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Still, Amelia had not allowed herself to be certain until dessert, when she’d asked him about the book that had had the greatest influence on his life, and he’d replied Principles of Accounting, Part II.
In Amelia’s experience, most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance. Amelia is
They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
“Infinite Jest is a masterpiece,” Harvey had said. “Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life,” A.J. had countered.
He sits down at the dining-room table and notices that the wine bottle has also been thrown out. Odd for him to have been so fastidious but not unprecedented. He is nothing if not a neat drunk.
A.J. jogs down Captain Wiggins Street with his dingy plaid bathrobe flapping out behind him. He looks like a depressed, malnourished superhero.
But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.
A.J. attributes the increase to the lesser-known economic indicator known as “the Curious Townie.” A well-meaning townie (W-MT) will sidle up to the desk.
A.J. runs their credit cards and concludes that a theft is an acceptable social loss while a death is an isolating one.
Pregnant, she is like a very pretty Gollum.
he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.
The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
She will read the word damask in a book one day and think, Yes, of course that’s what it’s called. In contrast, the word wainscoting will come as a huge disappointment.
He tosses the paper carcass aside.
“I am eighty-one years old, and statistically speaking, I should have died 4.7 years ago,” the book begins. At 5 a.m., A.J. closes the book and gives it a pat. Maya wakes, feeling better. “Why are you crying?” “I was reading,” A.J. says.
“Hey A.J.,” she calls. “There’s something kind of heroic about being a bookseller, and there’s also something kind of heroic about adopting a child.” “I do what I can.” He bows.
I’ll tell you, pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.” “That
“I know,” she said. “A place is not really a place without a bookstore.”
She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.
A.J. has often reflected that, bit by bit, all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat. First, it had been the record stores, and then the video stores, and then newspapers and magazines, and now even the big chain bookstores were disappearing everywhere you looked.
Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.
You totally can describe a hospital room. It’s gray. The art is the worst art you’ve ever seen. Like stuff that got rejected by the Holiday Inn. Everything smells like someone is trying to cover up the smell of piss.”
“Fuck you. I like you. I’m used to you. You are the one, you asshole. I can’t meet someone new.”
The attendant comes to wheel him away. “I love you,” she says with a resigned shrug. “I want to leave you with something cleverer than that, but it’s all I know.” WHEN
(The nurses deem the e-reader to be more sanitary than a paper book. “They should put that on the box,” A.J. quips.)
And the longer I do this (bookselling, yes, of course, but also living if that isn’t too awfully sentimental), the more I believe that this is what the point of it all is. To connect, my dear little nerd. Only connect. —
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.
Yes, Dad. Dad is what I am. Dad is what I became. The father of Maya. Maya’s dad. Dad. What a word. What a little big word. What a word and what a world! He is crying. His heart is too full, and no words to release it. I know what words do, he thinks. They let us feel less.
The loss of his mind has turned out to be a curiously pain-free process. He feels that it ought to hurt more.
“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”
although she is one of those odd New England creatures who actually like the winter.
A lot of folks pass through Alice Island, especially in the summer. I’ve seen movie people on vacation and I’ve seen music people and newspeople, too. There ain’t nobody in the world like book people. It’s a business of gentlemen and gentlewomen.”
A place ain’t a place without a bookstore, Izzie.”
I love Island Books with all my heart. I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life.
He even walks like he has a calling. He could be mistaken for a missionary. In point of fact, he was raised Mormon, but this is another story.
