Book Box | Why readers can't have enough of books about bookstores

Sep 15, 2024 08:00 AM IST

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These feel-good books about bookstores provide a soothing sense of well-being, a connection with the community and a return to the simple pleasures of life.

Dear Reader,

Bookseller Sherab at the Book Worm Manali(Sonya Dutta Choudhury)

When you wake up in the morning, there is a chill in the air. You pull on your dark blue woollen phiran and leggings and walk to the bookstore.

You step into Book Worm, where bookseller Sherab sits at a desk with literary magazines and books of poems. There are bestsellers, books on travelling in the mountains and classics. After half an hour in the store, you feel happy, energised and positive about life.

Walking back through the forest, you think about the magic of bookstores and the people who run them. And of books about bookstores.

Your first was The Storied Life of A J Fikry.

There you met a grumpy bookseller in a sleepy little beach town, a widower who was in financial trouble. Then one day, he discovered a little girl abandoned in his bookshop. His life changed and he changed the life of his community as well. It was sweet and feel-good and full of lines like “We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”

The Storied Life of A J Fikry.(Sonya Dutta Choudhury)

Books from bookstores soothe you, they take you to a slower way of life. In Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, you are transported to a village in Tuscany where Italian poet Alba Donati talks about her customers and the different books she sells. Your favourite section is ‘Today's Orders’; it’s like browsing through a quirkily curated bookstore. Here’s one such entry:

“Today’s orders: The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Last Things by Jenny Offill, Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks, Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim, The Green Wiccan Herbal by Silja, Wild Decembers by Edna O’Brien.”

From Tuscany, you travel to the southwest corner of Scotland, to The Diary of a Bookseller, where Shaun Bythell goes climbing hills or fishing when he is not running his bookstore or driving around in his van on book-buying expeditions.

The Diary of a Bookseller(Sonya Dutta Choudhury)

Bookstore owners become your favourite characters. These idealists are the magicians of your times. Like Mr Penumbra in the novel Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, they may use fantasy and magic to fight for the power of ideas. Other times like in A Bookshop of One’s Own, in the real-life story of a bookstore set in Charing Cross Road in London, they work to curate books by women and for women and to keep business going. They fight hard to survive. Until they don’t.

And like our Gandalfs and Dumbledores, these bookstore owners safeguard our communities; they are patrons of writers and mentors to our children. In The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, young Nina runs book clubs for children. In Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, you meet the troubled teenager Mincheol, whose mother offers him the choice of spending his afternoons at the bookstore or being grounded at home. He reluctantly chooses to be in the bookstore, and this choice changes his life.

The Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is the perfect place to sit and unwind. There’s a coffee machine and a barista comes in most days, you meet the regulars, attend events and pick up life learnings.

You learn about the DNA of different places. In Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, you see fractured attitudes to classics like the Arabian Nights. You note the differences in language publications - business books about the western world sell in beautiful hardbound English versions, but rarely is there a book in either English or Arabic about doing business in Egypt.

And finally, you slow down to go back in time. In The Paris Bookseller, you live with an American in Paris. Sylvia Beach is full of fire and literary love, she opens the famous English language bookshop called Shakespeare and Company, she supports James Joyce when his book Ulysses is banned and even publishes his novel. A similar story plays out over the Atlantic, where San Francisco City Lights bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti publishes banned Beat poets. You can read Paul Yamazaki, the bookseller at this same store, tell his story in the recently published Reading the Room. Closer to home, read Bahrisons: Chronicle of a Bookshop by Anuj Bahri and Aanchal Malhotra.

What are your favourite bookstores? And what are your favourite books about bookstores? Do write in with recommendations.

In other literary news, the JCB Prize 2024 longlist is out and includes Of Mothers and Other Perishables by Radhika Oberoi, a book I savoured reading earlier this year. Another longlist worth noting is the FT Best Business Books of the Year. This one includes the racy, pacy, unputdownable The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson and the compelling The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann. And finally, if you are tuned into the Ganesh festival celebrations, consider reading Quarterlife by Devika Rege, for an immersive look at Mumbai’s relationship with Lord Ganesh.

And until next week, happy reading.

Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at [email protected]

The views expressed are personal