Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 149, 49, 49 of three books.
Forgive the bizarre echo in this recording.
I am walking around very slowly in an odd triangle shaped second floor boardroom that you can rent at the airport when your flight to Chicago gets delayed by high winds.
Yeah, they call it the windy city for a reason.
I have been blowing around like the wind the last few weeks.
In the last few weeks, I have been in Nashville, hanging out with 5,000 of the funnest Marriott general managers ever.
Over in Vancouver, hanging out with about 3,500 McDonald's store managers, which is a lot of fun.
I've been in Vegas.
I've been in Dallas.
I've been in Chicago.
I've been in Ottawa today, speaking to the federal government this morning.
I was in Barcelona last week, speaking to a big bank out there.
And you know what?
A few weeks ago, I was down in San Diego.
That's when I went birdwatching in the morning.
I like to go birding before I speak.
Grounds me physiologically, gives me a lot of good phytoncides, checks off my list maker tendency.
So I was birding down in like Torrey Pines, seeing peregrine falcons, common ravens, California scrub jays.
And then I walk up the coast, the Pacific Ocean.
An hour later, I bump into John and Alison, the booksellers, wonderful 42-year-long booksellers who John, at age 67, just opened Camino Books for the road ahead.
But before we get into John and Alison, as always, I want to kick things off with a letter.
If you want to send me a letter, just mail it to 719 Bloor Street West, Suite 307, Toronto, Ontario, M6G1L5.
I love getting your letters in the mail.
And if you don't want to leave a letter, you can always call me at 1-833-READALOT.
I play a voicemail at the end of every chapter.
Okay.
This chapter's letter comes from Timothy Abbatacola, who writes to us from Oak Park, Illinois.
Dear Neil, he writes, I am an avid listener of three books.
I think what you've hit on is such a gem.
It's almost unbelievably perfect from a book lover's perspective.
I'm reaching out because a friend and I are starting a bookstore in Oak Park, Illinois, where we both live.
It's the birthplace of Hemingway, so we've got that going for us.
We believe that the bookstore's naturally flexible form can be experimented with to expand its cultural and intellectual reach in order to address some of the cultural illnesses of our lonely, anxious time.
Some things you've touched on in multiple chapters, isolation, anxiety, along with things like cultural illiteracy and just plain old regular illiteracy.
We're thinking of our bookstore primarily as a place offering a convening ground for writers, artists, thinkers, those who aspire to such work, and those who aspire to simply live a life that is examined and good.
To do this, our adjoining unit is going to feature a cocktail bar, where we hope to utilize a shared floor plan and continuity of design to bring the interiority and stillness of books to the verve and conviviality of the cocktail house.
We believe, and I think you'd agree, that our interior lives ought to push us back out into friendship and the social realm, that stillness and conviviality are not in opposition, but equally vital organs of one full and precious life.
I'm reaching out because our work is a convening ground for all the different types of people in the book world.
I love your work, and I want our community to be formed in part by it.
I'm making and sustaining friendships with the people we love and who we believe do great work in other worlds.
We want to highlight what you do to our community, all the while strengthening our own culture.
By being attentive to the work you put out, we would love to help that inform our bookstore.
The letter goes on and on.
I've had a really fun time going back and forth to Timothy.
We basically established that three books can be used anywhere, and I say this to any bookseller.
The three formative books of Quentin Tarantino, the three formative books of Brené Brown.
Whatever you want to do.
It's totally fine with me.
And then I also just love verb and conviviality and community, so we're having fun conversations about other ways of organizing bookstores.
How else might you organize a bookstore?
1-833-READALOT, if you want to drop me a line, and you know the mailing address, I mentioned it at the beginning.
All right.
Why did I read a letter from an aspiring independent bookseller, Timothy?
Well, because we're going to talk to a veteran independent bookseller today.
After I went birdwatching at Torrey Pines before my speech in San Diego a couple weeks ago, holding, by the way, these gigantic pine cones that are bigger than the size of your hand from the endangered Torrey Pine, seeing all these wonderful, cool, interesting birds.
I walk up the coast.
I bump into Del Mar.
I ask a couple people in town, hey, is there a local bookstore here?
Everyone says no.
The locals tell me there is no bookstore, but then I see a bookstore, like a hobbit hole bookstore in the side of a brick wall.
Big round entrance, Camino Books, it says, for the road ahead.
I walk into the bookstore, and it's like a Biblio paradise.
Staff pics, walls everywhere, handwritten signs, bustling people everywhere.
These interesting kids' corners.
I checked the Lord of the Rings section.
They've got like big print and small print and a fancy version and a cloth version.
This is just Lord of the Rings.
It's just like a 1500 group of bookstores.
