The Bunker and the Bookseller

written by ella @ bower books

I am a reader that people love to find fault with.

I am also one that booksellers love to take advantage of.

I read everything at once, a few lines of this, a few lines of that, a book subsumed in one night, another over three years. 

I’ll read compulsively for weeks, unable to do anything else, and then stop cold. In these winters of reading, I’ll pick up something and try, only to find myself shivering with a feeling: 

I do not want this, go away. 

My home is books. I have other things, but with less personality. Books are stacked in odd places—inside kitchen cupboards, between folded jumpers, under my pillow in the hope that some intellectual osmosis might occur overnight. As I write, I have a pile next to me - the electricity in my mind showing just how randomly it can strike. 

Kafka,

a Michael Palin biography,

Jia Tolentino,

E.M. Cioran,

something on palmistry,

Bushra Al-Maqtari

None of them I’ve finished, but you can tell where I am in each. Different coloured pencils, pens, the desperation of permanent markers.

Lines, circles, exclamation marks,

and of course, something indecipherable that I imagined as EUREKA! yet, in the warm light of my lamp, it looks more like the turbid musings of a toddler or a serial killer. 

Where the booksellers love me is my buying books in threes and fours; okay, sevens. I know full well some of them will sit untouched for months, even years, waiting for the right moment. I believe there is a word for me in Japanese; tsundoku. A word that describes the pile of books beside one's bed: ever-growing, never read.

Yet here I go, I’ll trip over my tsundoku and come back the same time next week, asking my bookseller what they liked and can I have them.

Will they all fit in my bag? 

I'll leave my bananas by their market stall, forgetting them as I hand over my cash. I cannot eat a tome, but I'm glad it wasn't it I left.

I'm co-dependent sure, I need them more than they need me. I am a perfect mark, the tunnel vision of a conspiracy theorist, one convinced that I must have more or something is going to end. 

Booksellers facilitate my collecting like a hoarder would a bunker; me, an inconvenient bunker owner, who has not thought much about food or water; leaves their bananas at the behest of radiation. 

Are there any essential minerals hidden in 200 pages of fiction?

I hope so, otherwise I’m certainly going first once we all close our bunker doors. 

So where am I going with this? Well, I wanted to write an ode to reading, and I knew that everyone who writes about books inevitably "goes there". The ode is the only patriotism a reader shows, it scars you like a high school hymn. It is by design to stick.

In a bid to be different, I won't be naming the books or authors I am writing about. If you can guess, I'll give you a present.

You better believe it'll be a book. Unless you ask me for bananas. 

I don’t remember buying Book One, but I do remember losing it. 

And then one day, someone else found it. 

They picked it up like it had always been theirs, like it had been waiting for their hands instead of mine. They asked me what I thought of it, and I felt that compulsion to lie. I tussled with myself - do I offer -

‘I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet.’ 

or the -

‘Oh yes I found it blah-blah-blah.’ 

I can’t remember what I said - probably because it wasn’t honest. Alas, that moment stuck with me. When they left my house, Book One looked at me and winked. I flinched. I had this nagging sense that I had already waited too long. Maybe out of spite, maybe out of curiosity, I said, alright. 

Let’s do this.

As I read, I realised I wasn’t just doing this for my own reasons, The Author’s work had given me something I didn’t ask for. This was my meeting with another self, myself, one that had been waiting to understand something it hadn’t yet lived through. 

That’s the thing about reading. Books don’t just exist in themselves—they exist in time, in context, in the rooms where we first open them. They sit in the versions of ourselves that turn their pages. There is no reading without rereading, not always starting the book again, but the hundreds, maybe thousands, invisible experiences that led up to it and after. 

“The most influential author”,

“One of the greatest things I’ve ever read”

“Drop everything and BUY this if you want to live BETTER”. 

My father’s biggest bug-bear is when you see places that are being torn down, bought by developers, and they’ve plastered a huge sign that says “Vibrant new precinct coming in May!” 

He always laughs. Vibrant new precinct? It’s a construction site, the most vibrant thing here are their vests. The developer probably used the same plans from the last one and put vibrant into thesaurus.com and didn’t bother to scroll. And, all those people on that poster are fake. That’s AI. 

AI’s fake. 

What losers. 

This town is going to the dogs.

I love that. 

When I say it was one of the most important things I have ever read in my life, I mean it. It changed how I think, how I read and a lot of things that I did going forward. It also connected me with people who also loved things just like it, and I was able to cross a threshold with them. A threshold that made firm a bond that would otherwise, flew by unnoticed.

You may cringe when you pick up a book with slobbering quotes all over the front. You might check for names you recognise, respect or feel your body reject. You may feel personally attacked when a novel you “discovered” hits the hands of people you consider diagonal or perpendicular to your taste. Going to the beach and seeing Emile Durkheim’s ‘Suicide’ in the hand of a young sunbather, is burnt into my retina for life. 

Heavy reading for the sunshine, literally and figuratively. 

