Murder by Death

This book is an ode to bookshops everywhere.  Broken down by continent there's a small bit about interesting, famous, or extraordinarily unique bookshops all over the world.  Interspersed throughout are short essays written by authors about their love of reading and the importance of bookshops, including some of their favourites.  Sprinkled here and there are interesting facts related to books.

I started out adoring this book and by the end, liking it a lot.  It was easy for me to adore it right off the bat as she starts the book in Wigtown, Scotland, wends her way through England and ends up in Hay-on-Wye, Wales.  I didn't know about Wigtown but I've had a burning desire to go to Hay-on-Wye since I first heard about it (I thought it was a fantasy: a town made up by an author - then a Welsh friend of mine told me it was indeed a very real place).  Now, I have to go to both.

The book petered out for me a tiny bit after she left the UK, because while it was obvious she spent time at quite a few of the places in the UK, it's equally obvious that she didn't spend time at most of the places in North America, or the rest of the continents.  In fact, the further east the book traveled, the shorter the entries for the bookshops (some, I'm convinced, were just quick paragraphs emailed to her by the bookshops themselves).  But there are still some great stories to be found - one or two even teared me up, and the book curse had me laughing.  

There are two signatures worth of colour photos of the bookshops inserted at 1/3 and 2/3's of the way through; I'd have liked it better if they'd been properly paired with their respective bookshop entries, and I'd have loved to have seen more of them.  It would have bumped this book up into the category/price point of a coffee-table style book, but I think it would have worked even better.

It's a great little book and it succeeds at celebrating the importance of the independent bookstores all over the world.  I have dreams and schemes of bookshop-tour holidays and opening my own, perfect bookshop now more than ever and I hope the success of these bookshops are a sign of things to come.

[PopSugar 2015 Challenge (provisional): Book that made you cry.]