There's autographs from Dave Eggers on the wall.
He was just there for Independent Bookstore Day.
They've got all kinds of sign books at the front.
It's got pizazz.
I asked them, hey, I started to say, hey, sorry to ask you, but like my phone just died.
I'm visiting from Canada.
Can I plug it in somewhere?
And the guy looks at me.
Guy, late 60s, he's got white hair combed over his head.
He's got like dark glasses, a really nice, he's nicely dressed.
He's got like tight pants.
He's got a, he's, he's a, he's a handsome man.
He's wearing like a, not a Hawaiian shirt, but like a, like a silk dress shirt coming out kind of just hanging out there.
He's a, he's a handsome man.
And he gives me like a quirky smile.
And he says, oh, from Canada, how many tariffs should I add to your free charge?
And he smiles at me with this kind of funny way.
And I look at him and I'm like, I start laughing.
We end up connecting over this funny joke and we start talking politics, which you probably shouldn't do just randomly, but we just did it.
And I made the comment, I said, you know, I wonder if the most right-wing guy in Canada is left of the most left-wing guy in the U.S. And he says, oh yeah, absolutely.
He says, we don't have a left wing.
We're like a, we're like an eagle slowly spiraling to the ground with just one right wing.
And I look at him and I'm like, uh, whoa, did you just make that up?
He's like, yeah, yeah.
I was like, do you think like this all the time?
He's like, yeah, yeah.
I was like, wow.
I said, you know what?
The way you're speaking and the way you look, you kind of remind me of George Saunders.
He says, George, great guy.
Had lunch with him at a bookseller convention recently.
Yeah.
He said, yeah, we have the same aura, don't we?
We have the same warm gnarliness.
That's what he said.
He said, we have the same warm gnarliness.
Well, you guys know George, our guest in chapter 75, author of Lincoln and the Bardo.
He's got a pretty cool warm gnarliness, doesn't he?
And if you haven't checked out his recent op-ed in the New York Times about the firing of the librarian from the Library of Congress, I do implore you to check it out.
We'll throw that in the show notes.
But anyway, this guy is like another George Saunders, and he's been a bookseller for 42 years since 1983 in Berkeley, California.
That's where he met his 30 plus year girlfriend, maybe 40 plus year, but now recent wife.
They've just got married, so we can wish that newly happily married couple well.
We're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about a lot of things.
We're going to talk about building bookstores, about California independence, about fighting fascism and much, much more.
I basically turned on the recorder right after we had that opening exchange.
So what follows is the conversation I had live in Camino Books in Del Mar, California, 30, 40 feet away from the sandy edge of the water into the twinkling Pacific Ocean down a dusty, sandy main street in town with the fresh bookshop feeling.
You can smell the paper.
You can smell the binding glue.
There's light coming in the front.
There's people milling around, and we had this conversation.
Let's flip the page into chapter 149.
I guess it takes as long as you want.
How long do you want it to take?
Well, let's not start right now.
Let's go outside.
Outside?
What's outside?
It's beautiful.
You don't want to do a podcast inside?
No, no.
I just don't want to distract my co-worker.
I can't shoplift.
I'll have to buy your book first.
Can't just walk out of here with my next breath by Jeremy Renner.
Although this is before, as we walk outside, John, we're walking from the back of your store to the front.
Could you just give us a tour?
What am I looking at here?
You just moved here.
You're looking at me.
Yeah.
And your beautiful pink striped shirt, your thin black glasses, the aura of George Saunders, the same warm gnarliness.
That's right.
We're right by the poetry section, my favorite section.
All your signs are handwritten.
You wrote handwritten.
Some of them are.
Mystery is handwritten.
Fiction is handwritten.
True crime is written.
We've only been here three weeks in this location.
Oh, mythology section.
What other sections do you have here that most bookstores don't?
Let's see.
Do we have...
What other sections?
We have just a global section.
We have a divination section.
But we have most of the subject categories.
Yeah.
I'd say.
I don't know.
We have romance for all those.
You have a Middle Eastern category.
That's pretty rare.
Yeah.
We have all the different sort of regional studies.
It's all done due...
And it's a small bookstore.
Yeah.
It's only 1,300 square feet.
Wow.
And you've been in the bookselling business since 1989.
1981, actually, but 89, we've had bookstores since then.
Diesel, a bookstore, was our first bookstore.
We just sold the LA store along with the name.
And then six months ago, changed our names to Camino Books for the Road Ahead.
For the Road Ahead?
For your Road Ahead?
And yours.
Wow.
May I ask how old you are?
67.
Wow.
So you've been in the bookselling business since what age?
I guess it's...
81.
That would have been 24.
