One of my favorite truisms is that conflict comes from incongruent expectations. Something I think about less is whatever happens when expectations match. Is it joy? Is it just the absence of conflict?
The first example of these matched expectations that comes to my mind is when I was dating my now-husband. I had never before had the experience of being with someone to whom I was so well matched--we read different books, we had seen different movies, but something else far more important matched perfectly. The primary thing was that we liked food in compatible ways, but that is another story. Suffice to say, this time, I did feel joy.
The second example, far less dramatic, I think, is always a bookstore.
These are some basic expectations raised by the name: it should be a store that sells books. But we are a storytelling culture, and so we have unnamed expectations for what a bookstore means. A temple of letters; the literal marketplace of ideas. A cozy place to spend a rainy afternoon. Maybe there’s a cat. As I parse my own bookstore expectations, I find that some of them are in direct opposition to each other: I expect booksellers to be both young and old, the stores to be well-lit and dim, labyrinthine and open, dusty and clean from frequent use.
The funny thing about City Reads is how often I have walked into a bookstore and felt that it perfectly matched these impossible expectations. So far I have been in bookstores large and small, crowded and empty, and almost every time I have walked in and felt that sense of recognition, that this is somehow the Platonic ideal of a bookstore, everything it should be.
I like to think this comes from the thousand faces a reader can have--there is a bookstore matched to each type of person who enjoys reading books, and when I walk in I recognize in the bookstore the friends I have who would love it.
More likely, it’s that books themselves are not a static thing. By capturing ideas and stories the way they do, they are anything but monolithic. Instead, they capture, along with the diversity of ideas behind book covers, something of the diversity of possibility among people. Bookstores being organized differently or branded differently is simply a way of sorting through those--taking our bookstores from the last newsletter, something as massive as the Strand promises every book possible. A store as small as Passageway Books promises attention to something unique.
The bookstores I chose to feature this week are tailor-made for two very different types of readers. One of them, Freebird Books & Goods, is a used bookstore with a little bit of everything. It has comfortable wooden shelves and gets much of its stock from neighborhood donations. The second, Books Are Magic, is almost an incarnation of the modern young reader (who is definitely on booktok), featuring an impressive selection of diverse, contemporary voices, primarily in fiction, and an Instagram-friendly mural out front. Both, impossibly, are the quintessential bookstore--read more in the full features below.
Bookstores
Freebird Books - Brooklyn, NYC
Freebird is a local bookstore–a trait that can be felt even in its location across from one of New York’s major ports. The neighborhood is not quite Red Hook and not quite Cobble Hill, sandwiched between the Port Authority and a freeway. Nevertheless, the Brooklyn brick townhomes make it feel cozy… read more
Freebird Books on a perfect day. Photo Credit: Foursquare.com
Books Are Magic - Brooklyn, NYC
I keep writing the title of this store with an exclamation point. It feels like the type of statement that would be said with a shout, maybe at a pivotal moment in a children’s movie--however, I could see it as a reverential invocation as well… read more.
The exterior of Book Are Magic. Photo Credit: Book Are Magic, by way of NYC Tourism