Rainy Day Bookshop Life

And Some of My Favorite Books From This Year

It’s a rainy day here in Lancaster, one that I would typically bemoan as I dashed through the cold drizzle to the front door of our bookshop, but during the Christmas season, even the dreary days have a certain sparkle to them.

Still, when the wet and chill blow into the city, whether a holiday is on the horizon or not, it usually means a slow day at the shop. Which I don’t always mind, especially when there’s organizing to be done or I’m in the middle of a good book or my fingers are itching to do a little writing.

Like today.

So this morning, Shawn and I traipsed into the shop, stomping our wet feet on the welcome mat and got on with our opening duties at a leisurely pace, one fitting with the weather outside our windows. I plugged in the festive fairy lights strung around the store and flipped the switches on the overhead bulbs, our own electrical sunrise for all the stories resting on our shelves.

Shawn did what he loves best: inching along the shelves, straightening all the books and getting them looking their best for the day ahead. While I took to my perch behind the front desk and queued up our favorite Christmas playlist, Shawn flipped our front door sign to “Open,” and the day at our bookshop began.

On most weekdays, Shawn is mainly a handsome statue sitting in the red chair in the corner of our Fiction Nook, the only movement in his entire body coming from his fingers that type at a mythical speed, lightning flashing across the keyboard of his computer. While he’d love to be doing all the book-recommending and general chit-chatting that I get to enjoy with our customers, he’s got to do the real work of this outfit.

His ghost-writing and co-writing projects are what keep food on our family’s table and clothes on all our backs. And, yes, when sales are slow (or a mammoth construction project on the block closes down your business’s sidewalk—sigh), Shawn’s handiwork with words even props open the doors of this little shop from time to time. But I love his company too much to let him keep it all bottled up at home in his office.

“You could come work at the shop with me,” I said to him over breakfast this morning. “I promise I won’t talk to you. At least not too much.”

He’s usually an easy sell.

I like to think it’s me, but there’s a pretty good chance that it’s just the books, and I’m okay with that. Those are mistresses I will allow. Because I get it. Books feel alive to me. And not just the ones I’ve read. This isn’t about me knowing the story within the cover, having lived that life with the characters named upon its pages. Nope, it’s more than that.

Even if I’ve never read a word from a book, when I hold it my hands, it pulses with the potential to tell me a story that will change me, for the better or for the worse. Books have energy, and if you choose the right ones (yes, I said “the right ones” and I stand by that phrase), your life will be better for it. Should you go a step further, say, and buy a bookstore and fill some of it shelves with stories that have changed you for the better and the rest of its shelves with the books that others say have done the same for them, you’ll pretty much create a little Nook (wink, wink) of paradise for yourself this side of heaven.

At least, I like to think that’s what we’ve done.

“So what are those books that have made your life better this year?” you ask.

Ah, the perennial year-end question.

The Top Ten.

Our family are top-ten enthusiasts. We have top-tens for everything from cereals to movies to family vacations. And because my children are also my husband’s, some of those are maintained on spreadsheets that are occasionally pulled up and amended when a new favorite dethrones an old one.

For me, the top-tens feel so weighty, like trying to pick a favorite child. I like to keep things fluid. So we won’t call this a “top” anything. These are simply a few books that I loved this year and think, perhaps, you might as well.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The word was out that Barbara Kingsolver had written a book inspired by Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and I’ll admit I was intrigued. But I’d read and loved the classic in college and had my doubts about anyone trying to mimic Dickens’s inimitable style. Then my son, who is currently studying social work at university, came to me and said the words that, when a child says it to their mother, alters the priorities on her TBR list. “Mom, I just read probably my favorite book ever. You have to read it.”

The next day, I started Demon Copperhead, the story of a foster child growing up in Appalachia during the rise of the opioid epidemic. Good gracious, this isn’t a light read. I’ll be honest, I had to take a break from it for a few days on occasion because it was just so damn heavy.

But, wow. Demon, the main character and also the narrator of the story, pulls you in and makes you love him from the moment he slides into the world on the floor of his mother’s trailer. From the toxic foster homes he miraculously endures to the “what the hell’s wrong with you, boy!” moments when you wish you could reach in the pages of the book and knock some sense into him, it’s impossible not to root for this kid.

