When I travel to cities, my favorite things to do are to walk, explore art museums, and visit independent book stores. My souvenirs are often books that have nothing to do with the place I’m in, except maybe a John Cheever novel from a shop in Greenwich Village with my mom, but that bring back fond memories of the place I bought them: Mary Oliver’s poems from Shakespeare & Company in Paris with my son, Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive from Books Upstairs in Dublin, Little Women from E. Shaver in Savannah, Georgia with all my family. Holding the books, thinking of the books, smelling the books: these all conjure the light in the shop, the coziness of it, the sidewalk and scene outside its doors.
Earlier this year, my husband and I visited our daughter in Gainesville, Florida. We stayed in a downtown hotel so that we could walk to restaurants, coffee shops, Bo Diddley plaza, and past street murals and whatever else might be interesting. We found a cool art store and an even cooler book store, The Lynx.
The book store was off the beaten path on a quiet street, was wooden-floored and tall-shelved, and had a compelling staff picks section that convinced my husband to buy Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Every time I see it on the shelf I think of the pleasure of buying it. The staff member who recommended it happened to check us out, and he told us how much of an impact the book had had on him. It was a human and personal experience.
A few weeks later, I read Florida, a book of short stories by Lauren Groff, one of my favorite authors. She wrote Fates and Furies which knocked my socks off the first time I read it. The Vaster Wilds is stunning. In one of the Florida short stories, the character walks through Bo Diddley plaza, and I thought, hang on. Is Lauren Groff in Gainesville?
Yes. She is.
My son loves to visit book stores when he travels, too. This past weekend, when my husband, son, and I traveled to Gainesville to see our daughter, we told him about The Lynx. I remembered that Groff lived in Gainesville and thought, wouldn’t that be funny if we saw her at the book store? I wonder what she looks like. In my googling for photos, I saw this sentence: She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.
!
When we visited, I was delighted to see a display of the books featured on A Great Book with Barack Obama. In the final episode, Groff talks with him about Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which I read specifically to hear them dig into. It’s gorgeous and a little bit devastating.
We didn’t see Lauren Groff when we visited The Lynx, but we walked off with a memorable haul. Our son bought 2666 from her staff picks, my husband bought a signed copy of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, and I bought myself a signed copy of Groff’s newest book of short stories, Brawler. It’s a rainy day today and I’m going to disappear into them.
