Shop Thoughts
The thing about my job as a bookseller is that I’m always reading ahead. There is always something new coming out, next week, next month, for the holiday season. When the hot new release shows up on our shelves, I want to already have read it, so when you walk into the shop, I can tell you if it’s the right book for you or not. Once the moment has passed, if I haven’t read that book, it’s unlikely I’m going to read it now. But true vacation reading is a different matter and on my trip to Portugal and Spain, I had decided to pack one book and pick up the rest on the road. Which meant the books could be new or old, the only requisite being that they had to speak to me.
I picked up Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrere because I had never heard of it before, it had been nominated for a few awards in France, where it was originally published, and because it was about a ski trip and I love skiing. The cover of Class Trip shows a few skiers on a trail, a gray day, the colors a bit washed out. Let me start by saying there’s a disappointing amount of skiing in Class Trip. Beyond that, though, it is a deft psychological journey, portraying a schoolboy with overbearing parents and an overactive imagination away from home for the first time on a two-week school trip to the mountains where everything goes wrong: he forgets his bag and has nothing to wear, he’s paired in a bunk with the terrifying biggest kid in the class, and then a young boy in the town where they’re staying goes missing.
I read much of the book sitting by a pool in the mountains of northern Portugal after a morning of hiking. The next morning we packed up and descended the treacherous hairpin turns back down the mountains and into Spain, arriving in San Sebastian a few hours later. On our drive, we listened to the audiobook of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. Each essay has appeared previously in the New Yorker and some of the stories we were already familiar with, but listening to self-contained stories periodically throughout the drive was an enjoyable way to pass the time. After each one finished, we found ourselves asking: who was the rogue, the person we originally thought of as the perpetrator or the person we originally thought of as the victim? Keefe has a way of questioning each character’s motivations, making you consider the situations from different angles.
Once in San Sebastian, I visited the used bookstore around the corner from the apartment we were renting. I still had a few pages left of Class Trip, so the situation wasn’t dire, and I forewent yellow-paged copies of various novels, despite the store’s charm. We woke the next day to an overcast sky and intermittent rain and spent the day wandering the charming sidewalks of Old Town and occasionally stopping into shops, including a three-floored new bookstore with a bookcase dedicated to English-language books. After much debate, I was swayed to purchase Consent: A Memoir of Stolen Adolescence by Vanessa Springora, originally published in France in 2020 and in the U.S. in 2021. I had recalled hearing about it—it was a sensation in France at the time—and a Time quote on the cover promised me it was “rapier-sharp, written with restraint.”
I love when promises live up to expectations. Consent is a tough, troubling story, a memoir of grooming and sexual abuse by a man (and distringuished author) 35 years Springora’s senior when she was only 14, but it is written with a similar elegance and restraint as The Lover by Marguerite Duras. And as with the best memoirs, in telling her story, Springora also questions and examines the mores of the times, the systems in place that allowed such a thing to happen.
Not exactly light reading, but I read much of it on the plane ride home, when vacation was nearly over, and I was preparing to re-enter real life. I’m not sure I would have picked up Class Trip or Consent otherwise. I wouldn’t have made time for them in my “normal” life, but I’m glad traveling caused me to cross paths with them.
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.