You were 24.
Yeah.
24 to 67.
Yeah.
That's a long time.
Yeah.
That's 43 years.
Good.
You're good with math.
Well, I'm Indian.
That's the low stakes in my, in my, you know, in our field.
Yeah.
You gotta be able to...
Many mathematical geniuses.
Yeah.
No, it's just two-digit numbers, actually, my personal specialty.
Don't get me on three.
It's good enough for most things.
John, and you run the store with your wife, Alison?
Yes.
And so when you were 24 in 1981, and you opened Diesel?
No, we opened in 1989.
We opened Diesel.
But 1981, I first became a bookseller.
Where was that?
Berkeley.
University.
Berkeley and Oakland.
Yeah.
Near the university.
Yeah.
What was the name of that bookstore?
One was called Talusadar, which is the center of the earth in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels.
And the other one was called Pegasus.
Oh, Pegasus books.
Oh, Pendragon, actually.
Okay.
Pendragon was the other one.
And then Pegasus opened.
So all three of those were the same owner.
Wow.
Is that where you met Alison?
Yeah.
Oh, she was a bookseller as well.
Yeah.
I met her before she started working there.
But yeah.
Wow.
You were 24.
She was...
Older.
Wow.
A little bit.
Yeah.
Did you end up getting married?
Yeah.
You're married.
How long?
Well, we haven't been married very long.
But we've been together since 83 or something.
And what year did you get married?
Mm, 2000...
I don't really remember.
Maybe five years ago.
So what is it?
Like, no, it was before that.
So what makes you, after being boyfriend and girlfriend for 37 years, decide to get hitched?
That's a good question.
You know, I think a couple of different things.
It felt good.
Wow.
So it was that.
But actually, I mean, the wedding was fantastic.
Yeah.
I mean, it wasn't a big wedding.
It was only two, two people, three people were witnesses.
But it was just felt so good.
Yeah.
Weddings are great.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
But you held off for, you know, quite a while.
And you're like, put it...
We wanted to be sure.
37 years of making sure
You know, there's a lot of ideas swirling around a bookstore.
You're a natural skeptic and curious at the same time.
You're a believer and, you know, don't believe too much.
You know, way back in, I think, Chapter 18 of this show, we interviewed a guy named Mitchell Kaplan, who runs a bookstore chain called Books and Books down in Coral Gables Florida.
Do you know Mitchell?
I know him very well, yeah.
Oh, how do you know him?
He's a friend of mine.
Well, he was on the American Booksellers Association board before I was.
I've known him, I don't know, 40 years.
So he also, I would say, has a warm gnarliness.
Yeah.
Yes, definitely.
It comes with bookish, curious people, I think.
Why?
Because I think there's a lot of critical intelligence going on.
That's the gnarliness.
And then there's a lot of humanity and warmth with all the people you see.
I mean, people coming in, you see a great swath of humanity, right, coming through the store.
All ages, all types of people, interested in all types of things.
But basically, they're pretty civil and kind in a bookstore.
Wow.
So it's pretty heartwarming.
So then would you argue that, because the way we met was, you know, I've been recording this for five minutes.
We met seven minutes ago when I asked you if you could plug in my phone as I walked into this bookstore, which two people on the street said, there is no bookstore in town.
I asked two people and they both said, there is no bookstore.
Then I walk in and I was awestruck by the beauty of this place.
It hit me right away.
There's no chargers at the front.
No, I walked to the back and you asked me, what kind of tariffs you should add to my free charge.
Yeah, because you had said that you were Canadian.
It's the first thing that came to mind.
What do you make of the tariffs?
Oh, no.
It's just a bad idea.
The most right wing guy in Canada is more left than your leftist wing guy. And you said,
I said that there isn't really a left wing in America.
It's like an eagle without a left wing and it's just spiraling to the ground.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's what I think.
And the tariffs thing is just not friendly.
It's not neighborly.
There's that old joke from Jimmy Fallon.
I think right when it started, he said, you know, maybe it's the New Yorker in me, but when you got both your upstairs neighbor and your downstairs neighbor mad at you, it's not a good situation.
That's right.
Yeah.
It's just not, not good.
Could we not solve this, though, if we became the 51st state?
No.
Do you think Alaska should be the 11th province?
That's the joke you said to me.
Alaska could be the 11th province or California.
Oh, you would rather join us than us join you.
Yeah.
At this moment.
But things change, you know.
The only problem is California doesn't actually touch Canada.
So we've got a couple of states in the middle there we have to talk to.
Yeah.
Well, that's true.
But look at Alaska.
We've set an excellent example.
Alaska doesn't touch any other part.
Same with Hawaii.
