Do you love bookstores? I do! I get nostalgic for the wonderful bookstores from ages past. I used to love to take my little guys to them. We'd go to the children's section, where they could play while I browsed through the titles and all the amazing artwork provided by those talented illustrators.
I still love children's books, but don't have a good excuse to buy them.
In the past decade, bookstores have changed. You walk in, and instantly you are smacked in the face with politics, or some agenda, or a social cause. Whatever the zeitgeist of the day is. You cannot escape it. Everything feels divisive and combative and angry.
It makes me so sad. Bookstores used to be my happy place.
I found the most amazing bookstore last month!
Naughty Dog Books in Nashville, Indiana was so lovely!
When I walked in, I was greeted with tables of books...not agendas. There was a wall of beautifully illustrated classics. There was an entire shelf devoted to the newest Tolkien editions. They had the coolest "vault" that contained their mysteries.
It was the kind of place that had me exploring...room after room, genre after genre.
They had a table with puzzles for patrons to work on, next to a fireplace with cozy chairs. Give me a coffee, and I could curl up there all day!
I'm going to make a real effort to tackle my reading list this summer. My guest room has a bedside table that looks like this:
It's a hodgepodge of titles from the TBR list. I've picked these up from Goodwill, resale shops, and the local Friends room at the library. Fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, historical, contemporary. A little bit of everything.
I just finished a book by Lisa Wingate called Tending Roses. Very sweet story. And now I have a Kristin Hannah book called Home Again that I borrowed from Mom. I have a few requests in at my local library (because obviously I do not have enough books at home. ha!). The newest Erik Larson book. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. Long waiting lists for both.
Do you have a favorite bookstore near you? When I visit our family in Indiana, we always pop in to Half Price Books. They don't have any locations near me. Such a bummer.
What's on your summer reading list?
EDITED: Gave up on the Kristin Hannah book about 30 pages in. It felt like a waste of time. I've now moved on to The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict. So far so good! Life's too short for bad books. LOL
I too have a pile plus the waiting several months for ebooks at our library. I've read several Ann Patchett books lately and enjoyed the short story collection These Precious Days. I can take or leave K. Hannah's books although am waiting another 10 weeks for The Women. I finished G. Brooks' Horse, a novel about a real racing horse from the Civil War era which I highly recommend. My husband, a birder, just finished Amy Tan's book that you're waiting for. He really liked it but as it's a daily journal with her drawings he would read it a chapter or two at a time and go on to another book. Vikki Hein
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