The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

This book is exactly what it says it is--it's Shaun Bythell's daily diary of what happened each day in his bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. He writes about buying books from people, going through people's book collections, crazy customers coming into his shop, the struggle of dealing with online book sales through Amazon, and more. He is very dry and sarcastic in a lot of his descriptions of people, and caustic in his discussions of Amazon, Kindles, and e-books and their effects on the book industry (especially the secondhand book industry). He even took a Kindle out and shot it and hung it up in his bookshop.

This made me want to work in his shop. Or at least to go peruse the shelves and look through all the sections and see all the books he has there. I really think I need to be a librarian or work in a bookstore someday. But I don't know that I'll want to own my own bookstore--Bythell makes it very clear that it is hard work and stressful and not very fun in a lot of ways. But he also makes it clear that he loves the independence and prefers it to having to work for someone else. There's a bookstore near him called The Open Book that is open for people to try running it for a week to see how they like being a bookstore owner. I love that idea... maybe someday.

I was surprised by how engrossing this book was, considering how quotidian it was. There wasn't a huge overarching story or anything, but it was funny and real.