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| photo: Marissa Leshnov | |
Paul Yamazaki is the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers, the famed San Francisco bookstore and publisher, and was the recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2023 Literarian Award. Reading the Room: A Bookseller's Tale (April 19, 2024) is Yamazaki's love letter to the work of bookselling and engaged life of the mind. Reading the Room is the inaugural publication from Ode Books, a new imprint of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Reading the Room is the distillation of many hours of conversation with friends about the pleasures, perils, and joys of 54 years of bookselling.
On your nightstand now:
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru
Weird Black Girls by Elwin Cotman
There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib
Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray
Exhibit by R.O. Kwon
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson
In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame and illustrated by Ernest Shepard
Your top five authors:
Trying to define what top means and to limit that to five authors is impossible for me. If I rephrase the question to the most influential authors, I could come up with a list that I would probably revise if asked the same question in another instance. Here's my response to that question right now, the authors are in no particular order: C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, and Amiri Baraka. These authors are instrumental in shaping my curiosities which are at the foundation of how I acquire titles for City Lights.
Book you've faked reading:
The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. The Sophie Wilkins-Burton Pike translation runs about 1,800 pages in two volumes. I've made two serious attempts to read this amazing novel but have never managed to get beyond 700 pages. I hope to make a third attempt and complete this decades-long goal before time runs out.
Books that you're an evangelist for:
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita
These novels are a very good introduction to authors who have a substantive body of work that I treasure. If I could find two or three months in a high desert cabin in the American Southwest or Rajasthan in northeastern India with a sufficient quantity of scotch and mezcal, I would love to read in chronological order all the books that Yamashita and Kunzru have written.
Book you've bought for the cover.
By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberg
Book you hid from your parents:
Another Country by James Baldwin
Book that changed your life:
See all of the above.
Favorite line from a book:
"My eye frees what the page imprisons" --Ibn 'Ammar, from the poem Reading, translated by Cola Franzen from Poems of Arab Andalusia
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
See all of the above.
A suggestion:
If you, dear reader, are interested or curious about Reading the Room, I would suggest you read first In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch. There is no better book on the joy and craft of bookselling.