In fact, there's a country in the middle of Alaska.
Yeah, that's true.
We do have an island.
Yeah.
A couple islands there.
Yeah.
And, you know, Oregon and Washington, like, you know, they could be convinced.
They might.
Yeah, just one whole state.
We could also just go independent because it is a big economy.
You know, California, Oregon, Washington, Pacific.
What do you think the likelihood of California seceding is?
Because in Canada there's a province called Alberta, which is far more right wing than the rest of Canada.
And they're very unhappy with the results of the recent federal election as well as the past three federal elections.
So there's talk of succession where Alberta could leave and become, you know, maybe part of the states.
Yeah.
I mean, there is talk about that in California.
In fact, historically, parts of California have seceded from attempted to secede from California.
But it has to be approved by Congress.
And so in both cases, the state of Jefferson, as it was going to be called up in northern California and southern southwestern Oregon, were going to become a state called Jefferson.
They voted it.
It went before Congress.
And the I think the yeah, that was when World War Two broke out.
So Congress never dealt with it.
So it's actually still pending.
And then earlier, southern California, just before the Civil War, voted to secede from northern California because of all the craziness around the settlement up there and around the gold.
What year was that?
That was like 19, I mean, 1859, something like that.
And so they voted for the southern like third of the state.
And then it went before Congress and the Civil War broke out.
So it was never dealt with either.
So there's that still pending as well.
Yeah.
They're both theoretically pending, but nobody takes it up again.
But so there is talk about California seceding.
Do I think what are the chances, you ask me?
And I think pretty minuscule because because I don't think you'd get enough people to do it.
It's a complicated thing.
Like it's like when Scotland was thinking of separating from Britain, which it thinks about a lot.
A lot of people were like, well, it'll take 20 years of, you know, chaos kind of to an extent to get things stabilized.
May take less for.
So therefore, you feel as as the as the eagle circles and the one downside of I see you stepping outside.
The one side says the wind.
I don't have a wind muffler on my phone.
That's the one thing I know.
I don't want to interrupt your your customers.
Who do you call?
They call them customers or guests.
Well, that's interesting.
We were just talking about that the other day about what I call them.
Readers.
Right.
Yeah.
J.K. Rowling was once challenged on Twitter because.
Once?
John, I walk in the front door of your beautiful bookstore.
By the way, James Daunt was a past guest on our show, a CEO of Barnes and Noble.
And he says a good bookstore is lots of weird corners, lots of weird posts, lots of weird ceilings, a lot of weird shapes.
For some reason, that makes a good bookstore.
And you have nailed it with this.
That's right.
It's 13, 14 hundred square feet.
But it's on like I want to say like a seven sided room that has pillars everywhere, all these random walls.
But you've painted a beautiful bright orange.
You've got kind of like almost like a royal or a blue jay blue like kind of door and window.
There's white ceilings.
You've got the blue dot sail on the front cabin.
You've got a big ladder right behind me.
Nice cards.
And the front display, you've got The Maid's Secret by Nita Prose, Who is Government by Michael Lewis, The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins.
You've got Careless People, the Facebook book by Sarah Wynne Williams, On Tyranny, a small book by Timothy Snyder.
What else?
He just moved to Canada.
Really?
Yeah.
Because?
Made a lot of people nervous.
Because if there is a sort of left, he would be in it.
And he and three other political critics of tyranny, fascism, things like that just moved to Canada.
Wow.
OK, I'm picking it up.
It's called On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century by Timothy Snyder.
It's a small little crown publishing like paperback for twelve dollars US, sixteen dollars Canadian.
What else did you put in the front display here and why?
This is all bestsellers.
These are the books that people in Del Mar are reading.
The Service Berry by Robin Wall Kimmerer you're picking up.
Yeah, she wrote Braiding Sweetgrass.
I have that book.
Upstate New York, yeah.
I read Martyr by Kaveh Akbar.
I've picked up Abundance by Ezra Klein, but I have not read it.
Pico Ayer is great and that started.
Aflame.
Yeah.
OK, what's Aflame about by Pico Ayer?
It's about the loss of his home by fire, which I mean, Californians, you know, just went.
In fact, Alison and I lost a place up in Pacific Palisades in L.A. in January.
Wow.
As part of that huge fire.
Wow.
Beautiful store.
Beautiful displays.
Cards.
You've got hats here.
There's a smiling woman with red hair on the phone in the front left counter.
It's one of your booksellers.
There are customers picking books off the shelves.
It's a busy store considering, you know, it must have just, you know, just opened.
You got the door propped open.
Three weeks ago.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, we moved from a few miles away, so.
So the sub headline of the store, why did you not make that the name of the store?
You'd have to ask Alison that because she named it.
