  • Current Reads

      Life after Life Jill McCorkle
      This Is Your Captain Speaking Jon Methven
      The Starboard Sea Amber Dermont
      Snark David Denby
      Bring Up the Bodies Hilary Mantel
  • Popular Tags

  • Recent Reflections

  • Categories

  • Moleskine’s All-Time Favorites

  • Echoes

    B.B. Toady on [836] The Girl on the Train…
    Mika on [836] The Girl on the Train…
    Matthew on [836] The Girl on the Train…
    buriedinprint on [836] The Girl on the Train…
    Matthew on [836] The Girl on the Train…
    amaryllisturman on [836] The Girl on the Train…
  • Reminiscences

  • Blog Stats

    • 1,000,280 hits
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,737 other followers

Bookstore

image

“A place isn’t a place until it has a bookstore.” This line resonates in my head long after I put down Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, which I reviewed yesterday. It makes me think that as long as there are people who care about books, bookstores will not die. Despite the staggering rent in my hometown, Hong Kong, bookstores still thrive in silence. Whether they are corporates like Eslite (from Taiwan) and Page One (from Singapore) or indies, there are people who are passionate about the business sustaining them. Reading is more than a hobby in the same way a bookstore is more than a business. It’s where readers come together to talk about books and spur one another on to more books. I know I’m sentimental when I talk about how I long for the feel of a book in my hands and prefer the pages in my hand over e-reader. Bookstores attract the right kind of people: stubborn, gentle, patient, thoughtful, and composed. Every cover in a bookstore is a door that turns on magic hinges. Bookstores are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places. Perhaps that is the best way to say it: printed books are magical, and real bookshops keep that magic alive.

7 Responses

  1. I absolutely love this.

  2. Spot on! I loved this post – it made me smile.

  3. “Stubborn, gentle, patient, and composed.” What a lovely description of bookstore patrons!

  4. > It makes me think that as long as there are people who care about books, bookstores will not die.

    I would add an ‘enough’ in between ‘are’ and ‘people’?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://mattviews.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/bookstore/
mattviews.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-04
178768
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CIHN27BMJSCTONQHNU7NKPWQJ4D5AZVK
<urn:uuid:28828a35-545e-4b83-987a-4d60ee0955aa>
2017-01-16T17:14:22Z
192.0.78.13
sha1:MC3PFSKZLHLLCZCVBZPGMWS7JS7QDMFI
<urn:uuid:dfeb434a-0a4d-4301-83db-7214148374af>
https://mattviews.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/bookstore/
length
response
<urn:uuid:e14af9b2-70d3-427e-842a-07f8676314fe>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-04
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf