You’ve just come upon a list of books about books in a book about books. Why, yes! That’s because reading books about books is a wonderfully meta way to spend time. Why read the classics when you can read about an entire bookstore or library? Don’t just read; read about someone else reading! I think this way of thinking is probably why I no longer “own” books. I am a big believer in using my public library as my library. To me, books are meant to be shared or gifted, left behind on the Metro for someone to discover, or donated to the neighborhood Little Free Library. That’s why I love this genre. I always wonder if the authors of books about books were sitting in a bookshop while they wrote. Does this happen in other industries? I’m sure there are songs about music and films about movies and lawsuits about lawyers. Right? Paying homage to libraries, librarians, bookshops, collectors, readers, and literature, the titles that follow celebrate books and those who love them.
How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much (2014) by Samantha Ellis
“My whole life, I’d been trying to be Cathy, when I should have been trying to be Jane.”
••••••
We all have a list of books that changed us—they arrived in our hands at just the right time, we devoured them (or savored them), we saved them, we shared them … and there was a character in each that was our friend or someone we hoped we could become, or were. Samantha Ellis, an Iraqi-Jewish feminist who doesn’t take herself as seriously as she takes her passion for books, is no different. Her endeavor with this book was to revisit the titles from her younger years to see if her admiration for the heroines within each held up in her adulthood. The Little Mermaid, Gone with the Wind, Little Women, Lace, Valley of the Dolls, and A Room with a View are just a few of the titles she reexamined. Ellis does a fantastic job of being self-reflective while discussing the books. Part memoir, part literary criticism, this book contains just the right mix of well-known and obscure titles.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino
“Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap.”
••••••
The first several pages of this book prepare you for this book—get comfortable, it tells you; turn the book over in your hand, it says. Go ahead and read the first several pages, it urges. What do you think so far? And then you are dropped inside a train station, where the real story begins. Or does it? Every other chapter is the start of a story—you are reading the story and then the story cuts off and then you begin to investigate why the story cut off and then another story begins. An examination of the writing process and the reading process, this book feels like it was written for you, and well, it was. One of the few books written in the second person that not only works but shines.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012) by Robin Sloan
••••••
Meet Clay Jannon, an out-of-work graphic designer who gets a part-time job at a dusty bookstore run by the mysterious Mr. Penumbra. Clay seeks help from his techie friends to decode a 500-year-old book that holds the secret to immortality. This high-tech fantasyland of Google, secret societies, and meganerds is a surreal adventure for people who love the smell of an old book but could not possibly give up their smartphones.
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (2004) by Aaron Lansky
••••••
In 1980, at the age of twenty-three, Aaron Lansky set out to save and preserve the world’s Yiddish books. You see, scholars believed that there were fewer than 100,000 such books remaining in existence, and that did not sit well with Lansky. So he got some colleagues together and they visited aging Yiddish-speaking immigrants who owned the books; they also rescued them from attics, dumpsters, and demolition sites. This is the story of Lansky’s adventure and the people he met along the way. Oh, and he also founded the National Yiddish Book Center, one of the largest Jewish cultural organizations in North America. I really admire this type of grassroots social activism, which I see practiced by people like Lansky who see a wrong and set out to right it. Saving books is an admirable thing!
The Polysyllabic Spree (2004) by Nick Hornby
••••••
True bibliophiles (of which you are obviously one, darling reader) will love English author Nick Hornby’s month-by-month account of books purchased and books read, the titles of which rarely overlap. Each list is followed by a short essay that includes mini reviews mixed with biographical info, wit, and pep. This book will give you more ideas of what to read, what to skip, and what you probably will, but might-not-ever-and-that’s-okay, read in your lifetime. This book was born from Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for the literary magazine The Believer. Also check out the other books in this series including More Baths, Less Talking. Hornby very clearly tells readers to “Read what you enjoy, not what bores you.”
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) by Azar Nafisi
“[D]o not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”
••••••
Librarians, teachers, and other book lovers know how liberating reading can be and how damaging and despicable censorship or information suppression is. Iranian-American teacher Dr. Azar Nafisi is no different. In 1995 Islamic Republic of Iran, Nafisi and her students braved raids of fundamentalist morality squads to read Western classic authors such as Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and, yes, Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov. Books discussed and read freely in other parts of the world were expressly forbidden, so the ladies met in secret in Nafisi’s living room, shedding their mandatory veils and robes to discuss the relationship between fiction and reality. One of the most beautiful and simple takeaways of this reading journey is the fact that now, if Nafisi or any of these young women were to revisit one of the books read during this time, they would connect it with the time spent in the living room, getting to know one another, broadening their minds in the shadow of tyranny. Books stay with us; they leave their marks, and, above all, they empower us to explore ourselves and our surroundings.
