Black Mountain

A grey spring day at Lake Tomahawk, Mar 22, 2024

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Another Appalachian good book

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap...by Wendy Welch.
What a lovely entertaining read.  With the subtitle of  "memoir of friendship, community and the uncommon pleasure of a good book."
With a black cat pictured on the cover.

How could it be otherwise?
I've been enjoying this book, and will be sorry when I finish it tonight as my go-to-sleep read.  Ms. Welch writes of her own life starting a used bookstore with her Scotch husband in small small town Virginia.  This book speaks of literature as comfortably as walking down the street looking in shop windows, and yet the most memorable part for me is the continuing stories of interactions with the customers of the book store.

I did have to look it up on the map...and even then didn't believe Virginia had a little town there...it's coal country, it's near KY and TN...but not as near NC as I thought it would be.  But it's just a stone throw up in the mountains even so.  Big Stone Gap, VA.

I highly recommend this book, and was delighted that our library had the large print version!


 


6 comments:

  1. I always think that one of the main problems of the proliferation of books available via electronic publishing is that it becomes increasingly difficult to focus in on books that are worth reading. Recommendations such as yours are therefore especially helpful. Thanks, I will search for the book.

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  2. How interesting to have written a book about a bookstore!

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  3. A good recommend when you will be sorry to get to the end. Thanks for the great review!

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  4. I love little bookstores, and I love little mountain towns. I'm sure to like this book. Thanks

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  5. Hi everyone...glad to hear you're interested. I'll certainly do more reviews, though most of my reading has little or nothing to do with living in North Carolina. In this book, the owners of their own bookstore would travel to Asheville to go to Malaprops, one of the few locally owned bookstores around.

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So glad to have your comments...whatever they may be. I'm one who likes to reply sometime or another, so others will see that; or you might happen back sometime and see what conversation might have started.