I was 5 when I moved to Taunton and 8 when Readmore Bookstore came to town.
It was 1975 and schools didn’t just have ‘Suggested Reading Lists’ – they had ‘Read-a-thons’! Every time I heard of one coming up I was all Disaster-girl-Zoe-Roth just thinking about what I was going to do to my competition – and then I would plan a trip to Readmore.
There were different plans for those trips to Readmore over the years. My best friend Donna and I would rush over as soon as we finished book whatever in the Trixie Belden series for the next one (we shared those books; whichever one of us had the money paid for it). This was after the Nancy Drew book phase (and after we got our fixes of that on Sunday nights with The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on television — oooh, Shaun Cassidy!)
Readmore has a buyback policy, where you can sell your books back for 10% store credit of the cover price. I was a book hoarder, so choosing which ones to let go of took a day or two. I also loved how my bookshelves looked with series collections on them; the uniform colors and sizes were so pretty to me (yes, I LOVED Encyclopedia Britannica, too), so I couldn’t get rid of any of them until I was done done. I’m the type of reader that will also read a book (or the end, or selected parts) over and over. I didn’t get rid of any of the Trixie Belden books until I fully outgrew them, which means I brought all of them in at once – that was a banner day, bringing in so many at once! My store credit was always used immediately, and if there was any left over because I couldn’t squeeze one more book out of it, I would keep the remainder receipt in a special place until the next time (losing one was a catastrophic event).
School-recommended reading lists were longer back in those days; I remember writing more than one book report before school started. Those were the best trips to Readmore – we had to get books for school, so my parents had to pay!
And Readmore was there for me through every stage of my reading growth, and therefore my entire childhood. From Trixie Beldon to Judy Blume, up to general Harlequin then Silhouette Romance books to dedicated romance authors like Janet Dailey, Jude Deveraux, and Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, and then Erma Bombeck on to Stephen King and Sidney Sheldon.
And now, 45 years later, I wrote my own book.
And on Saturday, March 21, 2020, from 2:00 – 4:00 pm, I will be back at Readmore for my very own book signing event.
It’s like going home.
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(Photo credit: Kerry Akashian)
Readmore Books
330 Winthrop Street
Taunton, MA 02780
(508) 822-3074
Book: “ISSUES: The Opposite of Everything I Was Taught“
Synopsis
Most of our unhappiness or general dissatisfaction with life comes from not living as who we are and instead trying to live as who we were told to be. Before you can live genuinely, you need to know how you think.
This is a book of perspectives that challenge you to think about whether or not you think for yourself, using the author’s own thoughts and experiences as something to reflect off of. Given the author’s proclivity for taking perspectives to the extreme, it is like standing before a fun-house mirror and realizing who you are by seeing who you are not.
In each essay, Sue Roulusonis will deliberately push your buttons on subjects like self-awareness and judgment, religion and sex, self-love and parenting. At no point anywhere in this book will you find cooking tips.
A Life In and Of Writing 