Independent Bookstore Day

Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, so Ted and I decided to go to Berkeley and see what we might find there. The last time we went book shopping, we went to two bookstores, East Bay Booksellers and Pegasus Books. This time we went to Mrs. Dalloway’s. I started out taking pictures of books that I want to read but will probably listen via my Libby App, and then eventually succumbed to temptation and bought some books. First up, the books I will listen to via Libby.

Real Americans ~ Rachel Khong

Ted saw this one and said it sounded like a book I would enjoy, and I feel like some of you have mentioned it. From the bookstore website:

“Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn’t be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can’t shake the sense she’s hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.”

Long Island ~ Colm Tóibín

I remember watching the film version of Brooklyn, but I’m pretty sure that is as close as I’ve gotten to this author. It looks like this book is a sequel, so I think I’ll listen to Brooklyn first, then Long Island.

”Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at work an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting and suspenseful.”

Theft ~ Abdularazak Gurnah

I don’t know anything about this author, but I liked the sound of Theft.

”At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands”

Help Wanted ~ Adele Waldman

“Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn’t schedule them for enough hours—most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement—including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path—band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.”

Expiration Dates ~ Rebecca Serle

I’ve read two books by this author before, In Five Years and One Italian Summer. I liked both of them, so thought this would be a fun book to listen to as well.

”Daphne Bell believes the universe has a plan for her. Every time she meets a new man, she receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it—the exact amount of time they will be together. The papers told her she’d spend three days with Martin in Paris; five weeks with Noah in San Francisco; and three months with Hugo, her ex-boyfriend turned best friend. Daphne has been receiving the numbered papers for over twenty years, always wondering when there might be one without an expiration. Finally, the night of a blind date at her favorite Los Angeles restaurant, there’s only a name: Jake.

But as Jake and Daphne’s story unfolds, Daphne finds herself doubting the paper’s prediction, and wrestling with what it means to be both committed and truthful. Because Daphne knows things Jake doesn’t, information that—if he found out—would break his heart.”

The Cemetery of Untold Stories ~ Julia Alvarez

”Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. 

Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.”

Now for the books I purchased.

I Cheerfully Refuse ~ Leif Enger

“Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.”

I’m currently reading Love Letters by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, which Engie recommended highly a bit ago. It’s perfect bedtime reading, you can read just a few short letters, or read a lot, and it’s lovely indeed. In it, Woolf mentions a couple of times that she feels like To the Lighthouse is her best work. So I decided to give it a try.

To the Lighthouse ~ Virginia Woolf

”To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There’s the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever.

But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.“

Orbital ~ Samantha Harvey

“A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts–from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan–have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.”

After I paid for my books, I was invited to select a book from their box of Free Books in celebration of Independent Bookstore Day. I chose You Belong to Me.

You Belong to Me ~ Hayley Krischer

”The Substance meets Girl in Pieces, in this new YA psychological thriller exploring the dark secrets of the wellness and beauty world, brimming with sapphic romance, class exploration, and friendship clashes

Frances Bean has always been content living life on the perimeter. Until she gets paired up for a class project with rich and popular Julia, daughter of famous wellness guru Deena Patterson. The “magic” skincare products, healing sound baths, and extravagant parties of Deena’s company DEEP never really interested Frances before, who wears the badge of goth outcast and bookworm proudly. But face time with the girl she has been crushing on for years is starting to give her a new outlook. 

When Frances gets an exclusive invite to a DEEP event, she is blown away by the beauty and luxury of Julia’s world and the group’s focus on empowering girls to be their most true selves surprisingly strikes a chord. Before long Frances finds herself invested in DEEP, a whirlwind romance with Julia, and a future that feels hopeful. 

But when an infamous DEEP party takes a dark turn, Frances wonders if the allure of being a part of Julia’s life was actually just a deadly distraction…”

After shopping at Mrs. Dalloway’s, we walked around the neighborhood and noticed that the traffic was really heavy. Ted surmised that perhaps a game had just gotten out at Cal. Instead of struggling with that, we stopped at another independent bookstore, Book Society. Book Society is a bookstore and wine lounge, and has been there for about 6 months.

Isn’t it charming? I didn’t take this picture, it’s from a write up in the San Francisco Chronicle. I took some pictures, but the store was crowded and I didn’t want to post people’s faces.

I took this picture, it’s of their wine offerings. The concept is that you exchange your driver’s license for a card and a glass, and you use the card to serve yourself wine from the dispenser above. You can have a taste, a half-glass, or a full glass. You can sit and peruse books, you can chat with your friends or family, you can have a snack, all while you sip your wine. They don’t have soft drinks, but they do have at least one non-alcoholic offering, which I heard some people say they wanted. I had a glass of the Scribe Chardonnay, and Ted had a half glass of the Four Dimes Cabernet Sauvignon. They were delicious, though the pours were not generous.

I didn’t buy any books there, but they did have my favorite postcards for Postcards to Voters. They are only about a dollar more than they would be at Amazon, so it felt like a big win to find them in real life.

After that we had dinner at an Afghani / Mediterranean restaurant that we really enjoyed, Saffron Kitchen. It was a lovely day.

Have you read any of the books that I bought? Did you celebrate Independent Bookstore Day? Do any of these books sound interesting to you?