Why I Love....Bookshops

My children have grown up now. I don’t miss the years of head-splitting squabbling, nor the constant interruptions when I was trying to write, but I do miss the hours we used to while away in bookshops when they were younger.

Introducing children to books is like telling a small kid an old joke and basking in their amazement at how clever and funny you are. Bookshops are better than magic. They are the gateway to everything.

Books were the one thing my children were permitted to buy with wild abandon. Trust me – it worked out a lot cheaper in the long run than all the eye-watering library fines and missing-in-action books I had to replace over the years. We spent hours in our local bookshops, and we never came away disappointed.

Perhaps inevitably, the elder of the two recently bought a Kindle (from a high street bookshop which struck me as sort of ironic). She broke the news to me gently over a glass of wine. I watched her with it on holiday recently, and I can see that her sister is vaguely interested, although she, like me, declares herself a reading Luddite, and says she doesn’t want to read a book that “hasn’t got a cover”. That made a lot of sense to me.

The internet has ripped the element of adventure out of buying books. There is no quiet wandering, picking things up, finding yourself lost in a random paragraph, discovering new writers and revisiting old favourites, and where’s the joy in that?

I can’t even begin to count the books I would have missed out on had I not been a bookshop addict – a trait that I have determinedly passed down the line. There is nothing compares with the bookshop experience, the way time slows down, the instant gratification of finding something interesting and walking out with a rustling carrier bag.

Both my daughters, now in their twenties, have grown into avid readers, although their taste in books couldn’t be farther apart. I know that they will be readers for life and that, should they go on to have children of their own, they too will discover the magic that can only be found in a bookshop.

Born to an Indian mother and an English jazz musician father, Alison McQueen grew up in London. After a convent education, Alison worked in advertising for twenty years before retiring to write full time. In 2006 she was selected from an impressive longlist to join The Writer’s Circle, a group of 8 top writers to be groomed by the UK film industry as the new generation of British screenwriters. She has written two novels, UNDER THE JEWELED SKY and THE SECRET CHILDREN, which was inspired by her life.  Alison lives in a small English village with her husband and two daughters.

Books Of A Lifetime by Alison McQueen

My mother introduced me to Pearl Buck some twenty-five years ago. I was visiting my parents, who lived in a village in the middle of nowhere, and found myself at a loose end from a reading point of view. “Have you read any Pearl Buck?” she asked. I reckoned I’d gone through everything vaguely interesting on my parents’ bookshelves years ago. Apparently not.

I started with the 1945 novel, Portrait Of A Marriage, and although I just couldn’t get my head around the annoying dynamic of the marriage, (as a banner-waving feminist, I think it felt too passive and old-fashioned in comparison to the books I was reading at the time), there was something almost haunting about the way it was written. The style was a little too verbose for my liking, but still, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, so I started another, Pavilion of Women, and it all began to drop into place.

Written in 1946, Pavilion of Women is one of Pearl Buck’s superb Oriental novels, and tells the story of Madam Wu, who, upon reaching her fortieth birthday, decides to retire from married life and brings a concubine into the household for her husband. It is a delicate and beautiful story, written of a certain time, and I have never forgotten it.

Pearl Buck was born in 1892 in West Virginia, and grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries. It was there, in the grave-littered grasslands behind their house, that she would stumble across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. She started writing in her twenties, and became so prolific that her works are almost unlistable, yet, by the time that I started reading her, she had been largely forgotten.

Many of Pearl Buck’s novels deal with the confrontation of East and West, with the fragile business of customs and traditions, and, most brilliantly, with the intricacies of all-too-human relationships and the lot of women in her far-flung settings. Her 1931 novel, The Good Earth, earned her a string of awards, among them the Pulitzer. In 1938, she was recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writing spilled over into political journalism, and she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and to press for Chinese women’s liberation.

I knew none of this when I started reading her, and in my years as a writer, I came to realize how little known she had become. I mentioned her to one of my editors many moons ago, and she had never even heard of her. Then, a couple years back, her name popped up on the radio as the subject of a newly-released biography about her life in China.

The Good Earth re-entered the American bestseller charts in 2004 after being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, over seventy years after it was first published, and thirty years after the author’s death. These days, whenever somebody asks me for a book recommendation, I often hear myself saying, “Have you read any Pearl Buck?”

Born to an Indian mother and an English jazz musician father, Alison McQueen grew up in London. After a convent education, Alison worked in advertising for twenty years before retiring to write full time. In 2006 she was selected from an impressive longlist to join The Writer’s Circle, a group of 8 top writers to be groomed by the UK film industry as the new generation of British screenwriters. She has written two novels, UNDER THE JEWELED SKY and THE SECRET CHILDREN, which was inspired by her life.  Alison lives in a small English village with her husband and two daughters.