Bokelskere.no

Brave.
Zoe has no idea what that looks like.
She knows she ought to call Will’s parents, but instead, she sits on the floor and starts to turn the pages of Anne of Green Gables.

And there are books. Readers know that, when their heart hurts with loss or absence, then a book that they have read before can lessen the ache. Readers, faced with a new experience, find a book to help them navigate: a travel guide to a new city, say, but also a novel set there.
Readers give books to other readers, telling them, this will make you laugh, or, read this, please, so we can talk about it. Here you are, readers say, I don't know why but this made me think of you.
But what about when the pain is too generalised, or too acute, or too strange for us to self-diagnose? What happens when the new pain cannot be cured with the old medicine? Or when the problem seems too trivial to mention – we are not dying, we are not even coughing, we have no right to claim we are suffering – or too great to fix?
What if reading itself feels like a chore, or someone who has always found solace in books suddenly cannot find the energy or the empathy to so much as pick up a favourite paperback?
That's when a bookseller can help you.

So here is a contradiction for you: you can love books, and you can also decide not to finish a book.
Yes you can.
Books don't judge you.
Books can contain, and invoke, every feeling that there is. Books can bring you to rage or tears or happiness or all all three, in quick succession. Books can have such a profound effect on your emotions that they can change the course of your life. How many lawyers have been made by To Kill a Mockingbird, how many vets by the James Herriot books, how many teachers by Roald Dahl's Matilda?
This is how books work. They take what's in them, and what's in you, and the interface, more often than not, leads to picking up that book every chance you get. Sometimes the power is so great that you're up all night; sometimes you have to (and yes, I do mean have to) cancel a coffee date so you can get to the end.
And sometimes, there's a missing part of the chemistry. Or something in the book that just doesn't work for you. Or maybe the supposed romantic hero has the same name as the ex you will never quite recover from. It could be that the setting doesn't appeal or there's something in the way the characters relate to each other that doesn't fit into the receptor that you need it to fit into.
Sometimes, you do not care enough to want to read on.
This is something that books understand. That writers understand. That other readers understand. It's a fact of life. All foodies do not love bananas.
So if you haven't understood this yourself yet... take a moment. Take a breath. The next time you are fifty pages into something and rather than pick it up, you're scrolling through your phone... you can stop reading that particular story. You can donate or pass on that book, and you can start something else.
Reading should be a pleasure and a joy, an education and a promise, a release and an escape. The books you choose for yourself should never, ever feel like a punishment or a chore.

I’m always so ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I’ve never read you wouldn’t believe it. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I’m reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

She sets her alarm for six every morning and reads in bed till seven; she said if she hadn’t formed that habit, she’d never find time to read anything. As it is, it seems to me she’s read everything.

Hun vasset utover til det plutselig ble dypt og hun kjente gyset av slimete sjøgress mot lårene. Da vannet nådde henne til brystkassen, trakk hun pusten, la seg på rygg og svømte utover. Nå, sa hun til seg selv, i dette øyeblikket, var hun akkurat det hun skulle være i livet. Hun så på horisonten og tok seg i å sende en takk til noe hun egentlig ikke trodde på.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.
Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.
And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.

Change wasn’t always a bad thing, like my aunt had convinced herself to believe. It wasn’t always a good thing, either. It could be neutral—it could be okay.
Things changed, people changed.
I changed, too. I was allowed to. I wanted to. I was.

And, in turn, that monster didn’t let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her all in the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and—
If, if, if.
There is no easy way to talk about suicide.
Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

It still smelled the same as I remembered. Of old books and weathered leather and crinkly paperbacks with broken spines, romances and adventures and fantasies and travel guides, paperweights to picture books. When she wasn’t traveling, my aunt read. She pored over stories, drowned herself in words. In the summers between our adventures, she’d build a pillow fort and crawl underneath it, lit with fairy lights and lavender-scented candles in mason jars, and we’d read together. Sometimes I spent entire weekends adventuring with Eloise or solving mysteries with Harriet.
There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.

I didn’t want to write books myself, but I loved the idea of some long-dead or long-forgotten travel guide waxing about cathedrals of old and shrines of forgotten gods. I loved how a book, a story, a set of words in a sentence organized in the exact right order, made you miss places you’ve never visited, and people you’ve never met

She couldn’t resist picking up an Austen. It was a copy of Pride and Prejudice with a floral cover she had never seen before. She held it lovingly. There was something about seeing an old friend in a place where she had thought she knew no one. It sent a little happy ringing through her body.

This was clearly a wonderful, well-loved bookstore. Bookshop She had to get it in her mind that it was a bookshop. Before her were the books. On display tables, squeezed into bookcases along the wall, and stacked in a sturdy pile in the corner. It was a place that she would love visiting, if she lived here.

She looked around and was transfixed by the bookish room. The place wasn’t big enough for aisles. Instead, solid wooden bookshelves lined all the walls of the bookstore and cheerful overhead lights lit the back of the store. Resting her hands on the table in front of her, she breathed in deeply. Like she anticipated, the room did smell deliciously rich with the scent of paper, which delighted her.

The sun shone through the window and painted a stripe of sunlight onto the armchair just inside. She could almost smell the special scent of fresh new books and anticipate the feeling of the smooth covers in her hands.

Lucy wandered back into the bookshop. She longed to grab a book from the shelves, settle into the armchair, and just read the day away.

While she waited for Sam, her eyes rested on the satisfying order of the books stacked on the shelves. In each book was a possibility of joy: a magical place to visit, a hero or heroine to meet, or a new friend to make. With grief, books allowed a chance to revisit a story you once shared with the person you had lost.