A few months ago, I finally visited a popular zine shop in my city. It was beautiful, airy, and resembled a museum shop. Everything was intriguing and artistic, yet what caught my attention was the bright pink Sofia Coppola’s Archive on one of the tables. It was bigger than I had imagined and woke up a wave of nostalgia in me. Naturally, since I enjoy nostalgia lately, I purchased it immediately.
While I was looking through it, I remembered the impact The Virgin Suicides had on me when I was a teenager. The dazy photographs made me think of the world Sofia Coppola had translated into the screen and I now wanted to see if the one built by Jeffrey Eugenides had the same qualities. I checked the usual stores to buy it: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and even Thrift Books. Until I remembered how I promised myself I wouldn’t buy that many books this year, and instead would opt for the library.
It took a lot of self-reflection for me to notice my inability to leave a bookstore without a new book in my hands. My habits had gotten slightly out of control - I saw the bookshelves at Barnes & Noble and Goodwill as adventures, and in my free time I would get a taste of this feeling while scrolling through Thrift Books at night. I enjoyed finding new stories and interesting vintage books I had not seen before. I knew I needed to decrease my hectic buying habits alongside the amount of books piling up inside my room (many of them unread).
Looking back, I can see that bookstores always had this effect on me, just not in the same magnitude. Living in Latin America, we had a lot of options but the selection for some contemporary books could be slightly limited, mostly because they had not been translated into Spanish yet. My favorite bookstore was tiny compared to the ones here, it had light brown wooden shelves, a large table in the middle overflowing with different-sized books, and a half-wall dedicated to magazines only. It felt cramped but that made the experience more fun to me.
I was used to going to a bookstore, buying the specific book I wanted, reading it, and going back to get the next one. Nonetheless, when I moved to the US, I no longer went into tiny cramped bookstores, instead, I entered a supermarket-size haven saturated with books. Every single genre. Even those I didn’t know anyone would ever be interested in. This change, alongside the news that I now would have my own money, caused me to start buying, buying, and buying with the hopes of building the shelves I had always craved.
Bookstores became a place of comfort and opportunity. Eventually, I began buying used books which made me get even more ambitious, I would buy tons of books that were about subjects that interested me: textbooks about Eastern & Spanish art, or a French version of “A Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even though my French is not good enough to read it.
Nonetheless, once I started college and began visiting the library, I saw the beauty of it. I did not take much advantage of it. I enjoyed walking around and seeing even more options than the ones in stores: academic texts from different countries, plays, and modern literature on the way to becoming classics. I borrowed some books but never really finished them, as being an English major meant I was always drowning in readings. But even after I graduated, I often think about that wonderful library that allowed me to travel to the past just by walking through it.
So this year, I decided to borrow from the library rather than buy. I would save some money, have a deadline, and an obligation to take the books back after finishing them. It went perfectly at the beginning. I read “Pure Colour” by Sheila Heti and “Bonjour Tristesse” by Françoise Sagan. But that ambition I felt when I first moved to the US came back, and now I wanted to borrow, borrow, and borrow.
I write this as I have three borrowed unread books next to me (but I will get to them). I’ve seen how my desire to read everything is fed by the abundance of options that we have, and I think it’s precious that we have these resources. My local library is a tiny, suburban branch yet its impact is similar to those supermarket-sized bookstores and my university’s library. I walk in and see all the borrowed books lined up for people to pick up, dozens of flyers for English conversation circles, meditation classes, a knitting club, and so much more than books. It has the same purpose: to promote knowledge and create a community while doing so. At a moment when everything has become accessible and digitalized, I believe it’s important to preserve those places that carry bits of the past while preparing for the future.
Thank you for getting to this point, please let me know if you liked it and if you have any preferences between bookstores and libraries :)
i feeeel this! i gave myself a new years resolution to only buy 4 books this year + borrow the rest (whether from friends or the library) because i would end up buying so many beautiful books that would sit untouched. it's a great way to be mindful about literary consumption!