Lewis Buzbee

It’s been two months since Travis’s family moved to a development so new that it seems totally unreal. His parents are working harder now, to pay for it all, and Travis is left to fend for himself. There’s one place, though, where Travis can still connect with his old life: the Salinas library. Travis and his family used to go there together every Saturday, but now he bikes to it alone, re-reading his favorite books. It’s only natural that Travis likes the work of author John show more Steinbeck—after all, Salinas is Steinbeck’s hometown. But that can’t explain why Travis is suddenly seeing Steinbeck’s characters spring to life. There’s the homeless man in the alley behind the library, the line of figures at the top of a nearby ridge, the boy who writes by night in an attic bedroom. Travis has met them all before—as a reader. But why are they here now? And how? As Travis struggles to solve this mystery, budget cuts threaten his library. And so, he embarks on a journey through Steinbeck’s beautiful California landscape, looking for a way to save his safe haven. It’s only then that he begins to sort out fact from fiction, discovering the many ways a story can come alive—and stumbling into a story Steinbeck might have started, and Travis needs to complete. Here is a mystery that delves deeply into the ways that books take us, one at a time, out into the vast world. show less

Here's another marvelous book for all of us book maniacs to read about our obsession. This one gets you into the back room of a bookstore. Buzbee knows the business inside out, having worked at selling books pretty much his entire adult life (when not reading or writing). The book alternates between Buzbee's musing on his own experiences with books, to the history and origins of books, to speculation about what might happen in the future. [The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop] was written ten years show more ago, before the e-book "caught on" but he is right that the medium has not been as popular as the purveyors had hoped. But he did predict the unpredictable and I would say the rise of the audiobook fulfills the surprise factor. Buzbee loves to speculate and he comes up with some great ideas: Books that get kids to read:"books of engagement"! There are many more gems of that kind. A great read! ***** show less

Pleasant and interesting until just past the middle when it went more into the business and less into history and memoir when it flattened out for me as if the author were more checking off the boxes he had to cover. Also, considering how much e-Books and Amazon in general has taken over the world, strongly nostalgic. It is sad to hear of all those no-longer-bookstores.

This delightful little book is part memoir, part history, and part gentle polemic. Buzbee started his career in the last great bookstore age, when the tech nerds busy creating the modern Internet depended on print books just as everybody else did. He seems (like me) always to have been in love with books: not just with particular books, or with the pleasures that reading books can bring, but with the very idea of books, not to mention with their feel, their look, their smell. He has much to show more share with other booklovers about how bookstores are run, and what it was to work in one (and is still, for a lucky few). Along the way he covers the history of books as we know them and of the vendors, stalls, and stores that sell them. Not surprisingly, he's worked not just as a bookstore employee but as a publisher's representative, and he has interesting stories about what that life is like, too.

I enjoyed every page of this book and read it very quickly. I'm sure that anybody who likes books at all would like it. show less