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Our favorite line from The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher. And Sir Isaac Newton (the newt) cracks Rilla up every time.

And in the you-had-me-at-hello department, how’s this for an opening?

When I walk into a bookstore, any bookstore, first thing in the morning, I’m flooded with a sense of hushed excitement. I shouldn’t feel this way. I’ve spent most of my adult life working in bookstores, either as a bookseller or a publisher’s sales rep, and even though I no longer work in the business, as an incurable reader I find myself in a bookstore at least five times a week. Shouldn’t I be blasé about it all by now? In the quiet of such a morning, however, the store’s displays stacked squarely and its shelves tidy and promising, I know that this is no mere shop. When a bookstore opens its doors, the rest of the world enters, too, the day’s weather and the day’s news, the streams of customers, and of course the boxes of books and the many other worlds they contain—books of facts and truths, books newly written and those first read centuries before, books of great relevance and of absolute banality. Standing in the middle of this confluence, I can’t help but feel the possibility of the universe unfolding a little, once upon a time.

—from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee, one of your memoir suggestions from the other week, and also mentioned by jep in the comments here.

And a bit of Howards End this morning. I didn’t read much this weekend. How about you?

Author Lewis Buzbee and his daughter Maddy tackle a big fat book.

Lewis wrote:

Five Things About Me as a Young Reader

1.  I was not a voracious reader as a child — I watched a lot more TV than I read books.  My love for reading didn’t start until I was in high school.

2.  Neither of my parents had gone to college, and were not what you would call literary.  But they read, for their own pleasure and information.  My mother read Gothic novels, the precursors to today’s Romance novels.  My father read the newspaper every morning at breakfast — he’d read it to us — and he read magazines like Argosy and True Stories.

3.  My favorite way to buy books was through the Scholastic Books catalog.  My second favorite way was at the local five and dime.

4.  My favorite early books were all very generic — The Long Bomb, Murder by Moonlight, Mystery Under the Sea, Radar Commandos. I loved those books.

5.  I can still remember the moment, when I was six, when I realized the word “says” on the page was pronounced “sez.”  That was a moment of profound understanding.

Lewis Buzbee is a San Francisco-based author of many fine books for both adults and children, including: The Haunting of Charles Dickens . . .

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