Spring pickings: Elliott Bay Book Co., Seattle

I’d like to recommend ‘The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death and Pretty Much Everything Else’ by Christopher Beha. I was totally charmed by this book, which is partly a medical memoir (he’s recovering from lymphoma and some other health problems) and partly a meditation on the ways in which reading creates a whole community of readers and writers ... sort of a reader’s genealogy. It reminded me of what we as booksellers do with each other and with our authors and our customers and it was a great reminder that much adult education can and does still occur outside of academe. Chance encounters really do lead to developing new reading lists, ideas and books (and in at least one case here, a filmed version of a book by an Indian author published here by a small press). And I discovered that I really do have to read ‘Two Years Before the Mast’... and many of the other books Beha discusses.