My English Final: used books

Showing posts with label used books. Show all posts

Sunday, December 23, 2018

The Looking Glass Bookstore in Oak Park

I've been wanting to write up a little opinion piece on this store for the longest time and finally did so last month. Read it here.

One bracingly pleasant element of my college years was coming to class prepared to scribble away in the "blue book" that had been handed me for the purpose of testing my knowledge of some aspect of American or English literature. Although my blissful days of undergraduate literary critiques are long gone, I often still get the hankering and here's where those otherwise-orphaned musings will find a home.

The cool photo header is my maternal grandfather, who, although he only had a formal sixth-grade education, was a Chicago typesetter and a great reader who instilled his daughter with a love of books which she then passed on to me.

And though I've published six nonfiction titles with the Chicago Review Press, I never felt that I was truly an author until I wrote my first novel, The Belgian Girls, which the Historical Novel Society claims is "beautifully written" and Kirkus describes as "fluidly scribed."

Hey, Grandpa (and all my former English lit professors): I'm an author!