Reviews, travel writing and musings from a bookish Glasgow girl
Oh, Ducks, Newburyport. Where to begin? I actually never would have chosen to read this novel but it was on the shortlist for the Saltire Literary Awards shadow panel I was on and so I was determined to give it at least a good attempt. And by the time I realised I was actually a bit bored of it, I was in way too deep to give up – something I never ever do with a book anyway – so I was just going to have keep plodding along.
When I was seventeen and applying for part-time jobs, working in a bookshop was the pinnacle of all my dreams. Although I did volunteer in a lovely Oxfam bookshop in Glasgow for a few months, I actually ended up working in a strange mixture of retail, admin and hospitality for the next few years. But a couple of months ago, those teenage aspirations were finally realised when I managed to secure a job in a bookshop. Yes, it’s still retail and yes, it’s very busy and yes, it’s not like I’ve got my dream job of an arts journalist (hire me?), but it’s miles better than scraping soup out of a sink and picking up rubbish after annoyingly entitled students. (Can you feel the underlying bitterness?) So here are the top five things I’ve learned from my new job in a bookshop!
I’m currently re-watching my favourite TV programme Downton Abbey, meaning that right now I’m pretty obsessed with any books or films that chronicle the upstairs-downstairs dynamic of a twentieth-century great house. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning novel, fulfils this perfectly. Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, begins the novel by ruminating on the absorbing and complex question of what makes a great butler. His answer is ‘dignity’ – the ability to preserve one’s innate professionalism regardless of emotional demands; a quality that arguably ensures his status as a ‘great butler’ but serves to stunt his own personal life.
What Rachel Did 