Yesterday was National Independent Bookstore Day but the day was packed with soccer and grandparents and celebration. I did not go to the bookstore yesterday. However, on Friday, the rain canceled my planned hiking trip and, instead, Justin and I went to breakfast1 and then our local bookstore. I grabbed the long handle and pushed open the heavy front door and took a deep breath. I love how books smell and even with the tiny cafe in the back, the bookstore smells like books. The smell of books ranks up there with pot roast or fresh bread, candles that smell like Christmas, and the forest on a damp morning.
I scanned shelves with the intensity of fervent college resident assistants looking for dust during room checks.2 I saw beloved books and wanted to wave at them like I would an old friend. Hello, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Hello Their Eyes Were Watching God. I saw books that I had never heard of— some covers enticed me to pick them up and read the jacket. I bought four in the end and there’s a fifth that follows me around like a ghost, nagging me for leaving it behind.3
Lessons in Chemistry, a novel, was the first I picked up. I’ve seen it recommended multiple times lately in newsletters and the jacket convinced me. The haunting book is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow because I’ve heard great things about it as well. I stacked You Could Make This Place Beautiful on top of Lessons in Chemistry. I had finished an interview with the author and poet Maggie Smith on Thursday and she was top of mind. Next was Enchantment by Katharine May. I snuck to Target for a few minutes after trivia night on Thursday and picked the book up and put it back down telling a friend I’d prefer to buy it from our local place.4 I’ve read her other two books; they are very different and I love them in different ways. Last of all, I slid an ugly $7 copy of Huckleberry Finn on the stack because I’m reading all the books on my “read banned books” sticker that’s carefully placed on the side of my Yeti.5 Why that cover had to be ugly when they had intriguing covers to other Twain books, I don’t know. But I resent it.
Bookstores contain worlds. You wonder in and find the unexpected. You see staff picks, what’s been set out for national poetry month, books that you love and books that you have never heard of. I order books online too, but it’s a shortcut of the experience. You only find what you’re looking for or what an algorithm thinks is similar. You rarely leave with something entirely surprising.
The experience of a bookstore, or a library for that matter, is what I love about buying physical copies of books. Books are friends. They sit on shelves, winking at me, asking me to pick them up and thumb through them, remembering where I was, who I was, when I read them. I checked Emily of New Moon out of the library in the winter when I was young. I always got stacks of books, but I picked that one up first and settled in on the couch by the Christmas tree. I believe it was snowing, but perhaps that’s only how I would draw the scene. That memory sits in me like a comfortable chair, which would be perfect to read a book in, now that I think of it. Kindles are convenient but you don’t smell the books or touch the books. They don’t sit together and talk. They don’t whisper something about your interior world to everyone who enters your home and pauses to glance at the titles.
Mary Oliver has a poem that I would to frame and hang in my home. It reads like this:
Wherever I’ve lived my room and soon
the entire house is filled with books;
poems, stories, histories, prayers of
all kinds stand up gracefully or are
heaped on shelves, on the floor on
the bed. Strangers old and new offering
their words bountifully and thoughtfully,
lifting my heart.
But, wait! I’ve made a mistake! how
could these makers of so many books
that have given so much to my life—
how could they possibly be strangers?
I was so sad to postpone hiking but what’s better than a good breakfast date? Nothing.
If you did not experience this, I’m sorry. Or you made good choices. I promise the semester I was an RA, I ignored the dust. I was too busy hoping to get married over Christmas break to even think about dust.
Pesky budgets.
I had felt an itch to browse Target for a week and finally did it. I texted my husband and told him I didn’t buy anything and he responded, “These why did you go?!?” To see if I wanted to buy something, of course.
This is very similar to the one I have. I browsed several before choosing this link and I need to know why Of Mice and Men is huge in each of them when it’s a tiny volume.
I had to come back and tell you how much I LOVED your writing here. It was so beautiful and poetic. I know exactly what you mean. My favorite quote: "Kindles are convenient but you don’t smell the books or touch the books. They don’t sit together and talk. They don’t whisper something about your interior world to everyone who enters your home and pauses to glance at the titles."
My mom took me to the library every weekend of childhood, and I continued to do that up until I graduated HS. It made me realize that I feel most at home among books and that in a way - they're like my my most faithful and honest friends.