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Review: In Praise of Good Bookstores

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Cover image of "In Praise of Good Bookstores" by Jeff Deutsch

In Praise of Good Bookstores, Jeff Deutsch. Princeton University Press (ISBN: 9780691207766) 2022.

Summary: A tribute to bookstores, their importance, and what makes them great from a veteran bookseller.

What makes a great bookstore? It’s a question I’ve discussed with other booklovers. But rarely have I encountered the thoughtful, indeed erudite, response to this question given by Jeff Deutsch. He’s more than qualified to answer the question. He is a long-time bookseller at the Seminary Co-op, one of the most distinguished bookstores in the country, and most recently, its director.

What I found instead was an exploration of what an unusual, even improbable, thing a good bookstore really is. In his first chapter, on Space, he offers a thought-provoking discussion of browsing. Unlike many business establishments that try to make purchases as swift and frictionless as possible, bookstores offer a space where people may linger as “ruminants,” browsing among the shelves, skimming spines, and discovering something they’d never seen before that touches on an inner longing. Deutsch even introduces us to the different types of browsers.

Bookstores curate the vast amount of material in print (“Abundance”) into a breadth of selection that believes in “every reader his or her book.” He notes that in one year, of 28,000 books sold at his store, 17,000 were single copies. Such stores, and indeed our libraries, are “archives of longing,” reflecting our literary reach that often exceeds our grasp in terms of years of life.

All those single copies. How is a business to survive? Deutsch explores the Value of bookstores beyond their razor thin, or non-existent profit margins. He rails against the advice that bookstores must carry at least 20 percent products that are not books. Deutsch argues for distinguishing worth from value and seems to suggest that, like an Institute for Advance Studies or a groups of scholars studying Torah, supporting bookstores for their intrinsic worth is worth considering.

Deutsch describes the unusual community of bookstores. Solitary browsers find their own rebbe in the shelves. But there is also a bookselling art of knowing when to join the browser, and when to give them space. And then there are fellow browsers, some who become known for their kindred interests. It’s also an open community, welcoming diverse people from diverse walks of life.

Finally, Deutsch meditates on time. There is time to browse. But there is also the encounter with human thought and endeavor across time. There is the groping for the time that is concealed at present. In a world filled with the “remorseless rush of time” bookstores offer a place of respite.

This book is not a “nuts and bolts” description of the practicalities of bookselling. Rather it is a philosophical consideration of the bookstore. You come across quotes from Borges and Calvino, Dillard and Donne, and many more on the pages, and some rarefied discussion. It reflects the unique world of the Seminary Co-op, located adjacent to the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. Donors augment its bottom line. Yet I wonder how it relates to the Indie stores in small towns amid book deserts, offering liberal collections of horror, thriller, and romance stories, lots of non-book items, and a smaller selection of more “serious” books.

I do think there are elements in common–the space and time to browse, the bookseller, who is attuned to the kind of community forming around the store, and the near run enterprise that all bookstores are. But most of the patrons do not share Deutsch’s high-flown ideas of literate society. They just want a good page-turner for an evening at home, while waiting at a doctor’s office, or in an airport. While I love stores like the Seminary Co-op, I also praise the good bookstores in small towns serving the patrons I’ve described. We need both.

Finally, thanks for visiting Bob on Books. People aren’t reading blogs like they used to, so I appreciate that you spent time here. Feel to “look around” – see the tabs at the top of the website, and the right hand column. And use the buttons below to share this post. Blessings! [Adapted from Enough Light, a blog I follow.]

Review: The Reading Life

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Cover image of "The Reading Life" by .C.S. Lewis.

The Reading Life, C. S. Lewis. Harper One (ISBN: 9780062849977) 2019.

Summary: Essays and brief readings from his books, essay collections, and letters on the joys of reading.

It was a serendipitous find while looking for something else. This is not a “lost” book of C.S. Lewis but a recent compilation of writing by C, S. Lewis drawn from his various books as well as his correspondence. And all of this is on our lives as readers. What’s not to like for a C.S. Lewis fan and bibliophile, right?

Some of the material was familiar, for example his “The Case for Reading Old Books” in which he advocates we read one old book for every new one we read (or at least for every three. Or there is the biographical piece from Surprised by Joy on “Growing Up Amidst a Sea of Books.” But there are a number of pieces I either haven’t read or don’t remember (I don’t have Lewis’s eidetic memory).

The first part of the book contains his longer essays, though only one, on “The Achievements of J.R.R.Tolkien,” is longer than ten pages. “Why We Read, ” from An Experiment in Criticism, serves as a good introduction to the whole collection. Lewis makes the point that “[w]e want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” This is followed by “How to Know if You are a True Reader.” He offers five criteria, and I qualified. I suspect many drawn to this book qualify as well, or are on their way! There are wonderful discussions about children’s literature (the best being not just for children) fairy tales (as less deceptive than “realistic’ stories), and the marvellous.

