My favorite book in the last year is The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra. It is a heart piercing book about two couples living under the Taliban in Kabul. In one chapter a husband begs his wife to go for a walk with him and she finally agrees, only to have a solider abuse her and physically force her husband to attend the mosque, leaving her to stand in the heat boiling under a burka. The helplessness of both of them to protect each other in the face of such random brutality haunts me. With all the hype over Hosseni’s A Thousand Splendid Suns this jewel was never mentioned as a companion read, but I found it at The Bookseller in Grass Valley, CA.
When I walked into The Bookseller life was beautiful once again. I was on a car trip with a girlfriend and four kids on a hot afternoon. Grass Valley is a quaint village in the Sierra Nevada foothills with one commercial main street. As the horde of us window shopped, we left the blazing sun for the soothing cool of the bookstore. My attitude perked up as soon as I noticed the clerks laughing at the front desk; I caught their playful attitude. The Bookseller is one store front with an entire basement, the Children’s Cellar, dedicated to children’s books. The walls are lined with bookshelves, but the free standing rows of shelves down the middle of the store contain the fiction. A clerk and I wandered from one bookshelf to another until she saw The Swallows of Kabul and remembered how many readers loved it.
When we walked up to the cash register, the employees were talking about the traffic jam on the highway. Since I’m from LA, I asked them what rush hour meant to a town of 12,000, does that mean you aren’t the first car at the stoplight or that you can’t get through the intersection in the period of one stoplight? They were bewildered, traffic means you can’t go 65 MPH on the highway – in LA traveling at 65 MPH is not an expectation, it’s a gift.
The Bookseller
107 Mill Street
Grass Valley, CA 95945
530-272-2131
Specialties: Terrific children’s book section, literary fiction
Tags: California, California bookstore, Grass Valley, Grass Valley bookstore
Reply
Recent Articles
-
Wonderful Video of What Happens in a Bookstore at Night
I’ve been in a bit of a posting slump, but I’m working my way out and what better way to start the new year than with this lovely stop action video, “The Joy of Books,” about what happens in Type bookstore at night. I can’t wait to visit Toronto just to stop by Type Books to [...]
-
Scrambling For A Last Minute Gift? Head To Your Local Bookstore!
Farhad Manjoo ignited the latest round of ‘will the local bookstore survive’ with his “Don’t Support Your Local Bookstore” tirade on Slate. (I couldn’t fail to notice that while Salon promotes a campaign to support local bookstores, Slate is bashing them.) Numerous responses Manjoo were published, twitter feeds with special hashtags popped up, and even [...]
-
57th Street Books – Chicago, IL
57th Street, the actual street, is perfect for the meandering bookworm. We started with lunch at the graffiti clad Medici Restaurant. Famous for its burgers and scribbled upon walls and furnishings, we filled the time waiting for our food by adding our own “tags” to the table top. More importantly, within blocks there are three [...]
-
Essay Challenge Recap
I coming in just under the wire this year, this challenge must be completed today!! The Essay Challenge over at Books and Movies is the only one I joined this year, even so, I didn’t keep up with it the way I have the past two years. Not that I haven’t read essays all year [...]
-
Salon says “Support Your Local Bookstore!”
In the latest pitch to keep bookstores alive and well, or at least breathing, Salon.com gave credit to indies for finding and promoting the latest excellent book most of us don’t know: An independent bookstore brings a lot to a city or a town: a showroom for the latest literary releases, an auditorium where authors [...]
-
Small Business Saturday – Shop at Local Businesses on November 26th!
Actually shop at them as much as possible, they are the engine that drives your local economy. But, let’s give the little guys a leg up in the middle of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Drop by a local business, chat with a real person, and contribute to your neighborhood economy by purchasing a Christmas [...]
-
Which authors would you invite to Thanksgiving dinner?
Taking a riff from NPR’s story last week about which deceased composers Miles Hoffman would invite to Thanksgiving dinner, I pondered the same question for authors and asked quite a few friends. Here are the guidelines: which dead authors would you invite to Thanksgiving dinner? Which author would you invite to give a reading Thanksgiving [...]
-
Breaking Dawn – Part 1 Opens Today
One of the pleasures of having a teenage daughter is the opportunity to share silly, girlly experiences. While I understand all of the criticism about the Twilght series, and agree with some, as I’ve written before, I’ve enjoyed the ride. Even more, I’m grateful for the opportunity to share the sheer reading fun with my daughter. [...]
-
Abbey Books & Gifts – Valyermo, CA
I spent just over 24 hours last week at St. Andrews Abbey. I’m not Catholic, but I enjoy joining the monks in the Daily Office. For those of you new to that term (and that would’ve been me a couple of years ago), it’s the practice of pausing at several set times through out the [...]
-
Alexander Book Co. – San Francisco, CA
Alexander Book Co. is a traditional independent bookstore tucked around a corner in downtown San Francisco. Wedged between office towers and the Academy of Arts complex, it’s a cozy respite from steel, glass, and marble. The store even smells like good books waiting to be discovered. The first time I tried to visit the store, [...]
No comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://www.bookstorepeople.com/2008/07/best-read-in-the-last-year/trackback/