We had to all of a sudden realize that when we sold our store, we would have to come up with another name.
And you had Diesel?
Diesel, a bookstore.
So we're used to punctuated names for our.
Diesel.
How do you spell diesel?
D-I-E-S-E-L, like the gasoline.
And it's the name of the bookstore for that many years you had that bookstore.
You just sold it.
Yeah, from 1989 until last August.
Wow, where was that?
We started in Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, then down to Malibu, Brentwood in L.A. We had a store in Larkspur in Marin.
And then we had one just three miles away from here.
And now we're here.
So how many stores did you have when you sold it?
Two.
Oh, but it sounds like you had about eight.
We had four total, but we moved around a little bit.
And when you sold two bookstores, is selling bookstores a common thing?
And then opening your own new one?
We sold one and kept one.
So we just had to rename it.
And that's how Camino happened.
So this is the one you kept.
But you had to change the name because you sold the name.
Wow, and is there a good market for people buying bookstores these days?
Well, you know, you were talking about secession.
This is like succession.
Like how do you keep a bookstore going in a community past the original owner's intent, right?
Like when you mentioned Mitch Kaplan, he's like around my age.
And what's he going to do in 20 years?
Is one of his kids going to take over it?
Or is it the people that are working there?
Or Judy Blume?
Judy Blume, yeah.
She could expand.
I interviewed her in her bookstore, Books and Books in Key West, which of course is a books and books bookstore.
But it's a nonprofit bookstore.
So who knows?
But, you know, so people are, yes, people are buying bookstores right now as well as opening them.
I mean independent bookstores are doing okay.
Not as good as they should do.
But I'm kind of an evangelist for that.
Yeah, but when you think about succession, one idea is you sell the chain, you sell the name, you open a smaller one that you can run for the next road.
Yeah, if you're continuing on.
I mean it didn't make sense really for someone in L.A. to buy both stores, right?
And so we got a very nice offer to move here from the landlord here who wanted a bookstore.
They had had one before.
And our lease was up in the other space.
So we decided to move the store at the same time as change the name.
It was a busy year.
And where are we?
We're in Del Mar.
Which is where?
Where is Del Mar?
It's in North County, just north of San Diego, just over the border, just north of UC San Diego.
And it's right next to the Del Mar Racetrack, which is where the surf meets the turf, a sort of storied racetrack, horse racing.
They have a county fair for a couple months every year and then horse races.
And what's Del Mar, California, known for?
I know George Saunders and Dave Eggers are amongst the at least passing through customers.
I saw a huge display of signed Dave Eggers books at the back and he was just here.
He made a big poster for you.
So what else is the town about?
The town is also known as one of the places where humanistic psychology started in the 60s.
And so if you have to go back to I'd say the 60s and 40s and 50s, it was more known for the track and that kind of thing.
And then later on, sort of overflow from UCSD with professors living here and people who graduated from there.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful place.
A learned professorial, academic, well-read, left-leaning surf town.
Yeah, it's a mix of left and right, I'm sure, to the extent there's a left, as we talked about.
But yeah, and it's beautiful.
I mean, we're three blocks from the beach and the weather's great and it's lovely.
Wow.
Signed Dave Eggers shelf behind you with what is the what, the every, you shall know our velocity, and it was a tone.
Author of the month is Kate DiCamillo, which is his author of all the Mercy Watson books.
And because of Winn-Dixie, there's all these staff picks notes and your next great read.
And you're really well tagged and well read.
It's a really fulsome, hearty store.
Now if you're 67, does that mean you were born in 1958?
57.
1957.
And so that means you grew up in the 60s?
Yeah.
And isn't that old adage that if you remember the 60s, you weren't there?
Yeah, I remember them pretty well, though, because I was younger.
Where were you?
I've been places.
Where were you born?
I was born in Pennsylvania, in coal mining area.
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
And then lived in Kansas for the wonder years, from 3 to 10.
The wonder years.
And then went to Massachusetts for one year, and then Delaware.
My father worked for DuPont.
And that's where DuPont is centered.
So tracing back the roots, back behind Delaware through Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Kansas, was there a book or two that pops out in your early memory as somewhat shaping your warm gnarliness and general personality?
It's funny.
I didn't think about my, for a while there, as a young adult, and for quite a while, I didn't really think about my childhood all that much.
And then all of a sudden I thought, Ferdinand, that book Ferdinand.
And I looked at it, and it all came back to me, how much I loved that book when I was a little kid, and that I had a little Ferdinand stuffed animal that was made with velvet or something like velvet.
Do you have it in the store?
Can you take us to it as you tell us about the book?
And do tell us about this book.
