Odd interaction at the bookstore yesterday. Got summoned to the register in my capacity as Employee Who Knows About Old Books because a customer wanted to know what Don Quixote was about.
(Yes, this does mean that the employee already at the register wasn’t able to answer that question. I have a lot of “what are they teaching you in those schools?” interactions with my younger co-workers.)
Anyway, I gave the customer a quick synopsis. He asked if I’d recommend it, and I said I would, that it was not only well-written but also pretty accessible & engaging for a novel written four hundred years ago. Then he asked if he would “see things differently after reading it.”
He then elaborated that he really liked Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist and wanted other books he read to have a similar paradigm-shifting effect.
(I haven’t read The Alchemist, specifically because every time someone recommends it to me they use this same kind of language, which makes me feel like they’re trying to get me to join a cult rather than read a book.)
Anyway, we are in a college town, so “young person who’s just learned what philosophy and poetry are and now thinks of themselves as Deep” is a Type of Guy we encounter fairly frequently.
(Just a few hours before this, I overheard a young man recommending a book to his female companion because it would “help with her creative energies”.)
So it’s not that this is particularly unusual in vibes, it’s more that… this seems like an odd standard to hold a novel to before you read it. And it’s an odd question to ask your local bookseller — “will this book change my life?” I dunno, man, I don’t know your life. Maybe it will, books do that sometimes.
Anyway, I told him “probably”, because honestly Don Quixote is a really good book and I think more people should read it. And, I dunno, maybe it will make him see things differently.
(It might even make him see novels as intrinsically worth reading rather than as vessels for personal change.)
I have no idea if that worked, because as mentioned I wasn’t at the register at the time. I went back to organizing the used books and didn’t see him again. Kind of hope he bought it.
(To be clear, at no point during this conversation was he holding a copy of Don Quixote. I had to instruct him to look under “C” for “Cervantes” if he decided he wanted to buy it. His curiosity was sparked by a set of novelty bookends.)