One of the most important for our day is his discussion of “How to Murder Words.” We do so through inflation, verbiage, and speaking less descriptively and more evaluatively. We are “more anxious to express approval and disapproval of things than to describe them” Yet how can we judge a thing without knowing what it is? The following essay on “Saving Words from the Eulogistic Abyss” carries on this theme. The danger in our careless and imprecise use of words is that “[m]en do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”

As rich as was the first part, the short readings in the latter part of the book were an absolute find. Excerpted mostly from letters, I’d never seen most of this. For example, Lewis offers this pithy observation in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves: “If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.” Like many of us, Lewis loved not only reading but also “Talking About Books.” He encourages reading for enjoyment, especially for children, denounces literary snobs, and says “all sensible people skip freely” that which is of no use to them.

Then there are the readings offering opinions of various writers. He praises Dante but excoriates Alexandre Dumas. He speaks of the utter importance of Plato and Aristotle, opines on Shakespeare and Tolstoy. And he has nothing but good to say about Jane Austen (in contrast to Henry James). He boasts: “I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit.”

I’ve only offered a sampler of the riches to be found in this slim volume. It is a gift to have so many of Lewis’s thoughts on reading in one place. I’ll leave you with his concluding comment on “Good Reading”:

A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.

Review: The Bookseller at the End of the World

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The Bookseller at the End of the World, Ruth Shaw. Auckland, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 2022.

Summary: The story of two small bookshops and their customers in the southernmost part of New Zealand, and the long journey of the bookseller running from trauma, broken dreams, and adventures until re-united with her first love and her work as a bookseller.

Ruth Shaw and her husband Lance run “two wee bookshops” in the southernmost part of New Zealand, a rural town named Manapouri, a scenic destination of vacationers and eco-tourists. This is both about her experiences of bookselling, and the long journey from a working class upbringing across much of the south Pacific until she married her “first and last love,” and after sharing duties of sailing a charter boat, settled down and started the bookshops, at first one, and then a second nearby for children.

Ruth had a pretty normal upbringing, living in Naseby, until it was shattered by a rape at a school dance that left her pregnant. As was the case then, she went away to stay with relatives in Wellington until she had the child, which she gave up for adoption. She tried the Navy but couldn’t handle the discipline. She returned to Stewart Island to assist her parents in running a hotel. It was there that she met Lance Shaw, fell in love, only to have their engagement broken off because Lance couldn’t agree to raise their children Catholic. From helping to run a hotel, she took off to Wellington, running for the next twenty years of her life from trauma and heartbreak

She had various jobs including cook and housekeeper for a house of priests, then went sailing around the Pacific with another man she met and married. But tragedy stalked with her husband dying in a car accident, leaving her with child, who died from an Rh incompatibility, a consequence of her first pregnancy. Later, she returns to the cemetery where he is buried and snatches the cross to remember him by.

She spends twenty years in a wild assortment of jobs, surviving a tsunami, encountering pirates, having run-ins with the law in several countries, returning home long enough to care for her dying mother, attempting suicide and spending time in a mental facility. There were more marriages, from which she ran. For a time she works with a social agency, drawing on her own life to help others. Then a phone call comes from a familiar voice from twenty years ago, asking if she was still Catholic, a reunion with the son she’d given up for adoption, and the move to Manapouri after selling the charter business and the decision to open the bookshops. Always a reader, she began with her own library as the core of her stock.

Interspersed with her memoir are delightful little vignettes called “Tales From the Bookshops.” She tells of giving as many books as she sells, including one to Hamish the hiker. We learn of a couple with a bizarre practice of reading books, of finding the right book for the man who loved tractors, and of how she handles the sale of family books–heirlooms. We are entertained by the story of Lex, the six year-old, who became her “bookshop assistant,” Cove, the bookshop dog, and many more vignettes from her bookselling life.

Ruth Shaw offers us a memoir combining resilience amid trauma and tragedy, a wonderful love story with a happy ending, and plenty of stories any bibliophile will love and identify with. Shaw exemplifies the wonderful quality of all the great booksellers–the ability to connect the hungry reader with just the right book, even from her small shops. You don’t have to go to the Strand, Shakespeare’s or Powell’s. There are dedicated booksellers, even at the end of the world in southern New Zealand who find ways to bring just the right book together with the hungry reader.

Review: Every Book Its Reader

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Every Book Its Reader, Nicholas A. Basbanes. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

Summary: A celebration of those who compiled book lists and made recommendations, the impact of books on various individuals, and the reading lives of famous individuals.

