All it took was the title. Bookish People. I saw it on NetGalley and had to read it.
That may be kind of sad, but I just knew that the people within its pages would be my kind of people, and I was right.
Bookish People by Susan Coll introduces us to Mrs. Sophie Bernstein and her bookshop in Washington DC. The cast of characters is your usual suspects: the manager who has been working there far too long, the overworked events manager who is always frazzled with a very full email inbox, several teenagers who love reading--you know the crew. Sophie, unbeknownst to her, suffers from near crippling anxiety due to *gestures vaguely at America today* and she becomes somewhat of a secret doomsday prepper.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, and while I did find Clemi to be interesting, unfortunately this story kind of fell flat for me. It was enjoyable enough that I finished it, but I struggled. It took me days to finish what should have been a ~4ish hour read, because I kept having to put it down--the story just didn't capture me, mostly because it got very rambling, very often. For example, there were entire pages devoted to vacuum cleaners and ovens. I get what the author was trying to do there, underlining the stress that the characters were under and making the reader feel their almost manic desperation, but it was too rambling that it got to be exhausting.
It felt very low stakes, and there was never really a climax of the plot. It felt more like you were sitting in on a week in these people's lives, and while it was admittedly a shitty week for the bookstore, it was also pretty mundane.
Even though it wasn't my cup of tea, Bookish People did give me this beautiful, so relatable quote: "She sometimes thinks the world divides into two types of people, those who think books are for reading when there's nothing else to do, and those who avoid other things to do in order to read books--and unsurprisingly she's in the latter camp, but really, is that so awful?"
No, no it's not. If you're in any reading camp, you should give Bookish People a chance--it may be right up your alley.
I'll leave you with a Doodle joke, as just about every one of Bookish People's "End of Day Reports" includes one:
I drew my dog while I was on a boring phone call and I'm really proud of it!
It's a golden doodle.
Love and Roombas (iykyk),
Mandy