So Ferdinand was written during the Spanish Civil War.
We're walking to the back, past the red shelf, past the blue display of all the places you'll go.
Two white metal wicker chairs here.
We're in the kids' section now.
We're in the back nook, a corner, lots of brown shelves, lots of board books.
John is scanning floor-to-ceiling walls of picture books, kids' poetry, sleepy time, kids' music.
He's found it.
He's pulled off the board book.
He's found his own book like a needle in a haystack.
He's holding the story of Ferdinand by Monroe Leaf, a big square red book with a black drawing of a bull on the front, published in 1936.
This is the 17th printing of the board book.
Once upon a time in Spain, there was a little bull, and his name was Ferdinand.
All the other little bulls he lived with would run and jump and butt their heads together, but not Ferdinand.
That's right.
So he's a dreamer.
He doesn't really want to be a fighter.
He doesn't really want to have that kind of position in the world, and he's a beautiful guy.
How old were you when you read it?
Was this Pennsylvania days?
Probably Kansas, I would think.
Wonder years.
Maybe Pennsylvania, yeah.
Three to ten.
Yeah, somewhere in there.
And I had that little Ferdinand stuffed animal.
I mean, I could hold it in my hand, so it must have been not very big.
So it was red, even though this is black and white, and has always been black and white.
It was a red bull with black ears, all of it velvet.
Because the cover's red, even though the bull potentially is not.
It was a similar kind of red like that, and black ears.
So what about it?
Warm hearted and gnarly?
A bull who's a dreamer?
You know what I'm saying?
A bull who's a dreamer?
Yeah.
Would you describe yourself as a bull who's a dreamer?
Yeah, I would today.
At age 67.
My friend Susan Cain is in her 50s.
She wrote the book Quiet, and the book Bittersweet.
And I interviewed her before the pandemic at the 92nd Street Y.
We didn't release the conversation until after the pandemic, because we were waiting for Bittersweet to come out.
And Bittersweet kept getting delayed a year, about five years.
Worth the wait, though.
That was brutal.
As Oprah agrees.
Anyway, one of Susan Cain's most formative books is Ferdinand.
Oh, really?
That's funny.
Yeah, so it is that kind of, like on one hand, my sister said, you're so much more social than I am.
And I said, I'm so much more social than I am.
Right?
Because I am kind of an introverted person.
But then at the same time, I've just, I realize I'm too much outside myself.
Like I just turn myself inside out.
So that's when earlier you said, do you always talk like this?
I said, yeah, that's just the way it is.
Say that sentence again.
I'm so much more social than I am.
Because you're, because Susan.
I really assume that much.
Yeah.
So Susan wrote the book about introverts, Quiet.
Yeah.
This is her first recalled most formative book.
Yeah.
So we've got that in common.
Do you want to know her second?
Yeah.
I wonder if it's the same as yours.
Is yours Colette?
No.
No, but it could have been.
But no, no.
Oh, yeah.
See, I'm being called back to work now.
Do you have a second book in the wonder years?
Second book?
Yes.
What was it called, though?
It's I know exactly what it's about.
I can see the cover.
Yeah, I'll be right there.
Alison, sorry.
We're going to cut this off soon.
How much more time do I have?
A couple minutes?
That's your better half, right?
Now that you're married, we can't mess this up.
Yeah, it's Wow.
Secret Treasure, it's called.
And it was a kid's book.
And it's about the kids in Sweden who got the gold of Sweden out before the Nazis could get it.
Underneath them on sleds and took it down into fjords and loaded it on ships.
So it's a true story, but told from a little kid's point of view, you know, and so you're sledding down, getting the gold onto the ships before the Nazis get it.
I mean, so both of these are anti-fascist books.
Not that I was conscious of that at the time.
I understand why Secret Treasure is anti-fascist, stealing the gold before the Nazis could steal it from you.
It's got James Bond type imagery.
But how is Ferdinand anti-fascist?
Because it was all leading up into the Spanish Civil War, which was the test of Hitler and Mussolini joining Franco and suppressing the democratic government of Spain.
So this book being written in 1936, when was the Spanish Civil War?
36, 7, 8, 9.
Wow.
So when we talk about Trump and in the U.S., not to bring it back to this, but tag teaming with other dictators to suppress local populations is echoed throughout history, something that you've seen.
For example, El Salvador's president or Russia's president to take a chunk of the Ukraine.
You might argue that these are, you know, tag teaming behaviors.
Autocracy Inc., as Ann Applebaum would say.
Yeah.
Yeah, all that seems real.
In fact, you know, the other book I would say that influenced me later in life that Alison recommended is that Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which is set in the Spanish Civil War.
He volunteered.
He gets shot in the neck after a year.
