Pretty landscape summer reading log1/8/2024 Try it: Set aside an hour or two, pour yourself a drink, turn on some Miles Davis, and sit on the porch one warm evening and knock out a good portion of one. No three books are more ideal for summer reading than The Great Gatsby, Lonesome Dove, and A Month in the Country, books that shimmer with a sense of languid longing (if you’ll pardon the irony of the phrase). (And please be sure to check in with your local shop soon!) You can snag a copy here via our page if you’re so inclined. So, yes, I might be high atop a personal soap box in recommending this book so vociferously, but I suspect you’re with me, at least if you’ve ever discovered that “nothing can replace the work of browsing to help us discover who we are and who we might become,” as Deustch describes it. The life of a book ought to be determined not by an algorithm but by the judgment of time, the articulation of silence and contemplation, and the scattered method of nature-after all, books offer a “more capacious vision of the possible.” And anything so spiritual as that simply can’t be limited to a single economic unit, let alone a single meaning. Not everything needs to be quantified,” he insists. Deutsch believes we have accepted this cancerous idea because “we have as yet no scale for measuring meaning, knowledge, hope, pleasure, reverence, curiosity, beauty, kindness, awe, justice, wisdom, and love. The problem, of course, is that our economic models have decided that such things don’t matter and so we’re okay with the notion that something as profoundly Good (yes, capital “G” good) as books are nothing more than loss-leaders. “Deep in the browse, many of us move through the space as thought we were in the mind itself.” (Like many of the writers he quotes through the book, Deutsch is himself a fairly gifted aphorist.) the ephemeral concerns carried across the threshold of the shop.” “The bookstore compresses time,” Deutsch claims, “taking us to a dimension where the ancient languages are once again spoken” and where the reader can expend “the slow time of the browse. “The rhythm of the bookstore,” Deutsch writes, “is conducive to what Italo Calvino calls ‘the spaciousness of humanistic leisure.’” But the essence of the book, and the reason all book-lovers should read it, is in its defense of the book as an artifact and reading as an ultimate cultural good. Some chapters read like a fairly poetic handbook to being a good bookseller, but even these chapters will probably prove interesting to anyone who cares about books and bookstores, and who wants to understand the kinds of problems and situations we run into as shop curators. But it’s also about the art of browsing, the myriad ways the economy-at-large is built to ignore endeavors like bookselling, and the cultural necessity of rumination and contemplation. On the one hand, it’s a book to motivate and guide those of us who own or work in bookstores-after all, it’s about what makes a great bookstore great. But I don’t think I have encountered a book on the topic as thoughtful, eloquent, and inspiring as Jeff Deutsch’s new book, In Praise of Good Bookstores. I usually have a bookseller’s memoir in my currently-reading stack and I read about the trade side of things as much as I can. As a bookshop owner I read about the industry pretty regularly.
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