For bibliophiles, Nicholas A. Basbanes is a godsend. He has published at least five books about books and those who are dedicated readers and collectors. I’ve previously reviewed A Gentle Madness, Basbanes celebration of book collectors. This, I believe has a wider appeal. The premise of this work is to explore the impact books have had on their readers and he takes us on a fascinating tour of the lives and libraries of the famous.

He begins with the history of those who recommend books and it was delightful to find that Bob on Books follows a long and honorable tradition. We learn of the great popularity of May Lamberton Becker and her “Readers Guide” columns of the late 1800’s, spanning a wide array of interests. Most delightful is the story of a rural reader with limited access to books asking for books that “had made her [Becker] sit up at night” that she could order by mail order. Becker sent her a package of books that arrived after she’d had surgery for a terminal condition. She wrote back, “With books I slip out of my life and am with the choicest company.”

Basbanes discusses the various attempts to compile lists of “greatest books,” a literary canon, including the efforts of Anita Silvey, who has read over 125,000 children’s books and compiled a list of 100 best books for children. We learn of the efforts of the Lilly Library to identify and collect the books people will be reading in 300 years.

Much of the book is concerned with famous readers and how they interacted with their books. We learn of “the silent witneeses,” the notes Henry James jotted in his books. Basbanes goes on with this theme in a whole chapter on “Marginalia,” the notes readers jot in the margins of their books–a horror to librarians and a trove of information for those studying the history of reading.

We’re introduced to David McCullough, an ardent reader who tells the story of Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox, brilliant Revolutionary war leaders who learned strategy and tactics from books! We learn how Lincoln, Adams, and others carried books with them wherever they went. Basbanes traces the artistry of translators. He chronicles the biblical scholarship of Elaine Pagels. He introduces us to the child psychologist Robert Coles, a former literature major who came to recognize the power of stories for children and the rest of us. We meet Daniel Aaron, the man responsible for my bookcase full of Library of America volumes, doing for American writers what other series have done for Europeans. We visit the libraries of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, inventors nourished by their reading.

The book concludes by featuring the Changing Lives Through Literature program, and the transformative influence books have had on the lives of the imprisoned. (Sadly, access to literature for prisoners is being curbed in many states.) What Basbanes does throughout is explore the significance of books on our lives. Reading him both confirms my own deep sense of the value of reading and inspires me to grow as a reader, to truly attend to what I read.

Review: Reading for the Love of God

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Reading for the Love of God, Jessica Hooten Wilson. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: An exploration of reading as a spiritual practice, including the reading practices of Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy Sayers.

Jessica Hooten Wilson believes how and why we read to be as important as what we read. She invites us to imagine the message of the angel to John on Patmos to “eat this book” and what that means for reading the Bible and for reading other books. For those of us who read for amusement or information, she invites us to consider what it means to read as a spiritual practice. For many of us lost in screens, this means the recovery of a lost art. Along the way, she will introduce us to guides from whose reading practices we may learn.

She begins by asking why read anything but the Bible, acknowledging the Bible’s unique place in the life of the Christian. She proposes that we are not self-contained knowers of all and that other books often cast light on scripture, filling out what is lacking in our own knowledge of the world scripture discloses to us. She leads us into the distinction between “use” and “enjoyment” and the “uselessness” of much in life, including God. To “use” God is to turn him into an idol–we are meant to enjoy God and use things. In the case of books, she proposes that if we just use them, we denigrate their value in promoting our enjoyment of God and God’s world. She notes how many see poetry as “useless” and yet how poetry points us to the good, the true and the beautiful, toward what is of great value.

She asks whether reading good books can make us good people. Not necessarily, and there are vicious as well as virtuous readers. Among other things, virtuous readers are slow, attentive readers, receptive to what gifts they might receive in a book. There is a trinity in the ART of reading–author, reader, and text. We seek to discern clues to the author’s intent. We receive the text almost sacramentally, looking for the image of God and the presence of Christ, even in fallible and fallen works. And we approach humbly, charitably and generously. Reading that weaves these together is a kind of perichoretic dance.

She explores the different senses we employ in the reading of a work. She proposes a recovery of the four senses employed by the church fathers in sacred reading: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, or moral, and the anagogical, or spiritual. The last two seem very important to reading as a spiritual practice. In moral reading, we internalize truth so that we may live and pray it, and in spiritual reading, we so contemplate upon a work that it shapes our imagination. Memory is part of this. The author goes on to consider how works are remembered and that memorizing is also a spiritual practice. We also remember through repeated readings of important works such that they become part of our mental furniture.

I mentioned that Jessica Hooten Wilson also introduces us to guides at different points in the text. They are four: Augustine, who read humbly and in silence, contemplatively and spiritually; Julian, who shows us a woman reading in a world of men, seeing multiple sense of scripture, and particularly the tropological; Frederick Douglass, who discovered liberation in reading and used it to empower others through his speaking and writing; and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose reading of fiction, particularly of Chesterton, illumined her translation of the gospel in radio plays and of Dante.

The book concludes with an invitation to recover our character as people of the book, whose reality begins with the Word and ends in the book of life. She rounds out this treatment with an example of a “twofold” reading of a story of Flannery O’Connor. This is followed by an FAQ about how we determine whether a book is “good,” how to decide what to read next, on marking up books (she encourages this), on finding time to read more, and intriguingly, why Catholics have all the good literature! The final appendix includes reading lists by age and time period.

This is far more than just a book about books or an apologetic for reading. Jessica Hooten Wilson conveys how, for the Christian, reading is an important spiritual practice. Nor is this just reading of scripture. Other great works often illumine the human condition to which scripture addresses itself and the matters of ultimate reality and our destiny. How and why we read, both in terms of virtues and practices is vitally important to the discovery of the riches on offer in literary works. She also casts a vision of the sheer enjoyment that awaits families and communities who engage in reading of good literature for the love of God. It has been my observation that those who have discovered this have a richer and deeper hope in God, as well as a shared language of illusions to stories, to characters, and places, and the memories of sharing these stories with one another. Through Jessica Hooten Wilson’s book, I hope their tribe will increase!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Shadow of the Wind

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The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves). New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Summary: Daniel Sempere’s life is changed when he finds a mysterious book in the Cemetery of Lost Books, and embarks on a quest to learn the true story of its mysterious author, one that places him in great peril.

Daniel Sempere is the son of a widowed bookseller, struggling to retain the memory of his mother’s face. Then his father takes him through the labyrinthine streets of Barcelona to the Cemetery of Lost Books where he is directed to find one book that would become his. The book he chooses will be one he is to make sure never disappears. The book he chooses is one titled The Shadow of the Wind by a Julian Carax. He is enthralled and would know more about its author.

His father sends him to a fellow bookseller, from whom he learns that he possesses the only copy, all the others having been burned. He falls for the man’s blind daughter, several years older than he, and even gives her the book at one point, only to catch her in flagrante with her piano teacher. He retrieves the book.

A mysterious, and seemingly sinister figure approaches him to buy the book. He calls himself Lain Coubert, the name of a character in the book. He smells of smoke and his face darkened, shriveled. Daniel refuses, keeps his commitment to the book, and to learning the truth of Carax. He is aided by a beggar, Fermin, who he and his father take in. Fermin turns out to be a fascinating figure, and his and Daniel’s investigations take them on escapades throughout the city, one of the funniest in an asylum where they make a promise to a horny old man, He becomes Daniel’s mentor in the art of love as Daniel falls in love with his friend Tomas’ sister Beatriz.

Their investigations bring upon them an old enemy of Fermin in the form of police detective Fumero, an ambitious figure who pushed a mentor to his death, and has a vendetta against Carax. Their investigations also lead to a woman with a connection to Carax’s publisher, Nuria Monfort. They learn that Carax had been in love with Penelope. the daughter of the powerful Aldaya family, coveted by Fumero. In the end, he flees to Paris, where Nuria came in contact with him. He was supposed to have returned to Barcelona for Penelope, only to have supposedly died in a duel–Julian’s father seems to indicate that it was not his son whose body was found. It turns out that Nuria knows much more, revealed in a letter she writes for Daniel when she realizes her own life is in danger. It occupies the last third of the novel, revealing the truth about Carax, as well as truths of which Carax was unaware.

The reader notices the parallels between Julian Carax and Daniel. Both worked for fathers, with mothers dead or estranged. Lain Coubert, a character of Carax, haunts Daniel. Then there are the loves of Julian and Daniel, including Daniel’s trysts with Beatriz in the abandoned Aldaya mansion. Above all, there is the book, and Daniel’s quest to know its author.

It’s a plot that drew me in, along with the delightful and sometimes riotous relationship between Daniel and Fermin. One almost can visualize their Barcelona (and the book includes a walking tour of the real places). Zafón has been compared to the likes of Eco and Marquez. I actually preferred Zafón, whose writing involved more realism and less magic, One delights in the affection of Daniel’s father for his son, and the loyalty between Daniel and Fermin, who supplants his friendship with Tomas. The one plot element I wonder about was using Nuria Monfort’s letter to unravel the mystery of Carax. So much of the story is in that letter, which is a engrossing read, but one wonders if Zafón could not find another way to unravel the story through the investigations of Daniel and Fermin.

The novel doesn’t end with the letter bur I will refrain from saying much more except to say, what an ending, well worth the 450 pages that precede it!