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Book Box: A Reader in New York
A journey through bookstores, book clubs, and the great libraries of New York
Dear Reader,
New York is cold and wet. It had been snowing in the weeks before we arrived, and the streets still have sludgy snow and ice, swept up in small mounds on the corners of the sidewalks.
Our first day begins with a distasteful drama. As we come down the apartment stairs, our grey-haired Caribbean Indian landlady is lying in wait. “Our cameras have recorded you had your daughter come visit; this is against the rules,” she hisses. It feels both Orwellian and Kafkaesque, and takes me straight back to my cantankerous college hostel warden.
We are in a rush, but pulling on my coat and my boots, I scroll frantically through my phone. Are there any such rules? And how could I have missed them? When I get to the booking platform, it seems silent on any such strictures. Outside, the rain carries on, and the damp of the streets slowly seeps into my feet.
We are staying in a different New York neighborhood this visit. It’s far from the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn, the setting for immigrant classics like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and the riveting Brooklyn by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín—a neighborhood now full of beautiful independent bookstores like The Community Bookstore and the quirky The Ripped Bodice, a bookstore of romance books.
Instead, we are blocks away from Columbia University, where our middle child, the September baby, is now studying business. She takes us to one of her favorite libraries on campus, and we sit upstairs working in a little alcove full of books. It feels warm and fuzzy and comforting to be surrounded by so many books, and I slowly forget my wet feet and the agitation of the morning’s argument
The next day I visit the bookstores in the area. There are two new branches of the iconic independent Strand bookstore: The Strand at Columbus Avenue and The Strand at Lincoln Center. They are both nice, especially the one on 69th Street which even has a sliver of a coffee shop. But somehow neither has the vibe of the original bookstore—maybe they are smaller, or maybe they carry more non-book merchandise like puzzles and coasters and bags.
That evening we gather in a café that overlooks Columbus Circle. We bring books to swap with each other. There is Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann—one of those rare cases where the film might actually be better than the book. There’s The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, a bestselling novel told entirely in letters. The Outsider by Vir Das; gosh, how subdued Vir Das now is after getting into trouble with the Indian Government. He now dispenses life advice and motivation instead of making fun of the establishment, someone says, and the others agree. And a book of essays and stories on Iran, featuring the history, revolution, the protesters, and Evin prison, all in a graphic format. The book is called Woman, Life, Freedom and it is edited by Marjane Satrapi, author of the bestselling Persepolis
We discuss The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. Did you know Kiran Desai lives in Jackson Heights, just like her character Sunny in the book does? And she has a German grandparent like her character Sonia has. How much of real life goes into novelists’ stories, we wonder?
It is happy hour, our waiter tells us; everything is half price. We decide to be indulgent and bring in the weekend, drinking coffee, red wine and Prosecco, with olives, cheese and sourdough bread.
Central to The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the artist Ilham, who is energized by demanding adoration and attention from Sonia, draining her in the process. Some readers say this character is inspired by Kiran Desai’s own experience with the famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and we talk about creativity—why is it that so many great artists, writers, or painters are awful to the people around them, using them, never acknowledging them?
As we talk about loneliness, I look around me and feel grateful for the power of books to build community—for this chattering, bantering group of readers from an alumni book club I had only met online, and who already feel like friends.
Outside, the rain has stopped, and the lights of the city feel friendly. The group disperses and I walk back briskly, enjoying the chill night air, still warm from the books and the bonhomie. At the apartment, things are a little better. The landlady’s suspicion feels like the opposite of everything books have given us this visit: community, warmth, the sense of being known. But we now manage to reach a compromise of sorts. Some strictures lifted, others firmly in place. Kafka would have appreciated the bureaucratic tidiness of it.
A day later, two of us from the book group meet at the Morgan Library. We bond over bookshelves and the beauty of leather-bound volumes. Upstairs is an exhibition of 3,000 years of storytelling. We linger over a 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet and the exquisite illustrations of the story of the lovers Layla and Majnun in a 12th-century Persian manuscript.
Downstairs, financier J.P. Morgan looks gravely down at us from the wall above a fireplace. In another room, a Gutenberg Bible is lit in a pool of light. We are surrounded by walls full of leather-bound volumes, locked safely away in this magnificent museum of a library.
And on the wall, a quote from Gaston Bachelard: “For, up there, in heaven, isn’t paradise an immense library.”
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal
