Read and let read

Is working in a secondhand bookshop the cure for book snobbery?

I have a little something in common with the brilliant British author, Penelope Fitzgerald. It’s a cheering thought on a dull day, even though the thing we share is, not, alas, astounding literary talent. What we share is a thrilling, formative, early childhood experience, and perhaps you share it, too. She describes it like this:

“I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for. They obliged me completely and all at once, in whole sentences, so that I opened a book in my lair under the dining-room table and read aloud, without hesitation: “My hoop can only run by my side, and I often wish it was a dog and could bark.” I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much.”

Though my memory is not as good, I know my experience was similar. I was in the backseat of our family car, driving along a strip of road we had been down hundreds of times, and I started reading the store and restaurant signs out loud. And my mom turned around in the front seat, astonished and delighted. She had been reading to me daily, but hadn’t trying to teach me in any formal way, because I was still very small. She had no idea I had already started to figure it out.

I don’t remember the first book I read, but I do remember the sensation of words revealing their meaning to me, all at once, and of suddenly realizing that I could read anything—that there were words everywhere, in places I hadn’t really noticed, like bottles and buildings and clothes. And more than anything, I remember the feeling of being praised, sincerely praised, for something I could do, rather than how I looked or behaved.

Fitzgerald also said that the moment you learn to read is one of very few moments in life in which you are suddenly “approved of by everyone.” By that I’m sure she meant, by every adult. Because of course early readers earn nothing but scorn, perhaps mixed with envy, from their peers. As Bonnie Garmus explains in the opening chapter of Lessons in Chemistry, early readers are unlike musical child prodigies in that these children “are only good at something others will eventually be good at, too. So being first isn’t special—it’s just annoying.”

The A B C Class. Date: [ca. 1870–1900]. I’m second from the right. Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

It seems obvious now, but it was only recently that I realized that how much this powerful combination—of adult approval and peer disdain—so directly shaped my taste in books.

The moment my teachers and other adults stopped being so delighted and impressed to discover that I could read picture books, which was probably sometime after kindergarten, I began reaching for books without pictures. And the moment ‘chapter books’ stopped impressing people, I went after the books on my mother’s bookshelf, my only real access point for ‘grown-up’ books. By high school, I was carting all the heftiest Russian classics around, along with my best attempt at a long-suffering sophistication, a weary contempt for all the things that my fellow teenage suburbanites liked (a.k.a. the stuff I read voraciously, in the privacy of my bedroom, like Sweet Valley High).

And when reading the longest, most difficult, and most critically-acclaimed books got a sufficiently gratifying reaction, from my teachers if no one else, I went off and got a degree in English Lit…followed by a job at a little lit mag on campus, working directly with some of the teachers and professors who had praised me for how well I read and wrote about books. Sigh.

I was an ardent book snob well into my thirties, quietly convinced that the literary novels I loved were objectively better than the mass-market, commercially successful titles dominating the store shelves. I didn’t read Twilight, or Harry Potter, or anything Oprah boosted, because I was just, you know, too discerning to go in for anything super popular.

Somewhere along the line of my upbringing and education, I had convinced myself that a book could be exquisitely well-written or wildly popular, but not both. And surely, of the two, good writing had to be more important, because if it wasn’t important then I had basically devoted a huge chunk of my life to something unimportant, and that was just too existentially threatening to even contemplate.

But contemplate it I eventually did. One day, one of those shapeless, endless days of sheltering in place, the books on my shelf finally gave in and admitted what they were for.

Reading.

They were for reading. Not for showing off, or hiding behind, or for propping up a fragile sense of self-worth or identity.

People do so many things with books besides read them—analyze them, review them, compare them, rank them, rate them, collect them, fight over them, display them in their homes and on their socials. They, like me, invest their books with all kinds of power and significance, and sometimes make reading them their ‘whole personality,’ as my now thirteen-year-old would say.

Until that surreal moment of staring vacantly at the bookshelf in my living room, it didn’t really occur to me that all of the book-related activity and anxiety and angst I had been taking for granted was entirely optional. I could shrug all that off, and just…read? As in use the books for their intended purpose, and nothing more? It was a long overdue realization, a real ‘this is water’ moment in my reading life.

Ever since that day, I’ve felt as though I learned to read twice—by myself at age four, and for myself at age forty. I opened my mind to a wider array of genres, including some of the bestsellers I had once disdained. And while I can’t really say my taste changed—I still genuinely prefer a more literary tone and style—I no longer believe it’s better. Just different.

These days, I’m much less defensive about what I like, and less judgemental about what others’ taste in books, even if it’s the total opposite of my own.

If I had got this bookstore gig in my twenties or thirties, I know I would have silently judged the elderly ladies who come in to buy Harlequins by the bagful (3 for $3.75!) as frivolous, frittering away their final reading years. I would have felt like an intellectual weakling while ringing up Being and Time, and morally superior to the teens buying Coles Notes (which has never happened, actually, even though we have a boxful. I suspect the kids are using AI to write their papers instead).

At forty-four, I’m happy to say my most frequent, knee-jerk reaction to our customers and their books is no longer judgment or comparison, but curiosity. What draws these readers to their chosen books? ‘Read and let read’ is becoming my default setting. And yet…

Just last week, I sneered at our collection of diet books. Should we even be selling these? I asked G. Well, she said, I agree that 99% of this stuff is probably total bullshit. Maybe we can whittle this section down somewhat. But people do come in looking for these books, so we should have them in stock. We have to try and keep our own opinions out of it when we are deciding what to sell.

And she’s right, of course. Though independent bookstore owners can curate their collections according to their own preferences and values, catering specifically to a set of readers with whom they are in alignment (think Christian bookstores, queer bookstores, etc) used bookstore owners have to approach the task more like librarians or cultural anthropologists. We have as much in common with the library as we do with other bookstores, in the sense that we serve the general population, not a particular subset.

Dropping your personal taste in things like genre and style at the door is just the first step, which I now see is relatively easy. You also have to take one further step, to go beyond stocking books you don’t love, books you can appreciate but do not wish to read, to stocking books you actively, vehemently dislike or disagree with.

You have to try to look at the books as artefacts, as products of a particular time and place as much as they are products of one individual’s mind, while also remembering that, even if you are acting as a kind of cultural historian, preserving these artefacts, you are also a product of a particular time and place—just as vulnerable, and fallible, as any other reader in the store.

You have to stock diet books, basically, even though they are fat-phobic bullshit. You have to resist the impulse to stick little notes inside each one that say things like: forget about burning calories - burn this book! Because it’s not your job to tell people what you think they should read, or what to think about what they read—it’s just your job to sell people the books they want to read.

So it seems I still have some work to do.

But at least I’m in the right place to do it.