[Review] The Storied Life of A.J.Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Title: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Author: Gabrielle Zevin

Publisher: Abacus (Kindle Edition)

Published: December 2^nd, 2014

Page: 319p

I was losing my reading mood last week when I asked my friend to suggest a book that could bring back my reading lust, and that’s how I met this book. At first, Gevin talked about Amelia Lohan, a woman who works as a new book representative from Knightley Press and was traveling to Alice Island to meet the owner of Island Book, AJ Fikry. I could say that it took only few pages to get me liked this book, the following quote says it all and because it talked about book people.

“Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.”

AJ who lived alone since his wife died has no talent of starting good relationship with people around him. So he was mean to Amelia when they met for the first time. He is not a people person and his bitterness makes everything worse. The only friends he has were Lambiase and Ismay. Alice Island is a small neighborhood, so when something unusual happened in the bookstore, the whole town will know, and it happened like that when AJ found a baby left in his bookstore, two years old baby girl who suddenly changed AJ’s life.

If you look for extraordinary story, this is not the one. But if you are a booklovers, I guess you’re going to love this one as much as I like it. I jotted down every title I found along the pages and read every opinion about particular book two or three times. Gevin portrayed someone who lives literary life: lived in a bookstore, run a bookstore as a business and fell in love with another bookish. When the world changed and e-reader became lifestyle, Gevin captured how paperback-lovers will probably response, that it could be a disaster when the world is not having bookstores anymore.

I listed few titles mentioned in this book,

·         A good man is hard to find and other stories by Flannery O’Connor

·         Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

·         What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by Raymond Carver

·         The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by F. Scott Fitzgerald

·         What Feels like the World by Richard Bausch

·         The Girls in their Summer Dresses by Irwin Shaw

·         A Perfect Day for Banana-fish by J D Salinger

·         The Bookseller by Roald Dahl

·         A Conversation with my Father by Grace Paley

·         The Tell-Tale Heart by E.A Poe

·         The Beauties by Anton Chekov

·         The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield

·         Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

·         Fat by Raymond Carver

·         Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway

And these are my favorite quotes,

“You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, what is your favorite book?.”

“Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.”

“The words you can't find, you borrow. We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”