdrops. Bookstores can be actors. Bookstores, even the little ones, can shape the world around them. They already have.’
Also shoutout to libraries. Support your local library as well as your local indie bookstores. I'm lucky enough to get to do both. Sometimes on the same day. Which has, admittedly, confused a few people when they see me twice in one day.
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...more
It was a book about books, it was a book about lovers. It was a book about books about lovers, it was a book about lovers of books. But above all, BooIt was a book about books, it was a book about lovers. It was a book about books about lovers, it was a book about lovers of books. But above all, Book Lovers was a lovely book. Emily Henry really charms here. She knows her audience and delivers with grace, harnessing the aesthetics of book love amidst the sexual tension of two publishing professionals with a tendency for ferocity. As a fellow book lover, what really resonated was the way Henry captures the tendency to find narratives in the world around us, though for Nora this sef-type casting has allowed her public life as ‘the villain in someone else's love story,’ to rule her romantic life ‘because people like me don’t get those endings.’ With a keen eye for the classic elements of a romantic comedy, Book Lovers delightfully both subverts and satirizes tropes while simultaneously leaning into them in surprising ways that makes this story as humorously engaging as it is endlessly adorable. ‘Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you,’ Nora thinks, and this book captures that feeling so effortlessly. It’s the anti-Hallmark film Hallmark film narrative that acknowledges, sure, its fun to mock the stereotypical cliches and feel like you are above them, but you know deep down you still enjoy watching them even if you don’t care to admit it. Besides, who doesn’t want to save a small business while also falling in love!? Now sprinkle in all the book lover joys of small town indie bookstores, enemies-to-lovers coming together while editing a riveting novel, metaphors about not wanting to finish books and endlessly referencing favorite books to better explain a situation, and you’ll see why it is nearly impossible to not fall in love with Book Lovers.
‘She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.’
Seriously though, I really loved this. It’s such a feel-good book that I simply could not put down. I love the aspect of the novel of all the juxtapositions of people and places with their fictional counterparts. The adorable small town of a novel is lackluster and lame, though maybe a place that can be beautiful if you give it enough time. Or the fictional Nora, Nadine Winters, that shows up in Dusty’s newest novel and forces Nora to confront her own public persona. I also loved the characters. Charlie is so wonderful and I adored his full commitment to Nora, smitten and supportive every step of the way. He could certainly charm the pants off me, watch out Nora. But she was delightful too. It’s so easy to fall in love with them both. And I gotta say, Charlie running and indie bookstore while having a full time job really hit deep. Representation matters, thanks Henry. I also loved the discussion on book endings, especially the ones that are ‘a reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them,’ which warmed my heart as a fan of messy or sad endings. Granted, this book does run a big long and the ending starts to drag but overall this book just made me happy.
‘ Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either.’
While I found Happy Place a bit underwhelming, I found that all of the elements of this one worked really well. The banter is funny and adorable and I liked the calm pace that really let the scenes and characters breathe. The tension builds quite well and I enjoyed that Henry could discuss heavier themes amidst a rather sweet story as the slow understanding about Nora and her sister’s relationship was one of the most endearing aspects of the book. And not just the cutesy vacation checklist which leads to some good gaffs, but the tension between Libby wanting to he her own self and Nora wanting to always show she can support people and be reliable.
I think what really makes this work is that there is more than just a romance going on—in fact Nora find the romance to be stressful because it distracts from her other problems. It makes a good balance, especially with the sister narrative getting equal time as the romance narrative and Henry handling heavier subjects to counterbalance all the cuteness. Like a good mixed drink, gotta add a some bitters to balance the sweetness.
‘I still feel like a city person, through and through, but maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.’
All in all, Book Lovers stole my heart. But how can it not when it so marvelously plays with the tropes of person and place aligning to make you swoon. Henry excels at giving a sense of place that draws you in and feels as much a character as those walking around it and here I found myself full up in this small town romance and everything that came with it. Because this book has a lot: publishing, small town charm while also embracing big city charm, hot guys, hot cousins of the hot guys, family drama, saving a small business, bad local theater, scandalous backstories, Bigfoot erotica, and did I mention hot guys? Book Lovers is a winner, and yes Emily Henry, ‘the romance gods would be proud.’
⅘
‘The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.’...more
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