Shelf Life

When she was recovering from treatment for breast cancer, novelist Suzanne Strempek Shea was seized by a desire to be "in an environment that had no connection to the past year." So she took a job at her friend Janet's bookstore, Edwards Books in Springfield, Massachusetts. (An author working in a bookstore, says Shea, is a bit like "a dairy farmer hanging around the cheese shop.") She is delighted by everything she discovers, and she shares her discoveries in this mostly lighthearted book-about-bookstores. Planning a bookstore event in honor of Bob Dylan's 60th birthday, Shea realizes she has reconnected with "the me I was before the diagnosis." And this, in the end, is the advice she offers, "should the day dawn when you look in the mirror and aren't sure who's looking back." When that happens, she urges, "Get thee to a bookstore."