So what's the name of the book?
Homage to Catalonia.
Can you spell that?
H-O-M-A-G-E.
Homage or homage.
Oh, homage.
OK.
Homage to?
To Catalonia.
Catalonia by George Orwell.
Yeah.
And that was read during the Wonder Years.
That was written— No, this was read later in my 20s.
But that war never ended in a way, right?
That sort of balance between democracy and fascism has been bouncing back and forth ever since who knows when.
Certainly World War II.
And I'm so dumb and ignorant that I— No, you aren't.
Well, I would love a little—can you give me two more minutes of context around that book?
I got to get back to work now.
Yeah.
OK, OK.
So he goes and volunteers in Spain and then he gets assigned to an anarchist regiment.
He being George Orwell?
Yeah, George Orwell and his wife.
And so they both go, as a lot of people did, like Hemingway did, and volunteered to fight against Franco, who had taken over the country.
And then he gets shot in the neck and then comes back.
And out of that is what comes 1984, Animal Farm, as he said himself.
So that's where he got his true like global on-the-ground political understanding of the forces of mid-century global culture, the attempts of power to subvert democracy.
Oh, my gosh.
So 44 years ago at age 23, when you're working at a bookstore in Berkeley and you read Homage to— Catalonia.
By George Orwell, this as the third of your formative books and also—
None of them were like intentional reading in that sense. They were just great books, great reads.
But it was like took root.
What took root?
Those ideas, those like liberatory ideas, it's just as far as war as oppression, which it always is.
War as destruction, as it always is.
Power over others used and abused is bad.
It's pretty simple stuff, right?
And everybody kind of knows it.
They just don't see it necessarily sometimes.
So we all have to keep looking.
Stay awake.
What are three ways to run a profitable bookstore?
Be passionate, be curious, and listen and take care of everybody that's in here.
Wow.
John, what's your last name?
Evans.
John Evans.
And is it Alison Evans?
No.
What's Alison's last name?
Reid.
R-E-I-D.
John Evans, Alison Reid, bookseller since 1981, bookstore owner since 1989, and now the new proprietors of Del Mar's local Camino Books for the Road Ahead.
Thank you so much for coming on Three Books.
That was a real joy, John.
Thank you.
That was fun.
Thanks.
Is there anything else you want to say before I turn this off?
Okay, thanks.
I was just going to say that sounded so much fun.
I didn't know you were recording.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
I'm still recording.
I can turn this off.
But Alison, would you like to say – would you have one for – you know, because his first formative book is Ferdinand, which overlaps with Susan Cain. So if Alison has one formative book to throw in –
And I did mention The Homage to Catalonia that I always think everybody should read
Yeah.
But what's your formative book?
When you were little.
I have no mind.
Heidi?
Oh, I loved Heidi.
Oh, we don't have Heidi on the list.
And I've read Heidi, too.
It was popular.
I was a kid in Oshawa, Ontario, our east of Toronto.
Mom from Nairobi, dad from Amritsar, India, arranged marriage in England.
I was born in the suburbs, 1979, and we were read Heidi in school.
Uh-huh.
No, I read Heidi on my own.
I just loved the idea of going up a mountain in the summer.
Yeah.
You know, getting out of the city.
Were you living in a city?
Yeah, I grew up in Glasgow.
Oh, and how old were you when you read Heidi?
I don't know, maybe six or seven or something.
Wow, and you came over to Berkeley from there.
Oh, I came over a lot later, yeah.
Yeah, I came through New York and then Berkeley.
And, you know, now that you're on the coast of Delmar, right on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with the mountains up above you, you kind of have played the role of Heidi in your life a bit.
This is true, but I don't have a cowbell.
Alison, John, thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.
I really appreciate it.
Hey, everybody, it's just me, just Neil again.
I'm not hanging out in my basement with my backpack full of wires.
I'm holding a tiny lapel microphone with the receiver plugged into my iPhone in the Bellagio in Vegas.
A bit of a turnabout, but hopefully the sound quality is good enough.
As we listen to John and Alison, the 40-plus-year booksellers with their incredible wisdom, taking us back through their lives through the power of their own formative books, which include an asterisk.
That's what we're going to start with.
We're going to start with an asterisk on number 836.
That would be The Story of Ferdinand by Munroe Leaf.
I said it was Susan Cain, but I totally screwed up because, yes, it's one of Susan Cain's formative books.
Yes, she actually talks and writes about that book in quiet, but no, she did not give it to me on the podcast.
She did give me Collette, but I totally screwed up.
She gave it to Rumi.
She gave it to Collette.
Actually, it is on the podcast from Kate the Therapist in Chapter 56.
Oh, my gosh.
