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Nov 21, 2007

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves." --E.M. Forster

How A Bookstore Can Change Your Life

"One of the more romantic literary notions is that a book can change a person's life. Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford, for instance, claims Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer made Ford the author he is today. If a book can change your life, a bookstore can utterly transform it. In my case, I found one, or perhaps it found me, at a critical juncture when I was turning my back on everything I had known. It was a damp January day in 2000 when I discovered the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. I had left my home in Canada a month earlier, having burned out in my job as a newspaper reporter. I was approaching my 29th birthday, had little money and even less idea what to do with myself." ...