The Bookstore - Deborah Meyler

Esme Garland is a young Englishwoman living in New York & studying for a PhD at Columbia. Her boyfriend, economics lecturer Mitchell van Leuven, dumps her just before she's about to tell him that she's pregnant. Far from home & living on a student visa, Esme gets a job at The Owl, her local second-hand bookshop. The Owl is home to a group of eccentrics, both staff & customers. George owns the shop & is obsessed with germs & nutrition. Luke brings his guitar to work & tries to educate Esme about American music. Many of the customers are eccentric & a number of homeless men drop in regularly with bargains to sell or to mind the shop for a few dollars.

Esme decides to keep the baby but doesn't tell Mitchell. When he finds out, he wavers between urging her to have an abortion & wanting to get married. Mitchell's family is descended from the old New York patrician families of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. His parents are cool & assessing, obviously thinking that Esme has trapped Mitchell into proposing. Esme is disconcerted by Mitchell's ever-changing attitudes & assumptions that she will stop working in the bookshop & even move to the other side of the country. Through all this turmoil, the staff & customers at the Owl become the centre of Esme's world. She has few friends apart from her neighbour, Stella, & feels increasingly alone. Mitchell may be rich & handsome but, for me, he was summed up in this one comment, "... I don't need to buy books. I've got the whole of the library at the New School, as well as my iPad. Why do people still buy books? They just take up space."

The main problem I had with this book was Mitchell. He was so unpleasant, so self-centred, manipulative, needlessly jealous & unsympathetic that I just couldn't see why Esme agreed to get back together when she'd so fortunately escaped from him in about Chapter 3. He obviously has some deep emotional problems but we never discover the source of these, only the results. Esme has an inconclusive talk with an old girlfriend of Mitchell's but it leads nowhere. Their on-again, off-again relationship just got in the way of an interesting story about an Englishwoman alone in New York coping with pregnancy & all the financial & emotional problems that this causes. Every time Esme dismissed Mitchell or he left in a huff, I thought there was the chance for this novel to become something more. The most interesting chapters for me were the scenes at the Owl. The interactions with George & Luke, Esme's stumbling attempts to fit in & the growing friendships she makes that sustain her through several crises. Unfortunately Esme's erratic waverings about Mitchell just irritated me.

There are no easy answers for Esme as she faces the prospect of bringing up a baby alone in New York. Although I was frustrated by Esme's relationship with Mitchell, I did enjoy the Owl & the discussions about books & music there. The Bookstore is a fantasy in some ways as I don't imagine that Esme could possibly survive on her scholarship & the few hours she works at the Owl. Apart from the fact that she shouldn't be working at the bookshop at all while on the scholarship. I liked the fact that there was no neat resolution at the end of the book but I'm not sure that the delights of the Owl outweighed the irritations of Mitchell for me.

I read The Bookstore courtesy of NetGalley.

Just borrowed

I borrowed a couple of new books at work last week & I think they're so funny & true & beautifully done that I wanted to share them. Nikki McClure's How To Be A Cat is one of the loveliest picture books I've seen in ages & I buy picture books as part of my job so I see a lot of them.

Black & white drawings with a splash of blue. One word per page. There's no story as such, it's about a kitten watching his mother & learning the skills he will need to be a cat.

This book is for anyone who loves cats. You don't need to be three years old to see the truth in the observation of the cats that's gone into creating this book. I make no comment on this picture at all but there are days when I feel I do nothing but open doors for Lucky & Phoebe.

The other book is by Jen Campbell. A few years ago she published a book called Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops. It was exactly that. A collection of weird, wonderful, mad, funny, incomprehensible things that customers or patrons say when they walk into your bookshop or library. Jen works at the Ripping Yarns Bookshop in London & began collecting the odd things people said. The idea grew into the book & other booksellers & librarians began sending in their own examples. Now, she's published the sequel More Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops. Jen has a blog where she talks about her books, her poetry & more weird things that have come her way. Here are just a few of my favourite weird things from this latest book.

Customer: Pride and Prejudice was published a long time ago, right?
Bookseller: Yep.
Customer: I thought so. Colin Firth's looking really good for his age, then.

Customer: I don't like biographies. The main character pretty much always dies in the end. It's so predictable.

Customer: Can you recommend a book of spells to raise pets from the dead?
Bookseller:...
Customer: Just animals, you understand - not people. I don't want my husband coming back.

If you laughed at any or all of those examples, you will enjoy this book. The line drawings throughout are by The Brothers McLeod.

The temptation of bookshops

I bought two books this morning. That probably doesn't surprise anyone who reads this blog. But, I bought copies of two books that I already own several copies of (or should that be, of which I own several copies...). I'd come across the Penguin Deluxe edition of Persuasion on the internet just the other day & I'd popped it into my wishlist at The Book Depository. I have the Deluxe edition of Cold Comfort Farm & I know how beautiful they are.

This morning, I went to the Farmers Market which is in a park behind the local shops & after I bought veggies, honey, handmade soap & had a delicious coffee, I went into my local bookshop because I had time & I can never resist a look round. Even though I buy books for a living, I rarely see the actual books anymore. All my buying for the library, except children's picture books, is now done online. I read reviews & blurbs but I don't see the books, feel the paper & look at the illustrations & layout as I used to do. There are also far fewer local bookshops for me to browse in. My local bookshop is part of a chain but it's owned by the man who runs it & has a great selection of local books, bestsellers & a lovely Classics section.