The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared (2011) by Alice Ozma
••••••
After keeping a promise to read aloud together for one hundred consecutive nights when Alice was in elementary school, Alice and her librarian father decided to keep “The Streak” alive as long as possible. Amazingly, the duo managed to do so until Alice went away to college, and this book chronicles that reading journey. If that doesn’t warm your book-loving heart, then I don’t know what will. The Reading Promise actually made me think less about books and more about my own father and our rituals and how much I miss them. This book is an inspiration to readers and parents.
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (2014) by Tom Rachman
••••••
As the title indicates, we are born, we ascend to the height of our greatness, and then we slowly decline, and bookseller and heroine Tooly Zylberberg is no different. Saddled with a mysterious past full of unanswered questions, Tooly finds that she prefers books to people. In alternating chapters that relay Tooly’s story at age nine, at age nineteen, and as an adult, we learn that Tooly spent her youngest years traveling the world with a man named Paul until she made a decision at age ten that altered her course. Alluring, mysterious, and captivating, this book is filled with just the sort of characters that Tooly would like to meet.
S. (2013) by Doug Dorst (created by J.J. Abrams)
••••••
S. is one of those books, like the Griffin and Sabine series mentioned in the chapter “Very Truly Yours,” that is more book art than a novel. In it, Jennifer, a college senior, finds a well-worn book left by a stranger at the university library (Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a mysterious writer named V.M. Straka) that has tons of margin notes inside. Intrigued, she responds by writing back (in a different color ink) and leaves the book for its owner (who turns out to be a Straka scholar and disgraced graduate student). So you, the reader, can read just Ship of Theseus and its footnotes, which contain enigmatic codes and clues, or just the marginalia that is the discussion between Jennifer and Eric, or a mix of the two that just might help explain all of the mystery surrounding Straka. Whatever your approach, what happens next is an exciting, sometimes hard-to-follow but totally intriguing correspondence about the mystery of the book itself. The confusion the reader experiences is made okay by the beauty of the book and the removable photos, postcards, maps, and notes as well as the promise of catching more clues and details upon subsequent readings. This is interactive reading at its finest, almost as if the book is writing itself before your eyes.
The Shadow of the Wind (2001) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
••••••
Set in postwar 1945 Barcelona, The Shadow of the Wind is about a boy named Daniel who is captivated by a mysterious book called The Shadow of the Wind and its even more mysterious author, Julián Carax, who disappeared in Paris after a duel. Daniel soon learns that someone is destroying all of Carax’s books, but why? And what made Daniel choose this book above all of the others in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books? Carlos Ruiz Zafón does a superb job of world-building as well as tension-building in this book about a book. A gothic magic carpet ride of delight.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (2014) by Gabrielle Zevin
••••••
A.J. Fikry, a crotchety widower bookstore owner faced with dwindling sales and a dismal online presence, has a very particular list of literary dislikes, including celebrity picture books, genre mash-ups, postmortem narrators, movie tie-in editions, and “children’s books, especially ones with orphans.” He never imagined himself alone and angry and grieving over the unexpected death of his young wife. And then two things happen that, again, change the course of his life: A valuable book from his shop goes missing and an orphaned girl is left in his care. The baby’s presence is inexplicable except for the accompanying note from the mother: “I want her to grow up to be a reader. I want her to grow up in a place with books and among people who care about those kinds of things.” Residents of the quaint New England town come together to attempt to help Fikry, who, in return, plies them with books to satisfy their reading needs. This light, feel-good book about books doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s definitely an ode to reading and the magic of independent bookshops.
The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
••••••
Henry, a Chicago librarian, has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, in which the sufferer is plucked in and out of moments in his life and left at a different point, completely vulnerable. Henry has known Clare, an art student, for much of his time-scattered life. Told from the perspective of both Henry and Clare, readers learn about their ups and downs, including their strange encounters (such as when Henry is thirty-six and Clare is six), and the limitations and joys of their unique relationship. Not only is the protagonist a librarian (several scenes take place in a library), but readers will also enjoy the many allusions to literary greats such as Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Full of laughs and heavy on foreshadowing, for which I’m a sucker, this is a time-travel romance like no other.
The Uncommon Reader (2007) by Alan Bennett
“She was not a gentle reader and often wished authors were around so that she could take them to task.”
••••••
A compact novella about the (fictional) time the Queen of England happened upon a public bookmobile and discovered a love for reading, much to the chagrin of her court. You’d think that the Queen of England could spend as much time as she wanted doing anything she pleased, but her duties, christenings, dinner parties, and knightings take too much time away from her new hobby. For such a tiny book, it delivers punch after witty punch. Empathic readers can relate to Her Majesty, who is easily bored by the mundane things that take time away from reading. I am reminded of when I was young and just discovering the joy of reading. But this clever little book answers the question: what if the love of reading turns up later in life? And what if it turns up in one of the most popular figureheads in the world? As it turns out, the Queen despises the same books I do!