The Hutt Recommends: The Diary of a Bookseller

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

"It is a strange phenomenon that, when customers visit the shop for the first time, they tend to walk very slowly through it, as though they are expecting someone to tell them they have entered a forbidden zone, and when they decide to stop, it is invariably in a doorway. This, of course, is incredibly frustrating for anyone behind them, and since that person is usually me, I exist in a state of perpetual frustration. Anthropologists insist that it is an instinctive human response on entering a new space to stop and look around for potential danger, although quite what sort of danger might be lurking in a bookshop - other than a frustrated bookseller whose temper has been frayed to the point of violence by the fact that somebody is blocking the doorway - is a mystery." 

   Shaun Bythell's diary of a year of his observations as a second hand bookseller in little rural Wigtown, Scotland, is both hilarious and, for me as another person working retail, very relatable. He's a lovely mix between the misanthropic Bernard Black (from Black Books) and an exasperated Giles (from Buffy) which is just my kind of dry sense of humour.

The Hutt Recommends: The Echo Wife

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

   Evelyn Caldwell is devastated after her divorce from her cheating husband. It not just that he was cheating and it took her so long to notice, but he used her research in cloning to secretly create a genetic replica of her that is everything Evelyn is not. Martine is gentle, obedient and most of all the kind of motherly woman Evelyn could never be. That she promised herself never to be. 

   Evelyn would choose to just throw herself back into her research and put another part of her life in the deep pool of forgotten things, but now her cheating husband is dead and both Evelyn and Martine will have work together to bury the evidence or both their lives are forfeit. 

   You'll remember Gailey as the author who wrote about cowboys on hippos, which I absolutely adored thanks to it being humorous, intelligent and absorbing throughout. In the case of The Echo Wife "humorous" is most definitely not the word I'd use, but it sure made my head spin. I adore the way Sarah Gailey use their words - I was glued to the pages all the way through. It fucked me up, it did.