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If there’s one thing I love more than books and bookshops it’s reading books about books and bookshops. If you’re also a little obsessed with finding a good page-turner then I wanted to list some of the best books for book lovers to enjoy.
The Best Books for Book Lovers
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye.
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan
In Bookworm, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way.
The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell
From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine, The Bookshop Book examines the history of books, talks to authors about their favourite places, and looks at over two hundred weirdly wonderful bookshops across six continents (sadly, we’ve yet to build a bookshop down in the South Pole).
Bookshops by Jorge Carrión
Why do bookshops matter? How do they filter our ideas and literature? In this inventive and highly entertaining extended essay, Jorge Carrion takes his reader on a journey around the world, via its bookshops. His travels take him to Shakespeare & Co in Paris, Wells in Winchester, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier, the Strand Book Store in New York and provoke encounters with thinkers, poets, dreamers, revolutionaries and readers.
An Accidental Bookseller: A Personal Memoir of Foyles by
A very personal memoir of the author’s relationship with the iconic and much loved bookshop Foyles of Charing Cross Road in London. From fond childhood memories of his eccentric and brilliant grandfather William Foyle, ‘the Barnum of Bookselling’ and his aunt, the beautiful, charming, witty, self centred and at times utterly ruthless Christina Foyle, to the 21st century rejuvenation of a dying family business, An Accidental Bookseller will appeal to all who have their own memories of Foyles.
Reading Allowed: True Stories and Curious Incidents from a Provincial Library by Chris Paling
When novelist Chris Paling went for a job at his local library, he anticipated a quiet life. It took two hours between the stacks to discover that the reality was somewhat different. Chris found that at times the library is an extension of A&E; at others a hostel for the homeless; a psychiatric ward; a crime scene; a study hall; a place of safety; a boxing ring; a confessional booth; a theatre space; a venue for knitting and book groups; an information hub for people trying to find a long-lost relative; and a job. On most days the library is all of these.
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
In a small East Anglian town, Florence Green decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop. Hardborough becomes a battleground. Florence has tried to change the way things have always been done, and as a result, she has to take on not only the people who have made themselves important, but natural and even supernatural forces too. Her fate will strike a chord with anyone who knows that life has treated them with less than justice.
The Librarian by Salley Vickers
In 1958, Sylvia Blackwell, fresh from one of the new post-war Library Schools, takes up a job as children’s librarian in a run down library in the market town of East Mole. Her mission is to fire the enthusiasm of the children of East Mole for reading. But her love affair with the local married GP, and her befriending of his precious daughter, her neighbour’s son and her landlady’s neglected grandchild, ignite the prejudices of the town, threatening her job and the very existence of the library with dramatic consequences for them all.
A Delayed Life: The true story of the Librarian of Auschwitz by Dita Kraus
Born in Prague to a Jewish family in 1929, Dita Kraus has lived through the most turbulent decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Here, Dita writes with startling clarity on the horrors and joys of a life delayed by the Holocaust. From her earliest memories and childhood friendships in Prague before the war, to the Nazi-occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at TerezÃn, to the unimaginable fear and bravery of her imprisonment in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and life after liberation.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in the vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 – and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery.
Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Ernest Hemingway
This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.
On Writers and Writing by Margaret Atwood
What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and the development of her writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain – or excuse! – their activities, looking at what costumes they have seen fit to assume, what roles they have chosen to play.
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’ Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë’s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’s deceptively simple narrative techniques.
What books do you recommend?
Let me know in the comments.
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