The Staff Shelf: Community Bookstore

When we walk into a bookstore, the first place we go is the staff recommendation shelves—it’s how you get a quick sense of the personality of the store. The very best bookstores are merely a reflection of the eclectic, deeply felt opinions of the book-lovers who work there. As part of our Interview with a Bookstore, we asked the staff at Community Bookstore what we should read.

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SLIDESHOW: Community Bookstore Staff Shelf

: HAL (Events Coordinator) RECOMMENDS: Boozy, brash, and brilliant, Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England is my favorite book to find new readers for. It’s a picaresque about a hotel porter who dreams of becoming a millionaire, only to have the terrors of the Czech twentieth-century get in his way. Read it with a pivo.

: EZRA (Co-Owner) RECOMMENDS: Kate Atkinson has us confront mortality and acknowledge life’s random chances with such style, humor and intelligence that we are left begging for more. I would say that I can’t remember a recent book that moved me so deeply except that I do remember, clearly: Atkinson’s last book (and the “companion” to God in Ruins), Life After Life.

: SAM (Bookseller) RECOMMENDS: So far in my year of Jewish reading, I have only felt morose or rebellious. It was not until I read Hoffman that I remembered there was such a thing as Jewish Joy. Now all I want to do is frolic around the sea of Galilee telling tales of loves lost.

: STEPHANIE (Co-Owner) RECOMMENDS: A necessary corrective to the sappy genre of books about bookstores, this book dispenses with the fairytale and plumbs the sorrows, as well as the satisfactions, of the bookseller.

: STEPHANIE (Co-Owner) RECOMMENDS: Mann’s multi-generational saga of a German family from 1835 to 1877 is the ultimate debut novel.

: STEPHANIE (Co-Owner) RECOMMENDS: It starts as a comedy of manners, but morphs into a ghoulish tale where literature plays a role in the horror. Terrifying and wonderful.