Why Bookish Books Make Me Fall More in Love with… Books

“Books are Doors and I wanted out.”

- Alix E Harrow, Ten Thousand Doors of January

Doors leading into Books, Doors disappearing. Doors leading to other worlds, Doors leading to underground libraries. There’s book magic, book crime, bookstores and book wandering. I honestly don’t care what it is, just so long as it’s in the same vein. I love books about books. Bookish books. Meta books. Give me all the books. 

After writing that word so many times, it looks completely insane. How does that harsh four letter word with its own bookends encapsulate something so life-changing for so many people? 

Beats me.

My mother read to me and my sisters growing up. Classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Little House in the Big Woods, and The Chronicles of Narnia were read aloud at bedtime and upon first waking. Stories were made up during playtime of make believe. Stories were assigned to Barbies and stuffed animals. Wars were fought, lovers reunited. People died. 

Just kidding. 

No stuffed animals were harmed in the making of these stories. And if they were, my mother sewed them up in a jiff. All this to say, stories have been with me since the beginning as they have been for so many people. You’d think I’d just disappear into every facet of prose, but no. I keep going back to these books that are about books. 

In the summer of 2019, I went down a rabbit hole of bookish books. I started with The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, glided into The Starless Sea, and bounded headfirst into The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Then after a quick detour, I skipped into Tilly and the Bookwanderers. 

In hindsight these books were a slow progression to journeying into books. A.J. Fikry is the charming story of a grumpy bookstore owner in Massachusetts, and if you’ve ever worked in a bookstore, trust me, you’ll get it. I started working in an independent bookstore during graduate school and am still there. It’s like nothing else. 

The ups and downs and magic of bookstores are present in this book and Gabrielle Zevin does an outstanding job of making you fall in love with that grumpy bookstore owner. You don’t need to work in one to empathize with it, though. I tell customers that if you’re a human being with a basic sense of humor, you’ll get it. This book creates new readers and unites readers so that, along the way, they become family. 

The next rung on the ladder actually dives deep, deep into Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. It’s a fantastical adventure love story with RPG video game elements. The protagonist finds a door to an underground library. What else is there to say about it? If you’ve read it, you get it. It’s a masterpiece.

This book not only enters the archive of books, but there are books within books. Fairytales interspersed with Zachary’s narrative. He even reads a book about himself. It’s so meta, my brain and heart were thrilled. I want that. Who doesn’t want to read about themselves in a book? Only adventure and mystery await. It is books like this one that remind me why I go back to reading. 

After the warmth of Starless Sea, I was in a frenzy. Alix E. Harrow’s debut released in September and I tore into that book with no reservations. The cover alone screams to be read. What this book means to me cannot be fully explained. The Secret Garden and A Little Princess were favorites of mine growing up and this one reminded me of them. It was a nostalgic coming of age story about a lovely girl named January. Like Starless Sea, it’s got a book within a book and even footnotes. 

Guys. 

Footnotes. 

More mysterious doors and distant horizons. My secret wish to be a pirate thrived in this book. I constantly tell people just to read this book because it filled some aching hole in my heart. So you should read it too. 

After what quite possibly is one of my favorite books now, I went down a middle grade fantasy reading spree. I felt that my bookish book well had been filled. But Anna James came along with her Bookwanderers. 

Tilly and the Bookwanderers is like Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, but less “investigatively” focused and with younger protagonists. Tilly’s grandparents own a bookstore in London and she soon discovers the ability to talk to her favorite fictional characters. Not only that, but she can also travel inside those books by just. reading. them. That’s the dream. Antics and chaos ensue as usual in children’s books, but at the end of it, I had to stop and think about why bookish books are so enticing. 

We all wish to go inside books, enter underground libraries or venture to different worlds because of one thing: Books are an escape. 

They’re memories and safe places and reminders of people we love. Whether childhood was good or bad, we read because we had to. For sanity or inspiration. We still read for those reasons because life grows difficult. So many things hinder us that we must shut out the world and escape to another. Once we shut the book, we ache to be back in the middle of it. We ache to be in the world of fiction instead. However, despite that nostalgic, melancholy feeling, there is something else nagging us at the end of the page. It’s the same thing nagging the protagonists of these four books. Determination. Just like our favorite fictional characters, we are encouraged, we are reminded to press on to do one thing:

Live.