I did buy my daughter a Princeton sweatshirt, which she was wearing several months later while eating lunch in a remote village in Peru. A woman approached us and said she had just moved to Princeton and asked if we lived there. I explained that I only visited, and we immediately launched into a conversation about my amazement at the absence of bookstores. It was one of her disappointments in moving, she said. Her previous town had a wonderful bookstore, but there was nothing in Princeton.

But the Princeton trip wasn’t a total book failure. I visited the college bookstore, and while every end cap had a sign for “staff recommendations,” most were empty, and the selection was sparse. I talked with the lone employee who recommended Sen. Kerry’s latest book, but since I was still irritated with him from the 2004 election, I told the clerk I wasn’t interested. Then, with a shrug, he pointed out the new book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, called The Idea That Is America. The book discusses whether or not our founding principles match our foreign policy actions: it is an inoffensive, non-ideological, thoughtful book. A few months later I invited several people, both conservatives and liberals, to meet to discuss it, and we were able to talk about various issues without spewing, sputtering or raising our voices. We should require all our representatives to read it and behave similarly.

I have to tread carefully here.  As a book writer, I don’t want to alienate anyone who’s willing to sell my books.  And I kind of love Amazon: I visit their site several times a day, although not necessarily to buy books.  It’s a great reference source for a writer: I type potential titles into Amazon’s search engine and can find out instantly if someone’s already used the title and, if so, when and how successfully.  I can also use keywords to find out if a similar book already exists.  I’ve learned that if you can’t find it on Amazon’s impressive database, you don’t have to worry.

I buy kids’ toys on Amazon and a lot of birthday gifts for my husband (mostly tools and electronic equipment).  They gave us a trial Prime membership (that’s when you don’t have to pay shipping costs on certain items) and we ended up extending that into a paying Prime membership.  Not paying extra for shipping each time means I can buy almost anything for cheaper than I can get it around here–and without having to get in my car and drive (I hate driving).

So Amazon is many amazing things.  But what it isn’t is a little local, independent bookstore.  And I love bookstores like that.  If I — if WE — buy all our books from Amazon, because it’s easy, it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s the American way, then we run the very real risk of losing our independent bookstores forever. 

Amazon isn’t a place you can visit.  You can’t run in there to grab a desperation birthday present for your eight-year-old’s friend on the way to his party.  You can’t escape from your visiting in-laws by ducking in there for an hour or so.  You can’t make friends with the owner or her employees and get to know which ones share your taste in books.  You can’t go to booksignings where you get to meet authors face to face and finally get to ask them why they made that awful choice of killing off your favorite character.  You can’t dance your fingers over a row of bookspines and suddenly decide to tug one toward you.  You can’t pull your kid on your lap and discover a book together there and later monitor his maturing reading ability by which section of the store he’s drawn to.  And these aren’t things we should give up.

We need our local bookstores and the only way we’re going to keep them around is by buying books from them.  It may require a little more effort than clicking a mouse button and it may even cost a little more than it would online.  But the loss of letting them fade out is too huge to ignore.   Let’s not let that happen.   Buying books is what we like to do — let’s make sure we do it from the people who’ll benefit the most from our patronage.  Go out and buy a book at a local independent bookstore today. 

Buy one for me, too.  I’ll put it on the pile

When I first went three years ago and asked the owner for a recommendation, we discovered we had similar tastes, everything she liked I had read. That made for a terrific conversation, and I spent an enjoyable half hour talking about books with her; but this is in part a community experience and in part a quest. Finally, she found The Brothers K by David James Duncan, a New York Times Notable book from 1992. As a Dostoevsky fan, I was immediately intrigued. This find feels extra special because people rarely talk about a great book they read ten or twenty years ago, to the extent they talk about books, it’s mostly classics or current fiction. Sometimes I’ll ask a clerk is there an older book you loved, not a classic, but something terrific you haven’t thought about in awhile and come up with a great read.

When we visited the store last spring, there was a tall bookshelf with staff recommendations, we bought five of them. The owner mentioned that she doubted the store would continue and she was right, it no longer exists as a storefront. After 35 years in Bend, The Book Barn is now a virtual store located at bendbooks.com. Their specialties throughout the years, local history, literary fiction, young adult, local authors, can be purchased online (with limited free shipping). Staff picks appear on the opening page and they send out a monthly newsletter with book recommendations and events held locally. I’ll feel the loss next year when I’m in Bend, but I’ll drown my sorrows in an extra piece of pine nut tart while reading their newsletter.

The Book Barn
541.389.4589

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

Village Books in the Pacific Palisades isn’t exactly huge.  In fact, their slogan is “Large enough to serve you, small enough to know you.”  And they do–know me, that is.  And my kids.  It’s the kind of store where a kid can march up to someone who works there and say, “Can you help me find a book I’d like?” and they’re happy to wander over to the (surprisingly well-stocked given the limited space) children’s section and spend time pulling out titles and discussing them.

