How Booksellers Read

You might have noticed that the math here is actually not all that complicated.  It boils down to this: How and what do booksellers read?  Everything, all the time.”

Last week I attended a small gathering of booksellers.  Inevitably with a group of booksellers, the conversation turns toward what everyone is reading.  How do booksellers choose what to read next?  The math can get complicated, so bear with me.

Since many of those gathered do the buying for their stores, a lot of us were reading advance copies of books coming out this fall.  (One person was reading a February 2027 release, but this was too much even for me, and I didn’t retain the title.)  I’m just about at the tail end of meeting with sales reps from various publishing houses to review my fall orders with them.  More often than not, I’m ordering books before I’ve had a chance to dip into them.  The catalogs buyers order from direct our reading for the next couple of months, as we try to cram in as many as we can so that when these books finally release and people pull them off our shelves and ask us how they are, we can answer with confidence.

Someone was reading the forthcoming book by Bonnie Garmus (author of “Lessons in Chemistry”), “Peck & Peck,” set in the publishing world of 1980s New York, publishing October 13.  Someone else was reading “Public Access Afterworld” by Jane Schoenbrun, a real beast of a 600-page book that’s being compared to “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell (one of my all-time favorites) and someone else chimed in that they were reading it too.  I immediately felt left out and made a note to go find a copy immediately.  My most recent Fall 2026 read is “Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise” by Katherine Rundell, which, at only 80 pages long, feels a little like cheating.  But each page is so charming and full of wonder that it absolutely counts.

Rundell is a wide-ranging and prolific author, but you might know her from her recent bestselling children’s book “Impossible Creatures.” (“The Neverfear,” the third, much-anticipated book in that series publishes the same day as “Why You Should Read Children’s Books,” September 1.) “Why You Should Read Children’s Books” is a manifesto on the importance of reading books for young people and it will sit nicely on the shelf next to Mac Barnett’s recent book of similar argument, “Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children.”  Either, or both, will make you want to run straight to our children’s book room and pick out something to read just for fun.  It will remind you what makes children’s books so special — and so vital.  And either, or both, will give you something to think about so that you look at children’s books in new ways and appreciate them all the more.

However, booksellers are all also always trying to fill in gaps in our reading history.  Any book that published prior to the current season is called backlist.  So, basically everything.  A few booksellers gathered mentioned backlist titles they were reading.  One that stuck out to me was “The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time” by Keith Houston about every facet of a book and how and why it came to be.  If an industry veteran of over 30 years learned a lot from it, so can the rest of us.  I added it to my list.

I recently read the novel “I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpmen, translated by Ros Schwartz, originally published in French in 1995. Transit Books, a small press based in Berkeley, CA, published a new translation of the book in 2022. In 2024, it sold more than 100,000 copies and continues to sell and sell, driven in part by popularity on TikTok.  The hype, in this case, is well deserved.  I read the book in one sitting — quickly followed the same day by my mother after I handed it off to her and the next day by my brother after he got his hands on it. 40 women are imprisoned underground with no recollection of how they got there, how long they’ve been there, or why, but they can vaguely remember their lives before.  The narrator, much younger than the others, is different: she can remember nothing but the cage they live in. And then they escape.  There is so much mystery in this book, so many questions to ponder, especially the one about what it is that makes us human.  It’s worth experiencing.

Then there are the books publishing right now.  Booksellers are reading those, too!  Because sometimes we miss reading them early and now everyone is talking about them and we don’t like to be left out.  Or, honestly, sometimes we order too many and they’re not selling themselves and we need to be able to figure out who the perfect readers are for that particular stack of books.  And sometimes it’s because we get access to free audiobooks of recent releases, which is how I came to listen to “The Children” by Melissa Albert, a Gothic novel with wisps of fairy tale magic that haunted me until I finished.  A mother writes her children into her bestselling fantasy series, bringing them all fame and fortune — but at what cost?

If you’ve been reading closely and using your abacus, you might have noticed that the math here is actually not all that complicated.  It boils down to this: How and what do booksellers read?  Everything, all the time.

Hannah Harlow is owner of The Book Shop, an independent bookstore in Beverly Farms.  Harlow writes biweekly recommendations for us.  See more of what she recommends reading at thecricket.com.