Finding (and losing) ourselves in bookstores

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

"We know them. They come into a bookshop to find themselves. Book people."

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, quoting a bookseller, Browse

As a boy, I could lose myself utterly in a book; now I seem to lose myself only in used bookstores.

Michael Dirda, Browse

So which is it? Do we book people go into bookstores to find ourselves or to lose ourselves?

Both, I think. Or perhaps Michael Dirda and the Kenyan bookseller quoted by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor are really saying the same thing. Losing oneself may be a way of finding oneself. This may be what C.S. Lewis was talking about in the lines of his I quoted the other day ("First, surrender," May 1), those about surrendering ourselves to art (or presumably anything else) in order to get the most out of it. And what we get will most likely be something revealing about ourselves.

Michael Dirda

When we walk into a bookstore we immediately begin a sorting process, discarding (in our minds, at least) those books, sometimes entire categories of books, that don't interest us. When I am trying to find myself in a bookstore, I know I'm not likely to find me in a cookbook or a James Patterson novel or a book about motorcycles. My search takes me to the fiction, especially to literary fiction but also to mysteries, never romances. I browse through history (I've seen a lot of it, so might find myself there) and biography.

And so it goes for each of us. We seek out books that call to us, those that seem like mirrors. We buy those books that look the most like us, or at least those that look like our particular interests of the moment.

Meanwhile time passes, but we are hardly aware of it. In a bookstore, as in life itself, the search can be more rewarding than the discovery. And so we lose ourselves on the way to finding ourselves.