For the Love of Books
Every few months we’ll be sharing our favorite books of the season and our books that are next on the shelf. While it may seem like an obvious move for a so-called ‘lifestyle’ blog to discuss and recommend books, we both feel a particular affinity for books and what they’ve brought to our lives, which we felt compelled to share.
Reading for me has always felt like a luxury and an escape. I was lucky enough to have a mom who read to me every night before bed, and who made me feel that reading was a really wonderful escape to different worlds. I remember pretending to read before I even knew how, just because I thought it made me look cool. I’ll never forget, when I was in first or second grade my mom finally acquiesced to reading me Harry Potter. I fell in love with hearing about a magical world, and I would beg and beg for her to keep reading well past my bedtime. Since then I’ve been an absolute fiction (and Harry Potter) head, although I try to pepper in some non-fiction now and then.
After college I was so burnt out on reading that I remember not picking up a book for over a year. My aunt, who is a very avid reader leant me a book and encouraged me to get back on the horse. Every year since my reading list gets longer and longer thanks to book clubs, friends reading lists, and my aunts library. While I have a kindle, and often listen to audio books, there is nothing quite like finding a real book in my favorite bookstore and turning every page.
—Veronica
My Grandpa Al was a secondhand bookseller near the East Village of Manhattan. He began as a book scout for his brother Sam, traveling all around the country to find treasured stories to bring home. After the second world war, he took over the store from 1945 to 1955 when he moved to east 4th street to be a part of “Book Row”; a Lower East Side Antiquarian Book Dealer ‘district’. His book loft, Colonial Book Service, was in business from 1955 to 1979 and held about a quarter million books in 4,000 square feet (pictured on the left). While I never got to see the store in person (he was long retired by the time I was born), I love looking through photos of the book loft with its tunnels and stacks of every book you could imagine. My mom brought as many of these old, and often rare, books to California as she could, and I grew up scanning the bindings on the shelves and combing the pages of the few picture books included in the collection.
As I grew older, I lost the spark of wonder and excitement that came with books--partly because of an ocular focusing disorder (if reading makes you feel really tired, ask your doctor to get tested!) and partly because I was thrown into the fast-paced and overly involved life of a high-strung teenager.
Reading is something I’ve rediscovered as an adult. After years of frantically flipping through a novel for a high school quiz, scouring academic journals and intensely intellectual articles for my undergrad degree, or reading and re-reading my uselessly long thesis, the joy of sitting back and cracking open a new read lost some of its comfort and charm. Why sit down after a long day of reading, to well,….read?
I was able to ease back into reading by finding captivating audiobooks, joining a book club, and reframing reading as relaxing self-care not ‘work’. I am now an eager reader and make sure to carve out at least 10-15 minutes each night to read before bed (although I also have been known to plow through an entire audiobook in a weekend while cooking/cleaning or stay up way past my desired bedtime with drooping eyes, determined to make it to the end of a thriller because am I really going to just go to bed without finding out who the murderer is??)
So here’s to books in all their forms. Be it fiction, short stories, or memoirs; from shiny hardcovers to soft airport paperbacks. Thanks for teaching us, sweeping us into the unknown, and challenging the limits of imagination.
—Sophie