And with true Dickens panache, Kingsolver paints the world and relationships around him with such a vivid brush that you swear you could hop in your car and drive down to Appalachia and shake their flesh and blood hands (or in some cases, give them a hard stare punctuated by a few choice words.) But aside from character and plot, Kingsolver gave me a much needed glimpse into the world of opioid addiction and the institutions that have propagated it.

So, as occasionally happens, my boy was right: it was a book I had to read, and like mother like son, loved.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

I have a habit of coming to the books “everyone” is talking about years after “everyone” has moved on and the buzzed titles have slid off the bestseller list.

“Is it really that good?” I mutter to myself in the midst of the hype.

I usually add to my resistance effort by reading a book from another century that’s “stood the test of time.” And sometimes, resisting all the hubbub works out for me. I won’t name any names, but there are plenty of book bandwagons that I’m glad I let trot right on by. But occasionally, I pick up a book years after its hey-day and think, “Darn it, everyone was right that time. This book is amazing.”

Enter Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

I picked it up this spring, over a decade after it was published, on recommendation from my husband, because if “everyone” plus Shawn says it’s good, I’ll give it a shot. This is the story of twin brothers born in Ethiopia to a British doctor and an Indian nun, neither of which stays around beyond the boys’ first cries for reasons I’ll let you discover (assuming you didn’t read this book in the aughts when the rest of the world did.) With a political revolution playing out in the background (and eventually the forefront) of the their lives, the twins grow up within the walls of a mission hospital where they both discover a love for medicine but an increasing distance in their relationship (and, yes, there is a girl involved—isn’t there always?)

But the ending. Oh, the ending. The twin’s paths, parted for years, intersect once again in an ending that stays with you like a beloved scar. No doubt the fact that Verghese, a trained physician, use of language with the skill of a poet and the ease of a master storyteller will have you asking, “What can’t this man do?”, while simultaneously judging your own flimsy skillset. But that’s one of the casualties of reading fabulous writing, and I’m willing to endure it.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

And speaking of endings.

When my daughter told me that I needed to read Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet and even went so far as to gift me a copy of the book from a bookshop in Stratford Upon Avon that she purchased while on vacation there, I was excited to read it. But when she told me it was about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who dies of the plague, which you are told is going to happen on the first page, my enthusiasm waned.

First off, I like a good surprise. I didn’t know that Shakespeare had a son who died of the plague, and I was wishing my daughter as well as Maggie O’Farrell kept that bit a secret till the end of the story. I wanted to fall in love with his character, dream wonderful things for him, and then my heart to break when he takes to his bed with a fever and never gets up again. I’m all about those cathartically sad endings. It’s good for the soul.

But to give it away at the beginning?

“The book’s probably not for me,” I decided. But then my daughter convinced my son and my husband to read it. And they couldn’t stop talking about it. So I succumbed to the peer pressure.

Yes, indeed, in the very first pages of the book, you discover the boy’s fate. But that’s what is so masterful about O’Farrell’s story. As the day of Hamnet’s death unfolds at almost a minute-by-minute pace, the reader is also transported back in time to follow the love story of Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes.

It was 11 o’clock at night when I got to the point, about 2/3 of the way through the book, when sweet Hamnet actually dies. I sat in my bed and put the book in my lap and cried beside my sleeping husband. And then I picked the book up again. “Now what?” I asked out loud, of course, because I love to talk to myself. And for the next two hours, Maggie O’Farrell showed me the answer. And it was stunning. Absolutely breathtaking.

Touché, Ms. O’Farrell. I should have trusted you from the first page.

So, those, my friends, are a few of the books I read and loved this year, books that changed me for the better, left their mark, and now inhabit the shelves of our little shop. Because good words do good work where we let them.

Now it’s your turn. Looking back at the books you read this year, which ones left you changed for the better?

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A few quick announcements from our little shop . . .

You can purchase any of the books mentioned above by clicking on the links, which will take you to Bookshop.org. If you purchase there through these links, our book shop receives a generous portion of the sales!

You can also order just about any book, any time, by emailing your order to hello@nooks.gallery.

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Our 2025 book clubs are announced, along with the books we’ll be reading for the first few months. Have a look at those here and please join us in the store if you can!

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Finally, we have some wonderful events coming up with some talented folks including Roni Bates,

Stephanie Duncan Smith

, Mindy Caliguire, and

Christie Purifoy

(plus many others!). Check out our events HERE.