Need a Good Book? Bay Area’s Book Fairy Offers Her Recommendations
By Laurie Clark
After a long publishing career, Nancy Fish moved to the San Francisco bay area, returning to her first love: bookselling. Fish currently works at Book Passage, a Marin County independent bookstore, which also hosts conferences, classes, and readings—many accessible online during the global pandemic. Once, she ran the store’s Path to Publishing Program; she now serves as a vital force within this literary salon. When it comes to booksellers, she’s one of the best in the business. I spoke with the New York City native recently about her favorite books and why we need books now more than ever.
Fish has spent a lifetime studying books—and people. In college, she majored in anthropology and, in her words, “Marxian economics, or some other crazy, useless thing.” On her website designed for independent publishing consultations, she simply calls herself a “student of our culture’s reading habits.”
She began selling books as a teen, once even working at New York’s legendary Shakespeare and Co. Now years later, after marketing books in large and small publishing houses, Fish has embraced a return to bookstores. “It’s my avocation,” she says. “I get back to my love of books and ignore the books I don’t like…Books are still the thing that makes my heart soar.”
“[As a kid, I] spent every waking hour in a bookstore. My family [members] were readers; I got to see others reading.” She emphasizes, “I carried Harriet the Spy around with me for three years.”
In truth, an unhappy childhood made her a reader. But she is keenly aware of today’s declining readership. “[In books, I could] escape my situation. Now there are so many other ways to escape. People don’t have the same compulsion to find themselves in a book.”
So, how do we foster a love of reading in our current culture? Fish credits word of mouth and local book clubs for reconnecting people to literature. She acknowledges new publicity trends, too, like the celebrity book club.
“For example, [NBA basketball player] Steph Curry. He’s an influencer, not a ‘reader,’” she says. “But he’s bringing attention to literature.”
His book club, Underrated, says it all. Fish loved his recent selection, Rebecca Hall’s graphic novel Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, which details a slave insurrection. She says, “It’s beautiful literature in the guise of a comic.”
After some thought, Fish adds, “Reese Witherspoon’s book club is solid, not highly intellectual. But people follow her and like her.”
Independent bookstores, of course, prominently display these book club picks. But their booksellers play a crucial personal role in preserving and supporting literary art. As a reader and former bookseller myself, I can attest to Fish’s brilliance matching readers with the right book. During our interview, we chatted about our pups and the travails of dog ownership. She then asked about my favorite books. When I mentioned All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg, a denizen of my father’s rural Alabama hometown, she lodged the information away. Days later, his most recent book, The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People, arrived on my doorstep. I didn’t even know he had published a book in 2021. I’m telling you, she’s good.
What other books does she recommend?
● Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (2005), Vivian Gornick (“She wrote it in her 40s and is now in
her 80s. I’m a New York Jew…But anyone would like this book”)
● Truth and Beauty: A Friendship (2005), Ann Patchett
● Hunger: A Memoir of My Body (2018), Roxanne Gay
● The Overstory (2018), Richard Powers (“Not an easy read. But the first half is magnificent”)
● The Museum of Modern Love (2018), Heather Rose (based on Marina Abramovic’s 2010
performance art in the Museum of Modern Art and “a group of people who get obsessed with the
exhibit and go every day. Ultimately an exploration of what art means”)
● All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (2021), Tiya Miles
(a memoir from a historian about Ashley’s sack, found on a South Carolina plantation and now in
the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. “A slave
mother gave it to her nine-year-old daughter when she was sold. It’s scholarly work about an
artifact…that is an addition to ephemeral kinds of material culture that women have added”)
“I love a book that doesn’t tell you how to feel but makes you feel a certain way,” Fish says. “All the books I suggested are visceral…Nothing moves me like an incredible turn of phrase.”
Fish’s reading spans other genres and media, too. She says, “I’m a great lover of long form journalism.”
Just how good is Nancy Fish at reading books and people? Well, I’ll tell you. When I emailed to express my gratitude for the Rick Bragg book, I admitted her timing was impeccable; it had arrived just after an experience of deep personal loss. In her email, she replied, “That…kind of kismet really is magic. I hadn’t thought of Rick Bragg in years, you mentioned him and the very next day, the next day, a new book from him appears. About dogs. And a healing book. And you needed just that.”
“One of my very favorite things about working at Book Passage is I get to be a book fairy. I pretty much send a book to someone every shift I work. Usually no card, just my name in the return address, or not. Recipients usually figure out it’s from me. Who gets more, the giver or the recipient?”
This uncanny giver knows books—and the industry—inside and out. If you’re ever in the bay area, seek out Nancy Fish at Corte Madera’s Book Passage. Just don’t be surprised if the perfect book materializes like magic. Her secret? Beneath a New Yorker’s urbane sensibilities, her intellect and compassion remain keenly attuned to the human spirit, ever open to the joys and sorrows that keep us spellbound under literature’s sway.
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