Browsing is a Way of Life

by Sheila Coonerty
Published in the 2011 Summer Newsletter

Taking the time for a trip to Bookshop Santa Cruz is like getting lost in a great novel: you go with a book or two in mind and you find yourself delightedly overtaken by ways of seeing bits of the world that you didn’t even know to love. Wandering there is like coming upon new walking trails sprouting up along your well-loved walk in the mountains, suddenly seeing familiar sights from new eyes.

When it was time for me to choose books for this newsletter, the day had been rainy and the warmth of the bookstore was particularly welcoming. I intended to head toward the fiction shelves but barely made it in the door before I was lost in the new paperbacks (bringing home two or three), the large art books, and the search for a cooking book that would teach me more about Indian food. The peaceful music and low hum of my fellow readers pulled at me until I had to give myself a sharp talking-to and turn toward my original destination.

I love hitting the fiction and nonfiction shelves, where I indulge myself by reading every one of the dozens of handwritten staff reviews that hang there, passionate messages of book love that act as my own little coterie of personal consultants. Over the years, it has been those little notes that have led to most of my reviews, urging me to open books that I otherwise might never touch.

On this day, I soon had a stack of new worlds to consider and a perch on a bench with which to do so. Next to me sat an elderly couple, leaning tenderly against each other, taking turns softly reading aloud the biography of a famous artist. Their obvious pleasure so lured me into eavesdropping that I came perilously close to falling into their laps. My elbow landed on a pile of art books next to them, and I surreptitiously started sneaking a look through their pile. I thought then of how full a bookshop is—filled with the joys of others that can become our own if we just pay attention.

Yes, a journey to Bookshop is just like getting lost in a novel, and shortly the books I would get lost in announced themselves. And then I had to head home, so that I could ignore household chores and lose myself in The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht, to be followed by Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

In the superbly written The Tiger’s Wife, a young Baltic doctor, on a goodwill trip to vaccinate children, finds out that her beloved grandfather has died nearby and she must go to collect his possessions. She becomes lost in the stories that poured from him, filling and enriching her own life. It wasn’t long before I was engrossed with her in the story of the deathless man and later, the village, convinced that one of theirs had become a tiger’s wife. While sharing her life and her grandfather’s, I found myself grinning in delight at these worlds even more vivid than my own. I was filled with sadness when these stories ended.

But of course I only had to ignore my responsibilities for a moment more in order to pick up and begin Cutting for Stone. Now I left India by boat to start my new life with the others working in a hospital in Africa. There, strangers became family as they worked together, then loved each other, then saw twin boys enter their life under sad circumstances. Again, I was happily drawn in to a world filled with the sights and smells of Africa and rich with people whose connections to family and friends were deeply and intrinsically part of them. I was taken by the urge to go to Africa, to work at a hospital, to simply find myself covered by such vines of history and love.

As our lives speed up, as we can find any piece of information by clicking a key, it seems that storytelling and getting lost in the lives around us, and therefore in our own history, are in danger of being forgotten. When I wander through Bookshop, when I finally emerge from a novel that I love, I remember again that there are stories all around me, new lives and experiences to become wrapped in that cannot be Googled from my desk at home.

Sheila Coonerty, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice as well as for Santa Cruz city schools. When not working, she is writing about her post-polio adventure while learning new ways to walk, to breathe, and to live.