On “A Bookshop Where Everything Is Recommended”

The New York Times ran a story a while back on a New York bookstore founded on the principle of handpicked recommendations from famous and interesting people (“If you were stranded on a desert island…”) These recommendations will also include why the individual chose that book and how it affected them. The idea is great in theory, but it doesn’t strike me as groundbreaking. Moreover, this passage upset me:

Hicklin aims to make bookselling more selective and personal — in other words, everything that Amazon is not — by attaching familiar names to titles and having them explain why those books have shaped them.

I fail to see how Amazon cannot be selective or personal and how this bookstore instead is. The recommended books come famous people who one can’t readily interact with anyway. What if Amazon were to steal the lists, and feature a special marker? How would this bookstore differentiate itself then?

For me a bookstore is personalized to oneself. A bookstore works better than Amazon because of people. When I was in an English bookstore in Berlin, one of the clerks started talking to me about how the author of the book I’d picked up used to be his neighbor (the novel is actually #5 on Neil Gaiman’s list!) That’s what I go to bookstores for.

To be fair, there are ways this bookstore attempting to do that, from salons to readings, but that is what we should really value and focus on (instead of a replicable, gimmicky mechanism). I love the idea of people not involved in the literary world giving me book recommendations, but I don’t think that the Amazon-bashing is warranted: it speaks to an era of gatekeeping and elitism.