We’re hiring
We’re looking for part-time booksellers to join our small and friendly team. Applicants must be able to work every Sunday and regular weekday evening shifts. Apply by Thursday at 5pm. Details here.
Events at Backstory
Book your tickets now
SOLD OUT Screening: Putin Vs The West
Friday 3rd February, 7pm
Screening of part of a new BBC documentary series on the West’s foreign policy to Russia by the award-winning filmmaker Norma Percy followed by Q&A with her and the series’ producer/directors
Wednesday 15th February, 7.30pm
Author of The New Life, one of the hottest debuts of 2023, about forbidden love in Victorian London
SOLD OUT David Nicholls
Wednesday 22nd February, 7.30pm
An evening with the bestselling author of One Day, Us & Sweet Sorrow
Saturday 25th February, 7pm
An evening of music with one of the UK’s most exciting up-and-coming jazz singer-songwriters
Wednesday 8th March, 7.30pm
The author of Maame, an exciting debut novel that sharply depicts Maddie’s sense of being torn between two worlds as she navigates flat shares, dating apps, microaggressions at work, the shock of grief, and learning how to become the woman she wants to be – one frantic Google search at a time.
Team pick of the week
Denise recommends: The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam
A satire on tech start ups with a host of eccentric characters and situations (a trampoline in the boardroom and nudist networking anyone?), moral dilemmas on the responsibility of running a social media platform and the age-old issue of women coming up with the brilliant ideas and making them happen and men taking the credit for them.
Fans of TV’s Silicon Valley will love it. Anyone who spends any time on a social media platform will almost certainly recognise the issues around connecting with people online and the blurring of lines, when it all feels like it may get a bit out of control. Women readers will no doubt be able to relate to being sidelined and vow not to let it happen again. Your blood boils at points. - Denise
Our bestsellers this week
Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott (next month’s Backstory book club choice)
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Foster by Claire Keegan
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
The New Life by Tom Crewe
CONFESSION TIME. I’m a slow reader. Painfully slow. So much so that one of the names I initially toyed with for the shop was ‘The Slow Reader’. Charming, I thought. Whimsical. God I’m glad I didn’t call it that.
“Hello, the slow reader!”
Yeah, no.
In any case, maybe I should say I was a slow reader. I thought being a slow reader was like being tall - you’re either going to annoy anyone ever sat behind you in a theatre for your entire life (guilty) or you’re never going to - not something you could train yourself out of, like being an anxious driver. But I think I was wrong.
These days, I’m a really rather rapid reader. In part, it’s out of necessity. Before Christmas, we were averaging an event a week, meaning that if I wanted to do my job as event host at all diligently then at the very least I needed to read one book a week. Add in the book club and that’s five a month.
Then there’s all the damn customers, banging on about how so and so is the best thing they’ve ever read and how they simply can’t believe I’ve never read a single Rachel Joyce. Oh and what do I make of the Booker longlist? And my top choice from the Baillie Gifford?
Add to that colleagues who devour books almost as regularly as they replenish the “free” biscuits from Waitrose and then proceed to sing their merits on our WhatsApp group. After three of them kept up an incessant chorus, I was bullied into reading Piranesi over Christmas just for a bit of peace. (I really didn’t like it for the first 50 pages and then I really did.)
That’s before you consider the deluge of proofs from sales reps and publicists, sometimes hand-delivered to the shop by a keen newbie author. And the intoxicating knowledge that I can request a free copy of pretty much any book in print that takes my fancy.
So if my to-be-read pile was a teetering mess even before I opened a bookshop, is it any surprise I’ve turned into the Augustus Gloop of paperbacks? Oh yes, that one sounds great, too.
And while my eyes remain larger than my capacity to digest all of this, the latter has definitely increased. At journalism boot camp, my shorthand teacher had a good trick: just before the exam, she’d play a tape of someone speaking impossibly fast and let us struggle to write it all down so that when we were played the real thing, the required 100 words a minute was a doddle. I think something similar is going on with my reading speed. Now that I sometimes need to read a book in a day (and therefore do), I will often read one in two or three days without really trying to.
I don’t tell you this to boast. People who reel off stats about reading are almost as bad as bores with maps of the world on their walls, ticking off each country in turn. Reading should be sunk into like a warm bath, not timed against the clock.
I relay it not only to say that if you want to read more, you probably can (and I know just the place to buy all those books you’re going to need). But also that doing so might make the reading experience more pleasurable. It certainly has for me.
When I used to slog through a doorstopper for a month, ten pages in bed every night, it really could be a slog. I’d frequently give up on non-fiction after a few chapters, frustrated at what I saw as endless repetition. In retrospect what I thought of as droning on was only the consequence of never letting the author finish her point. In fiction, I couldn’t cope with too many characters or worlds too different from my own because how could I piece such a world together in 1,000 parts?
A case in point is Islands of Abandonment by my friend Cal Flyn. I read it first a while back and thought it was very good. But I re-read it over a weekend just before our book club and got utterly caught up in it. The different strands of her argument seemed so much more coherent. Surrounded by the sounds, sights and smells she conjures up for hours on end, I surrendered to the narrative in a way I have rarely done before. And I found the book that bit more powerful for it.
I’m currently galloping (romping?) through Call Me By Your Name. Not because I have to, or even because a publisher or a colleague or a customer said I should, but simply because I want to. And the stream of consciousness is so good I’m just letting it stream. As soon as I click ‘send’, I’m going to get back to it. Which has already been too long. Maybe I need to take up quick writing next.
Until next time,
Tom