5 Books About Books
What serious book nerd doesn’t love a reading memoir? This is when you read a book about someone else reading books. If this sounds a little postmodern, well, yes. But it’s great!
Besides exponentially expanding your reading list (gulp), books about books provide insight into and create a conversation around how reading matters to different readers, which is just about as fun to talk about as plot and character, setting and mood. The serious book nerd has his or her own ideas, of course, but experiencing the multiple iterations of reading’s value expands the sense of possibility.
How popular is this kind of book? One page at goodreads.com lists—wait for it—418 books about books. I’m going to provide a much shorter list of great books about books, and they were all released this year.
“Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” by Robin Sloan
After art school graduate Clay Jannon loses his job designing logos for a bagel company, he takes a job working the late shift in the titular 24-hour bookstore whose most requested inventory is books written in a mysterious, indecipherable code. As Clay works to uncover the relationship between his quirky customers and their books, he draws on the resources of his friends, wrestles with the limits of technology, and discovers the nature of immortality.
Sloan’s debut novel reads like a delightful mystery (meaning no one is killed), with a cast of imperfect but kind and ethical characters pooling their knowledge and traveling across the country to help Clay discover the secret behind the bookstore’s existence. But what they really find is the meaning of life. If you like to feel good after you finish the last page of a book, you will probably adore this novel.
My favorite read of 2012, it’s a multi-layered story that also has one of the best last lines ever. And did I mention the cover glows in the dark? It's a metaphor.
“My Ideal Bookshelf” edited by Thessaly La Force with art by Jane Mount
This collection features 100 chefs, food writers, cultural figures, fashion designers, musicians, and authors reflecting on the books that have inspired them. Mount created stunning original paintings rendered in colors that pop with hand-lettered book spines to accompany the selections, which include first-person comments La Force collected through interviews with each contributor.
Incidentally, I don’t own this one yet, but the holidays are coming… (hint, hint).
Rice’s collection celebrates independent bookstores, the books within them, and the relationship among writers, the books that inspired them, and the shops that provided them. Over 80 beloved writers contribute short essays describing his or her independent bookstore, the pivotal one that supported their growth and development.
I’ll be honest—I had my doubts about this, as a concept. I’m all for celebrating indies and cross town lines to support them. And yet, could essays about bookstores really be that interesting? Yes! Granted, these are all great writers, so they could probably make a bag of garbage compelling. But the essays are beautifully crafted, funny, moving, and they may quite possibly inspire you to drive to your nearest indie straightaway.
You don’t have to read this one straight through. Begin with your favorite author and browse as you would in an actual bookstore. Also, each entry includes a black and white sketch of the bookstore under discussion. So it’s pretty, too!
The author of “High Fidelity,” “About a Boy,” and “Juliet, Naked” (among others), Hornby also writes a column for Believer magazine in which he discusses the books he has bought and read each month. The two do not necessarily correspond (though sometimes they overlap). “More Baths, Less Talking” is a collection of his columns from May 2010 through Dec. 2011.
Hornby is British, so I already love his dry sense of humor and way with words, but I also enjoyed the direct address and conversational style. I recommend reading it straight through (it’s only 135 pages).
This is a clever, funny (I actually laughed out loud quite a few times), and light read also suitable for browsing. Though there’s nothing stuffy about Leto, she’s smart, and she knows her books. She covers such issues as how to make a love connection in a bookstore, what your book collection or favorite author says about you, rules for reading in public spaces, rules for book clubs, and why she believes “bookcat” should supplant “bookworm” as the reader’s moniker (she makes a strong case, and also: lol!). As for books, Leto offers Twitter-sized memoir reviews, guidelines for classifying fiction, a book critic’s “bag of tricks,” and tips for faking like you’ve read certain famous authors that you haven’t.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is a fun book for fun bibliophiles!
Your turn! What’s your favorite book about books?