Village Books has an entire wall devoted to local book clubs, which makes for fine browsing in and of itself–I’m always looking through them, thinking, “Oh, I want to read that one,” even though I don’t actually belong to a single adult book club myself.  They have a cozy picture book nook, about the size of a closet, with a place to sit and shelves of children’s books circling all three walls so a small child can make himself comfortable as he plucks one book after another from the shelves to see if it strikes his fancy.  (One of my favorite photos is of my daughter reading out loud to her little brother who sits on her lap in that very nook.)  No one ever tells the kids they “can’t read without buying.”  ( Let’s hope parents are equally respectful and remind their kids to treat the books gently and then buy the ones that the kids love.)

There’s usually a conversation or two going on in the aisles or by the cash register, as the people who work there chat with their customers about options for gifts, the best choice from a reading list, their own favorite recent book and so on.  You can certainly ask anyone for a recommendation, but you don’t need to be cause the staff fills out little cards for their favorite books and sticks them in the stack so you can see who likes what and why.

Buying a book earns you some credit back–with enough purchases, you can eventually buy a book for free (a system my kids discovered and abused by asking if we had credit and using it for their own purchases).   They’ll order any book you want and have it there quickly.  It is a little store with big service.  And it’s pretty much in my own backyard.  Long may it live.

Village Books
1049 Swarthmore Avenue
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
Hours: Monday-Friday: 10am-8pm and Saturday-Sunday: 10am-6pm

These websites only provide lists of stores. We want to give you a sense of the experience of visiting these stores and what is popular where they are located. Independent bookstores are more than cash registers, they nourish thought and discussion, but many are having a hard time surviving. We’re highlighting these stores to encourage people to visit them in person or on the web.

We’d love to hear about your favorite bookstore. Suggest a store to visit and tell us why you love it. I first heard about Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon from other readers. It’s mentioned frequently, and someday I’ll be in Portland for more than a layover and can visit.

Of course, I’ve discovered wonderful stores by accident; I need a bumper stick on my car that says “I stop for all independent bookstores.”

My life found direction because of a bookstore: I liked old-fashioned romances and, having read every Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte novel, one day shrugged and picked up a Barbara Cartland from a display.  I figured with her hundreds of titles, I’d be set for years.  My sister Alice saw what I was holding and tsk-tsked.  She took the book away, set it down, handed me Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.  “This is better,” she said.  After that, I read every Virginia Woolf I could get my hands, an activity which made me even weirder, nerdier, dreamier.   

It also had a lot to do with why I wanted to become a writer.   I spent years imitating Woolf’s style in self-conscious, overwritten “stream of consciousness” pieces.  I couldn’t imagine a greater thrill than one day seeing a book with my name on it in “real” bookstores.

Decades later, I got to experience that very thing — and it made me absolutely miserable. Once I was published,  I’d walk into a huge chain bookstore and suddenly be aware of how many millions of other books were on the shelves and how I was competing with each and every one of them for readers’ money and reviewers’ good opinions.  Books I didn’t like were on the bestseller list whereas I’d have to search for mine in some dark corner of the upstairs fiction section — and often didn’t even find a copy there.   It stopped being fun to go to bookstores.

Problem was, I still liked to read.  This new phobia wasn’t going to get me something to put on my night table.  But stepping foot inside an enormous multi-level chain bookstore made me sick with envy and despair. 

I was saved by independent bookstores.  I had always loved them, but chain stores had become ubiquitous and I forgot sometimes to make the effort to seek out the smaller stores.  I started to and discovered that instead of overwhelming you with sheer numbers of indiscriminate books, smaller bookstores had handpicked treasures.  I could walk into one and think, “Wow, I want to read every one of these books,” and not, “There are too many books in the world already — why am I even bothering to add to the list?”

Best of all, if a small indy carried my book, I was delighted (“they like me!”) but if they didn’t, well, you can’t expect a small, independent bookstore to carry everything, right?  No big deal.  I was disappointed but not devastated.

I was already aware that we have to fight to keep independent bookstores alive, that we shouldn’t let the huge soulless chains win.  What I found out was that small, independent bookstores were more than just an alternative to something big and commercial, that they were ultimately the key to my “recovery,” that in them I would rediscover the joys of browsing and buying books.

She wondered what type of reading I enjoyed. I paused; normally I’m not a beach reader. I love a challenging book. But on that day a book without pictures would have been a stretch. I told her my usual choice but that I felt defeated by everything. She brought over No Angel by Penny Vincenzi, a family saga of war, love, affairs and heartbreak; within the first thirty pages I became lost in another world, on vacation from life. The second book was Old Filth by Jane Gardam, a literary book with a unique character personifying the bygone British Empire. Months later, in a California museum I saw a woman carrying Old Filth, the only time I’ve since seen it, and I wanted to stop her and talk to her about it, but then realized that the book feels especially communal to me only because of my personal experience at the Corner Bookstore.

After flying home from New York and unpacking my books, I decided that finding independent bookstores wherever I travel and buying a recommendation would be my new collection. The beauty of these stores is that the employees read a lot and are opinionated about books. The stores often reflect their community, what might be popular in one place frequently is different from what is selling in my hometown. Walking into a store as a tourist, exploring the stock and then leaving after a substantive conversation with a local gives me a sense of connection to the area, much more intimate than chatting up the waitress at the local diner.

The Corner Bookstore
1313 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10128
212.831.3554