Lewis Buzbee
Lewis Buzbee is a fourth generation California native who began writing at the age of 15, after reading the first chapter of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Since then he’s been a dishwasher, a bookseller, a publisher, a caterer, a bartender, and a teacher of writing. He and his wife, the poet Julie Bruck, live with their daughter Maddy in San Francisco, just half a block from Golden Gate Park. His books for adults include The Yellow Lighted Bookshop, Fliegelman’s Desire, After the Gold Rush, and First to Leave Before the Sun.
His first novel for middle grade readers, Steinbeck’s Ghost, was published in 2008 by Feiwel and Friends and was selected for these honors: a Smithsonian Notable Book, a Northern California Book Award Nominee, the Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Association Children’s Book of the Year, and the California Library Association’s John and Patricia Beatty Award.
A second middle-grade novel, The Haunting of Charles Dickens, was published in 2011 and won the Northern California Book Award, was nominated for an Edgar, and was selected as a Judy Lopez Memorial Honor Book.
A third middle-grade novel, Bridge of Time, was published in May 2012--time travel, San Francisco, Mark Twain.
A new nonfiction book for adults, Blackboard: The Life of the Classroom, has just been published by Graywolf Press.
“For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.”
“November, a dark, rainy Tuesday afternoon. This is my ideal time to be in a bookstore. The shortened light of the afternoon and the idleness and hush of the hour gather everything close, the shelves and the books and the few other customers who graze head-bent in the narrow aisles. There's a clerk at the counter who stares out the front window, taking a breather before the evening rush. I've come to find a book.”
“How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?”
“"It’s not as if I don’t have anything to read; there’s a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I’ve been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that’s afflicted me most of my life.”
“A bran' new book is a beautiful thing, all promise and fresh pages, the neatly squared spine, the brisk sense of a journey beginning. But a well-worn book also has its pleasures, the soft caress and give of the paper's edges, the comfort, like an old shawl, of an oft-read story.”
“I've had many more thousands of books in my possession than my shelves at home would indicate. At one time, I tried to keep them all, but that quest soon became impossible; I now only keep the ones I'm sure I'm going to reread, the ones I'm definitely going to read before I die, and the ones I can't bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment.”
“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”
“Books were in the world; the world was in books.”
“It is with the common book that most readers will spend their head-tilted hours.”
“For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of the printed matter.It's a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was -- years old when I happened on a novel called --, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as --.”
“The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.”
“Maturity and experience shouldn't stop one from craving silly things like sliding down bannisters.”