Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama. and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore [Hardcover]

Suzanne Strempek Shea (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2004

Suzanne Shea has always loved a good book—and she’s written five of them, all acclaimed. In the course of her ten-year career, she’s done a good bit of touring, including readings and drop-ins at literally hundreds of bookstores. She never visited one that wasn’t memorable.

Two years ago, while recovering from radiation therapy, Shea heard from a friend who was looking for help at her bookstore. Shea volunteered, seeing it as nothing more than a way to get out of her pajamas and back into the world. But over next twelve months, from St. Patrick’s Day through Poetry Month, graduation/Father’s Day/summer reading/Christmas and back again to those shamrock displays, Shea lived and breathed books in a place she says sells “ideas, stories, encouragement, answers, solace, validation, the basic ammunition for daily life.” Her work was briefly interrupted by an author tour that took her to other great bookstores. Descriptions of these and her memories of book-lined rooms reaching all the way back to childhood visits to the Bookmobile are scattered throughout this charming, humorous, and engrossing account of reading and rejuvenation.

For anyone who loves books, and especially for anyone who has fallen under the spell of a special bookstore, Shelf Life will be required reading.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To fill the time as she recovered from cancer and chemotherapy, Strempek Shea volunteered at a friend’s independent bookstore in Springfield, Mass. An accomplished novelist (Around Again; Lily of the Valley), Strempek Shea felt at first like a spy—"a farmer hanging around the dairy section"—as she observed customers in constant discovery of books. Despite the bleak reason for her new job, she embraced it with delight and here recounts her sojourn at Edwards Books with humor and passion. Not a great deal happens though, even during the coverage of 9/11. She looks at the small, independent bookstore, and how it stays in business. Although she can’t help making fun of the inane questions she’s sometimes asked ("What would you recommend for a flight to California? I’ll be sleeping most of the time"), she lovingly portrays devoted book folks, such as "the tiny older woman who arrives on her payday to buy two or three more mysteries. The young woman who received the call that the latest of the Gothic novels her mother collects have arrived." The author also shares droll, albeit tacitly self-promoting, insights on the tour for her latest book ("there are maybe forty people at my reading, and I even know two of them!"). As readers absorb the life of the bookstore and author, many will be tempted to look for the titles she drops throughout the work. Book enthusiasts who pine for a friendly, like-minded community will love this light, funny memoir.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Novelist Shea turned memoirist in Songs from a Lead-Lined Room (2002), a chronicle of her bout with breast cancer. She now continues her upbeat recovery saga with a smart and jocund contribution to the ever-popular "year of" genre by telling the tale of her first year working in an independent bookstore. Realizing that although she was healing physically, she needed a reason to leave the house, Shea jumped at the chance to work at Edward Books in Springfield, Massachusetts. She launches her piquant and irresistible narrative with a hilarious riff on the questions bookstore clients ask, which is followed by revealing glimpses into her experiences as a touring author and a supple overview of the state of the book world in general and endangered independent bookstores in particular. With her sparkling humor, reporter's eye for detail, raconteur's love of anecdote, literary passion, and affection for humankind, Shea fashions a fresh and rousing tribute to the grand and quirky tradition of bringing books and readers together with insight, finesse, and enthusiasm. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 223 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; First Edition edition (May 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807072583
• ISBN-13: 978-0807072585
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,946,680 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reading, writing, books and bookstores, May 16, 2004

By 

Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama. and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore (Hardcover)

Suzanne Strempek Shea has discovered what we librarians have known for a while: that dispensing books to the general public can be a rewarding experience. It can also put you into contact with a wide variety of people with a wide variety of interests and/or problems. Any one of us could write a book about it, and Suzanne has. She details her duties in her part-time job at an independent bookstore, where she began to work after surviving radiation treatments for cancer. Here she learns the tricks of the retail trade. She prepares displays for every holiday on the calendar. She watches consumer reactions to 9/11. And she figures out what to tell people who say that they're looking for "something that isn't going to make me think." In a way, her employment is as recuperative and as rehabilitating for her as it is to the customers buying from the store's self-help section.

But the story isn't just about a bookstore in Springfield, Massachusetts. Suzanne also traces her own lifetime encounters with books, including those happy childhood days when the community bookmobile would visit her neighborhood. She tells us about the other bookstores she visits on book signing tours (she's published five other volumes) right down to the Polish pierogies that are served as refreshments. Here's a woman who's in love with every aspect of the written word and who conveys that emotion to us on every page.

Anyone who frequents a library or a bookstore will be able to relate to Susanne's observations. You might even recognize yourself here! A light and entertaining read, right down to the nifty drawings that number the chapters. And it WILL make you occasionally think.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An inspiring and gentle read, November 8, 2004

By 

Gen of North Coast Gardening (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama. and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore (Hardcover)

After beating breast cancer, Shea finds herself at a crossroads, not knowing quite how to step back into everyday life. So she gets a job at her favorite used bookstore, and in this book she tells of her adventures in reading and retail.

The book is gently paced, which is what you would expect of a book about a bookstore. The book is filled with description and gently amusing stories from the trade, which makes it a good bathtime, teatime, or bedtime book.

I think in places it was a little too gentle for me, which is why I read it in tandem with a faster paced book, but the sweetness and genuine love for books that is evident in Shea's writing made this a very enjoyable read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Little Uneven, but a Good Read for a Bookaholic..., January 6, 2005

By 

Georgene A. Bramlage "Cercis" (Leverett, MA / Roanoke, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama. and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore (Hardcover)

Shea's setting is universal for American booklovers. It could be any bookstore in any small mall anywhere in the United States, but is, in reality, located in a small downtown Springfield, MA mall. It is a setting Shea knows very well because she grew up not far from this county seat, still lives in that same town, and is familar with the bookstore and friends with the owner. "Shelf Life" chronicles not only the ebb and flow of life in a small urban bookstore, but Shea's rise up from depression following breast cancer (see "Songs from a Lead-lined Room.") Working two short days per week Shea does what she does best - observes people and their approaches to things and life - while she arranges displays, unpacks orders and rings up purchases. Readers get an inside glimpse of how small independent bookstores work and some of the many "characters" who frequent them. Readers also are somewhat privy to Shea's attempt to get back to her writer's world and treated to flashbacks of early bookstore readings and signings (including her mother and friends' serving pierogi at the first) and Shea's love of Ireland as a place to visit, as oppposed to Poland. All this flashing back and forth made the book read a little uneven for me. At times I got the feeling that Shea was writing the book because this was a task she'd set for herself...she was laboring. But I'm glad that she did write it as I value her fortitude as well as characterizations of bookstore visitors and comments on the rise and fall of Springfield's downtown. Shea can be thought of as a "regional writer," or a "Polish regional writer," but what she writes is applicable to almost any region or culture in the U.S. She should be better known and more widely read than just in New England or just in Polish communities.