A review by rienthril
Bookshops: A Reader's History by Jorge Carrión

5.0

My copy: an ARC of the English translation. Carrión writes like thought, flitting from one memory to the next, but invariably in the direction of the weight of books, reading, and what they represent. I can see some (many?) people not being able to hang with this, but if you’ve spent any time searching for hidden bookshops yourself, you’ll be into it. Have a pen handy. You’ll want to jot down some names of secret gems (and pray they still exist). I even expanded my to-read list to boot, as inevitably talking about bookshops means talking about writers, many Spanish language ones mentioned by Carrión I had never heard of before.

Although this is kind of like travel writing, it’s not. If you’re looking for a checklist of shops, you’ll get it, but you’ll also have to sort through the irresolvable historical-cultural import of why we read in the first place: to know, to ignore, to remember, to forget.