I totally messed that up.
Anyway, we move on.
That's all we can do is move on.
Then we've got number 566, Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, M-C-S-W-I-G-A-N.
Number 565, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which I've decided to pick up and read.
I really want to get that and read that.
It sounds like an incredible basis for Animal Farm in 1984, which I love both but never heard of this other one.
Number 564, this is Alison kind of kindly sweeping in at the end to give us three, and that would be Heidi by Joanna Spyri, S-P-Y-R-I.
Thank you so much to John and Alison for their formative books.
I did pull in a few quotes here.
How about this one?
You see a great swath of humanity coming through the store, all ages, all types of people interested in all types of things.
They're pretty civil in the bookstore, and it's pretty heartwarming.
Two, there isn't really a left wing in America.
It's like an eagle without a left wing, and it's just spiraling to the ground.
Three, be passionate, be curious, listen and take care of everyone.
That was John's wisdom on opening and running a profitable bookstore.
Then he gave me a quote right after he recorded because we kept chatting for a few minutes.
He said, gradually you become okay with whatever strange beast you've become.
I thought that was a really beautiful way to put it.
I remarked that he was sort of settled into his skin.
He said, gradually you become okay with whatever strange beast you've become, which I love, which wasn't in the podcast, but I'm throwing it in there as an Easter egg.
John, Alison, Camino Books, Del Mar community, support these people.
Get out there.
Get to your local bookstore.
Thank you so much for coming on Three Books.
Now, if you made it to the end of the podcast, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.
To kick it off, as we always do, let's go to the phones.
Hey, Neil.
It's Dave from Des Moines.
Love your show.
Very informative.
I'm driving now, and I especially love listening to it when I'm walking in the morning or driving.
Wanted to share three books with you.
The first is When You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
It's an awesome metaphor.
I've used it for 30 years at work when people aren't thinking forward on the implications of their decisions and the associated costs.
I give them the child book, When You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
It's a great reminder of that.
The second book is I just read, and it is The Ultimate Coach.
It's a book that's similar to Seth Godin's book Est, where he read it and it impacted him.
Didn't say it was a great literary piece of work, but it had a big impact on him.
The Ultimate Coach had similar to me in that I really ingested what it meant to me, not what it meant to The Ultimate Coach as it was written.
The third book I would say I also recently read was The Happiness Equation by yourself.
I think as I read and digested all of those books in a recent retreat, it really had a huge impact on how I want to think about my own life, its reinvention, and what it means to me.
Keep doing what you're doing, Neil.
It's great.
Love listening to your show.
Thanks.
Very kind of you to mention my book.
I really appreciate that.
Also, thank you for listening.
Thank you for calling in.
That's a great way to do it, guys.
Call 1-833-READ-ALOT anytime, 1-833-R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
Just leave me a form in a book, feedback, a dream guest, any reflection, any challenge, any debate.
We just love listening to you.
Call us, 3bookers.
It's always fun.
I won't go into another letter because I opened with a letter, but instead let's do a word of the chapter.
For this chapter's word, let's go back to John.
You were talking about secession.
This is like succession.
Yes, indeed.
It is secession.
Secession.
S-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N.
Note that this is a very different word than succession.
Succession is S-U-C-C-E-S-S-I-O-N.
Secession is S-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N.
They sound, they look like they would be very, very similar words, but that one letter difference, the S-E instead of the S-U, completely changes it, right?
Because succession means the order in which someone or something takes over a position or role.
Like at a big company, like when I worked at Walmart, we had a succession plan.
Who's going to be the CEO if this guy leaves?
Whatever, right?
But then secession is very different.
Secession means the separation or withdrawal from a larger entity, like the secession of states from a union, like the secession of southern states from the U.S. states, or the secession of a region from a country, the secession of a group from an organization.
Secession is from the Latin word seceder, S-E-C-E-D-E-R, which means to go apart, to go apart, which you can kind of see where succession came from there, too.
But secession is really from the mid-16th century, which denotes the withdrawal of plebeians from ancient Rome in order to compel the patricians to redress their grievances.
We all remember that, right?
No, the point is, secession is a softer sound, but it has a big meaning, to leave the thing that you're a part of, to secede.
Well, Camino Books, in a way, has seceded from Diesel Books, and now it's off on its own, a sprightly little offshoot in a hobble hole in down north California.
And if you go in, you will probably bump into John, or you'll probably bump into Alison, you'll bump into their lovely booksellers, and you will have a grand old time just soaking into the Biblio paradise that is Camino Books for the road ahead.
Look, for all of your roads ahead, I hope you enjoyed this conversation of three books, and remember until next time that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.
Keep turning the page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.
Take care.