I was browsing through the Classics & there it was, the Penguin Deluxe edition of Persuasion. Just along the shelf was the Penguin threads edition of Emma. Even though Emma is my least favourite Austen novel, I'd been tempted by the Threads edition before. I keep thinking that if I read it often enough, I'll warm to Emma Woodhouse eventually.  If you haven't come across the Threads editions, they have a raised design on the covers that is just like embroidery. The back of the cover even looks like the back of a piece of needlework with all the ends of the threads showing. The artist is Jillian Tamaki & you can see all the covers here. I could have bought them online for a few dollars less but there they were & there I was with the money burning a hole in my purse and Reader, I bought them! So, now I have yet another copy of both Emma & Persuasion. I've already justified my addiction to multiple copies of my favourite books. Every time I add a book to Library Thing & it helpfully tells me I already own another copy, I just think So what? There are worse addictions to have.

Next time I want to read either book, these will be the copies I reach for. I might have bought them online one day but it's such a treat to browse in a real bookshop that I'm glad I bought them this morning in my local bookshop.

Parnassus on Wheels - Christopher Morley

Parnassus on Wheels is one of the most charming, funny, delightful books I’ve read in a long time. It’s really a novella, only 80pp long, but there’s a lot of adventure & romance packed into those few pages. Helen McGill keeps house for her brother, Andrew, on their farm in New York State. Andrew was a contented farmer until the day he started to write. His early ambitions had been put aside because of the farm but when Great Uncle Philip dies & leaves the McGills his library, Andrew gradually stops working & starts reading then writing. His books, Paradise Regained & Happiness & Hayseed, are a big success. He’s seen as the successor to Thoreau. So, when Roger Mifflin, known as the Professor, arrives one day with his travelling bookshop, the Parnassus, aiming to sell it to Andrew, Helen is immediately on the attack. The sign on the side of the Parnassus says it all,

Worthy friends, my wain doth hold
Many a book, both new and old;
Books, the truest friends of man
Fill this rolling caravan.
Books to satisfy all uses.
Golden lyrics of the Muses.
Books on cookery and farming,
Novels passionate and charming.
Every kind for every need
So that he who buys may read.
What librarian can surpass us?

To forestall Andrew buying the Parnassus & going off on another of his journeys to find material for his books, Helen decides to buy the Parnassus herself. She finds herself on an adventure that will change her life. Helen has lived on the farm for years, as she says, “and hardly ever been away except for that trip to Boston once a year to go shopping with cousin Edie.” She’s feeling a little unappreciated by Andrew who is absorbed in his writing & occasionally his farm work & takes her for granted. She’s 39 & looking for adventure. She leaves Andrew a note and sets off with the Professor, who is going to show her the ropes for a day or two before he goes home to Brooklyn to write his book, Literature among the Farmers.

Dear Andrew, Don’t be thinking I’m crazy. I’ve gone off for an adventure. It just came over me that you’ve had all the adventures while I’ve been at home baking bread. Mrs McNally will look after your meals and one of her girls can come over to do the housework. So don’t worry. I’m going off for a little while – a month, maybe – to see some of this happiness and hayseed of yours. It’s what the magazines call the revolt of womanhood. Warm underwear in the cedar chest when you need it. With love, Helen.

The Professor is on a crusade. Accompanied by Peg (short for Pegasus) the horse & Bock (short for Boccaccio) the dog, he has travelled the back roads of America taking literature to farmers & small town shopkeepers & their families.

“Lord!” he said, “when you sell a man a book you don’t just sell him twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean... And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation... I’m doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It’s a new field, but by the bones of Whitman it’s worth while. That’s what this country needs – more books!”

Well, I can’t argue with that! Helen & the Professor’s adventures include Andrew trying to track them down, tramps stealing the Parnassus & the Professor being thrown into jail. I loved the way Helen tells her story. Her narration is full of funny turns of phrase, “My feelings were as mixed as a crushed nut sundae.”, “We stood in complete dismay – I did, at any rate – for about as long as it takes to peel a potato.” Helen & the Professor fall in love, Andrew accepts that she’s not coming back & they set off for one last tour in the Parnassus before settling down in Brooklyn to open a bookshop & for the Professor to write his magnum opus.

I went straight on to the sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, after finishing Parnassus on Wheels. I have to admit, it was a bit of a disappointment. The freshness of the original has been bogged down with the addition of a plot about German spies (it was published in 1919 at the time of the Versailles Peace Conference) although there are still lots of good things in The Haunted Bookshop, not least being the eponymous bookshop itself. The name of the shop refers to the ghosts of dead writers that haunt its aisles. The professor hasn’t abandoned his crusade, he just waits for passing trade to come to him. The description of avid book lovers in a state of bibliobliss (the Professor’s own description) is familiar to anyone who loves browsing in bookshops. I enjoyed it but it certainly doesn’t have the pace & humour of Parnassus on Wheels. I read both these books on my e-reader, downloaded for free from Manybooks.