A Solo Stroll to Three City Bookstores
Among the many cliches of motherhood – the ones spelled out on letter boards, printed in cursive on coffee mugs, and rendered in Instagram-sized squares – are the ones that say it takes everything you have to give.
“Being a mom has made me so tired and so happy,” one reads.
“Motherhood is the greatest thing and the hardest thing,” goes another.
And the one that sits atop my personal most-reviled list: “Mothers don’t sleep, they just worry with their eyes closed.”
I’ve always hated this sloganization of the perils of parenting – not because I’m not tired, ambivalent, or sometimes even sleep-deprived, but because my preferred source of relief isn’t expressing my exhaustion in pithy aphorisms: it’s taking the day off. Specifically, a day off to wander, happily, from one New York City bookstore to another.
About a month ago – sometime after we returned from our summer trip to Canada but before autumn swept into the city, between our July bout of COVID and our September dance with the same variant, I spent an entire Saturday on my own.
I began the day in the West Village, where I sat at a cafe table, too preoccupied by the two people beside me to write (was it a business meeting in ripped jeans and crop tops or a first date where they only talked about their professional accomplishments? I couldn’t tell). A stream of street life flowed around me – shopkeepers hosing down sidewalks, dog-walkers untangling leashes, hungover twenty-somethings pulling on e-cigs – but, this being the West Village, West 4th Street was dense with finance bros and their impeccably-dressed girlfriends and groups of women walking in complementary neutral-hued workout sets, the athleisure equivalent of ‘same strapless midi chiffon in different shades’ bridesmaid dresses. As soon as my iced coffee was drained and the talk at the table next to me turned to Series A funding (verdict: business meeting), I moved on, walking to Left Bank Books.
Six years ago, the original Left Bank Books – a used bookshop and gallery space that occupied various village spaces over the course of 24 years – closed for the reason all New York City bookstores seem to: (lack of) money. But the store’s employees kept Left Bank’s momentum going by selling books online and three years ago Left Bank was reborn, in a Perry Street storefront so tiny that two customers felt comfortable while three was a crowd. The store focuses on old and rare books about arts and the city and was beautifully, borderline intimidatingly well-curated. I bought an old copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, hoping it wouldn’t be as explicit and violent as the Marquis de Sade’s book by the same name (I’ve just started it, but it appears my hopes might be dashed).
Next, I wound my way south – from the West Village to Soho to Nolita to Chinatown – to visit a bookstore with a very different vibe: Yu & Me Books. While Left Bank was all hushed good taste – the irreverence the website touts must lie within the books themselves – Yu & Me was positively buzzy, perhaps due in part to a recent NYTimes feature that alerted me to the bookstore’s existence. People laughed, store owner Lucy Yu offered recommendations, and one person even threw a book clear across the store to their friend – an efficient if anxiety-provoking way to circumvent the crowd. Yu & Me opened last December, and is the city’s first bookstore run by an Asian American woman. It focuses on AAPI authors, has lots of comfy seating, and also sells coffee, cocktails, and cakes. It is, in other words, practically perfect. I bought another Times recommendation – Ruth Ozeki’s The Books of Form and Emptiness – and kept walking.
South of Chinatown, the charmless grey of the financial district’s edges yields to the South Street Seaport, a 400-year-old fish market turned ‘I Love NY’-hawking tourist trap turned rehabilitation project: its trendy restaurants, weekend markets, and public art indicate a transparent attempt to attract actual New Yorkers. And, honestly, I was attracted, in large part because the neighborhood is home to an outpost of the New York book scene’s own mini-empire: McNally Jackson. Though ‘outpost,’ frankly, doesn’t do the store justice: with 60,000 books, two stories, a wine bar, and a children’s section big enough to accommodate a kid-sized lighthouse, it’s absolutely massive, the sort of place that would be charmless if not for the abundance of exposed brick, natural light, warm woods, and gorgeous book displays. I wandered the warren of rooms slack-jawed, endlessly impressed by how intimate a store of this scale could feel. I bought Dining Alone, an art book with a self-explanatory name, and a tote bag to haul it home to Roosevelt Island in.
And when I did get home – weighed down with the written word, sunburned from the walk, and with hair tangled from riding on the open-air top level of the ferry (an experience I’m too skittish to do with my kids), I’d, paradoxically, never felt more refreshed. As I walked through the door, for perhaps the first time in my life, both Finnegan and Kip ran to me, burying their heads in my legs like a damn movie montage. So I ask again, for the exhausted moms in the back – have you considered a day to yourself?
