The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism….I do not like genre mash-ups a la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and – I imagine this goes without saying – vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translation….Above all…I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable.”   A.J. Fikry, bookseller, in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

This is a quick, funny, sweet read about a bookseller who is down on his luck and turning quite bitter in his middle age. It’s a tribute to booksellers, book lovers, beloved authors, and their stories.  “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (Flannery O’Conner), “Lamb to the Slaughter” (Roald Dahl), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (F. Scott Fitzgerald), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (Edgar Allen Poe), “Ironhead” (Aimee Bender), “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (Raymond Carver), Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace), and many others have little parts to play in Gabrielle Zevin’s clever story.

After something good follows the tragic turn in A.J.’s life, he begins to change.

He’s inspired to write pithy little reviews for someone he loves. This is what he has to say about “A Good Man is Hard to Find”  – 

“It’s Amy’s favorite. (She always seems so sweet on the surface, no?)…When she told me it was her favorite, it suggested to me strange and wonderful things about her character that I had not guessed, dark places that I might like to visit.”

You can tell a lot about a person by the books she loves.