Bookstores offer a sacred space to find comfort
Last month I paid a visit to Brazos Bookstore, the venerable independent shop on Bissonnet Street. It’s not a huge store, but it has character. It has those staff-written review/recommendation cards placed beneath personal favorites.
In another time, this would have been just another Saturday afternoon for me. But today this was something more. Once a fanatical patron of independent bookstores, I hadn’t stepped foot in one for more than three years. I moved to Houston amid some personal tragedy, which was soon compounded by COVID-19 and what became a marathon quarantine. I’ve chronicled my grief, including reflections on my Zoom support group, taking a clinical hallucinogen, seeing a mystic and working the night shift at the sober house where I used to live. I didn’t expect buying books to be another part of the story.
I was once mocked for the sheer acreage of books in my apartment. I had hundreds of volumes, spilling off of 7-foot shelves, piling up on coffee tables, nesting next to my bed. These are all now in a Dallas storage facility, along with the rest of my old life. I miss my books, but my communal living situations of late allow for limited space (although, as someone who writes about books for several publications, I still have plenty of ARCs, or advance reader copies, lying around. My roommate hasn’t complained. Yet.)
In that old life, I frequently moderated author events, often for free. But my bibliophilic tendencies went beyond professional obligation, or regional confines. When I traveled the country with my late girlfriend, Kate (who worked for the Dallas Public Library), I always made sure to hit the local bookstore. I kept a tally in my head: Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. City Lights in San Francisco. BookPeople in Austin. Kramers in D.C. And on and on. When I shopped at these stores, part of me considered it tithing. When Interabang Books opened in my former home
town of Dallas, I felt a surge of civic pride. Now we had our own new indie bookstore.
The effect of the pandemic on bookstores has been complicated.
“Numerous stores closed, especially those that had only recently opened prior to the start of the pandemic and didn’t yet have established customer bases,” said Ed Nawotka, a Houston resident who covers the publishing industry for Publishers Weekly. “But many new stores opened, too, often in smaller cities, buoyed by the short-term crash in retail rents.”
Houston had losses — including River Oaks Bookstore, which sold largely to an aging population that doesn’t order online much — and gains, including Kindred Stories, which specializes in Black authors. Brazos, like many stores across the country, became a mail-order-only operation during the pandemic.
In short, times have changed, and so have I, at least for now. At the start of 2019, a year before COVID-19, I was laid off from my job and received the news that Kate had a terminal brain disease. (She died in 2020, at the age of 40.) I fell apart, and bounced around some. I sought medical attention out of state; that’s when everything ended up in storage.
When, during the pandemic, I got my first Kindle, I felt like a cheating lover. I used to take a never-will-I-ever approach to e-readers. I usually carried four or five books in my tote bag. It was like they were food, and I was afraid of starving. So I was dubious about the Kindle. At first, I had difficulty adjusting. But the Paperwhite is pretty easy on the eyes. Highlighting and marginal notes are simple. And I have to admit, there’s something empowering about carrying a library in my back pocket. At my old newspaper job I used to love tearing open the packages containing advance reading copies to see what was coming. Now I browse NetGalley and Edelweiss, websites that make downloading ARCs fun and easy. My reading habits have changed. So have my shopping habits.
And yet. Stalking the aisles of Brazos brought me back to a better time of sharing physical space with new books. (Houston has some good used book stores as well, including Kaboom Books and Becker’s Books.) I felt that old impulse to tithe. Buying books through Amazon is often cheaper and more convenient, but when you buy from an independent bookstore you enter a kind of sacred space, and the premium you pay is a little offering to keep it from shuttering. Even if you don’t go to a church of books regularly, it can be comforting to know the building is there when you need it.
I bought two novels: “The Candy House,” by Jennifer Egan (tangentially related to one of my Egan favorites, “A Visit from the Goon Squad”); and “Zorrie,” by Laird Hunt. I’m not sure where I’ll put them, but that should figure itself out. It’s only two books.
When I think about it, there’s something faceless about an e-reader. When you sit in a café, reading a physical book, it’s an invitation to conversation. “That looks good. What’s it about? I’ve heard good things.” Of course, such exchanges with strangers are also something we lost during the pandemic, something we’re having to reteach ourselves to remember. Kind of like the pleasure of going to a bookstore on a Saturday afternoon.
I’m not just mourning my books. I’m mourning the existence that went with them. I’m mourning the love of my life. I’m mourning the spacious flat I shared with her in Dallas. I’m mourning the book festivals she used to produce, going above and beyond the duties of her library job. I’m mourning a better, simpler time.
Once my life makes another course correction, and I can rescue my books (and shelves) from storage, I suspect I’ll appreciate them more than ever. They’re a part of my identity that I’ve probably missed more than I even realize. I can keep the Kindle. It’s a handy convenience, especially when you don’t have room for a library. On the downside, a steady diet of e-books precludes the need for bookstores, and that’s a bad thing. I’ve come to realize that nothing can replace a new book, or the experience of shopping for one.
Don’t forget to tithe.