Review: My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop by Ronald Rice

4 stars for My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop by Ronald Rice.

This book is what I call Bookstore for the Literary Soul, the equivalent of Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. It is the embodiment of booklovers' paradise, a physical place where booklovers park themselves, not only to browse and buy books, but also to pass time, to lift their spirits and to just be.

It is a significant literary pleasure getting to know as many as eighty-four independent bookstores through authors' take on their favourites. Even though I have never set foot in any of the bookstores listed herein, I feel a great fondness and affinity with these bricks-and-mortar stores as if I have known them all my life. Bookstores are places of genuine wonder with a universe of knowledge on their shelves. Ask any booklover and she will tell you "there can never be too many books". For the same reason, there can never be too many small, locally owned bookstores. For a while, I read this hardcover book like a freight train, devouring bookstore after bookstore, soaking it all in. But as far as good things go, even bookstore hopping within the safety confines of my home does not escape the law of diminishing marginal utility. I have to admit that by the time I reach the forty-second bookstore, I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the stories inside every bookstore. Yes, each bookstore has its own history to tell, story to share, and every patron's experience is different, yet, it is all the same. Because all independent bookstores are owned or ran by book people. They know their store, they know their customers and they know books. Period.

Besides providing unique book-shopping experience to customers, independently owned bookstores also organized book events and readings, bring communities together, support small presses and give lesser-known or even unknown writers the opportunity to sign and read their books. This book gives an eye-opening look into the lives of authors. It has never occurred to me that even authors who are well known and well published now, were once unknown; having to launch a new career is no easy feat when most bookstores cannot be bothered with a rookie author's debut novel published by a small company.

This book also drives home the existential struggle faced by independent bricks-and-mortar bookstores around the world. The struggle is very real and is ever more dire, especially with the threat of big chain bookstores such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble and the inevitable rise in popularity of e-readers and e-books. With independent bookstores vanishing at an alarming rate, I wonder how many of these traditional bookstores will still be around in another three, five, ten or hundred years.

A bookstore is like a magical place, one where we may both lose and find ourselves. To have a bookstore - within walking distance from your home - which you like enough to call your own is truly a great blessing. I enjoy reading the essays and fond memories of authors on their favourite physical bookstores, but sadly, it also reminds me of the fact that there is no locally owned bookstore that I frequent enough and like enough to call my own - my personal bookstore. Sure, there are independent bookstores scattered around the island but I have yet to find the one. I am still searching, still hoping to discover My Bookstore.

My Bookstore is most certainly a book meant for readers and writers alike. If you like physical bookstores, to be surrounded by books (and I mean real books of hardcover and paperback), the feel of paper pages bound between covers, the smell of old books and the touch of language, then this is definitely the book to read.


Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal; 1 edition
Publication date: 13 Nov 2012

*** Favourite quote 1 ***

I still own books that have remained alive and dear in my thoughts since I was a boy, and a part of the life of each one is my memory of the bookstore where I bought it and of the bookseller who sold it to me.

— Wendell Berry

*** Favourite quote 2 ***

Statisticians may tell you that people cluster around jobs or transit or high-speed Internet, but some of us cluster around more important things. Like bookstores.

— Jon Clinch

*** Favourite quote 3 ***

In time, I gained enough sense to realize that writing was not about publishing, but about reading and seeing and thinking and listening and developing a sense of one's self. And, yes, about putting words on paper.

— Kathleen Finneran

***Favourite quote 4 ***

There are many reasons I love books: for the worlds they show me, for the things they teach me, for the way they feel in my hands or in my satchel, for the way they look decorating my house, for the questions they arouse from my children, for their mystery, for their cold or warm truths, for their lies, for their promise. But mostly I just love being transported to some place outside of my everyday life.

— Peter Geye

***Favourite quote 5 ***

A bookstore is, at its heart, like any of the novels you may choose to buy in it. The shop itself is just the title page - you can find any work you want, after all, in many other places - and its holdings are the table of contents, the portal to the real experience. What ultimately makes the place sing, and live in you forever, is something else, much deeper: the characters you meet in it, the emotions that arise in you there, the sense of patterning - and being without pattern - that turns the story of a bookstore into the story of a life.

— Pico Iyer

*** Favourite quote 6 ***

The owner of Next Chapter Bookshop had been holding my hand on a road to publication that had been fraught with potholes.

— Lesley Kagen

*** Favourite quote 7 ***

A flyleaf is that blank piece of paper at beginning and ending of a real hold in your hand and turn the pages book. That blank page is like a curtain rising, the promise of what is to come, and at end, it is the curtain closing, that collected pause before you face the slow return to the outer world.

— Jill McCorkle

*** Favourite quote 8 ***

...reading is a simple addiction, curable only by death - ours, or the world's.

— Edith Pearlman

*** Favourite quote 9 ***

It's the kind of bookstore to which I go when I want a specific book, but also when I don't know what I want, or when there's nothing I want, in particular, except to be in a bookstore.

— Francine Prose

~ My Bookstore
Ronald Rice

@}--->>--->>-----

In this enthusiastic, heartfelt, and sometimes humorous ode to bookshops and booksellers, 84 known authors pay tribute to the brick-and-mortar stores they love and often call their second homes.

In "My Bookstore" our greatest authors write about the pleasure, guidance, and support that their favorite bookstores and booksellers have given them over the years. The relationship between a writer and his or her local store and staff can last for years or even decades. Often it's the author's local store that supported him during the early days of his career, that continues to introduce and hand-sell her work to new readers, and that serves as the anchor for the community in which he lives and works.

"My Bookstore "collects the essays, stories, odes and words of gratitude and praise for stores across the country in 84 pieces written by our most beloved authors. It's a joyful, industry-wide celebration of our bricks-and-mortar stores and a clarion call to readers everywhere at a time when the value and importance of these stores should be shouted from the rooftops. Perfectly charming line drawings by Leif Parsons illustrate each storefront and other distinguishing features of the shops.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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