Perhaps this cringe comes from later, when something you love has been made into a film. One that you’re terrified to watch. The reasons, well we all have them. We know the images in our heads, formed when we had space to draw ourselves, suddenly projected at us like they’ve been filtered through a fun-house mirror.

But after reading Book One, I knew I would never think about a review the same way again. A review is for one, not all. I don’t care if that book becomes a film, a play or a song. All those things will be entirely at odds, enjoyable or not, to what it felt like for me. 

I won’t flinch at a book again, not the same way after that one. It didn’t even occur to me when I picked up Book Two and Three. They showed me the chance I could miss the connection I crave from reading. That rare connection, the one that builds a bridge between two places in your mind. It lets you wander new parts of your squishy self that you haven’t seen before. 

I still feel that same expectation or judgement, but I do my best to exorcise it.

“Never trust a book by its cover.”

I hear my father too often in the back of my mind. 

There is such an underrated importance to 'not think’ whilst you read. Instead, let things occur, like kinks in rivers, the imaginary stair you fall through when you don’t look. Let your body flow and your gut bounce. 

I know what I’m reading is good when there is only silence in my mind. These words are the dangerous kind of cosy, purposefully surreal or clean, and always feel a type of inevitable that never accompanies doom. If you ever find yourself needing to meditate and can’t hack the aesthetic that it comes with, these works will introduce you to how expansive, transformative and challenging a period of silence can be.  

Work like this is art, instead of thought, your body creates. It moves your eyes like a painting would; tuck into grooves, float up to the openings, drift into flecks, streaks, strokes. 

When you finish them, you’re forced to deal with the tour de force you were lulled into. You look back, trying to figure out what and when made you feel all complicated inside. It’s a terrible map, stains, tears, lesions. As complicated and meandering as a blogger's post on “Family Recipe Lasagne”. 

Entirely enmeshed; whatever the dream has made you, no questions about it.

Frightened, confused, elated. Maybe?

You feel it in your body and your spine, and the way your nerves tingle is one telling you it will find its way into conversation, behaviour or simply the way you look at a tree one day and notice something you may not have before. 

To look over these works as a body, following their veins, lipids and heartbeats, is only to run a cycle. For me, these were my introduction to a body and all its senses, and I was left to deal with it, setting me on a journey of finding every single line, every utterance, that its author had ever imagined. 

Book One

If you ever wanted to understand the traits and flaws that come with having an immovable English literary conscience, look no further. Book One had it in spades. 

To refer back to form, I think there’s something about embracing who you are as you know it, to help you be surreal, carelessly magical. English writers with a conscience inherit a certain kind of literary suffering. They carry colonial dread they can’t escape, and so they write with restraint. It is anything but polite, instead it's duty to let others speak whilst they tremble all over.

The only way to do this well is to be careful, beautiful, specific—to avoid framing identity in a way that lends you to slaughter or critique. It doesn’t come across as safe to me, I only see it as shy.  

Trembling all over.

Another very English literary tradition is the hat-tilt. There is always someone else in the back of these author’s minds whilst they write. I think most first books are homages to all the things we’ve read prior to them, and The Author of Book One, made it very clear that this work's literary parents had been Frankenstein-ed into one character, and one character only. The rest themselves, were allowed to roam a world with the legends of their reading history, to play, to be taunted, to be strung along with whatever the Frankenstein decided. 

This freak of stitches, swollen parts, trembling all over, is a masterpiece (to me).

All great surreal or experimental writing that feels genuine, comes from accepting who you are, and letting your brain rot and wild vines just ooze and twist out onto the page, breaking fingers, crawl into holes. This kind of unclenching reflects the complications of individual experience without pretension, allowing the mind to explore without the limits of the real ever being an issue.  

Another debut novel choice is to pick a universal theme - but one you have experienced. Book One did this. The writers in the back of the book's mind show the deft step from a mistake I’ve fallen into, which is making up a character to express the universal within your own story. The decision for this Frankenstein though, was not hesitance or fear—it was respect. 

Other writers capture animals we know we have inside us, and present them to us in cages - look at what I trapped, look at what I’m showing you! To write a debut novel, you have to stare their creature in the eyes, and pour the feelings associated with that into what you need to show. A cup of childhood, a cup of memory, a pinch of the unresolved - push it through the cage and see how the animal reacts. Go from there. Book One did what all great writing does: no climbing into the cage, no trying the same thing twice, instead - sitting back, expanding, watching things breathe. 

You can navigate the insanity and unpredictability of universal experiences this way. You can see it through your own binocular vision, cherry-picking what others might have missed. Your Frankenstein? Your reminder that the animal should bite at anything you push through those bars that could show you as indulgent, callow, self-honouring or worse; fake. 

We don’t want to fill the cage or sit back away from it too long. We want balance in our books. Take the chaos of human feeling and sieve it through the mesh of grey, of violence, of learning, only to emerge not soft and precious like flour, but rather the opportunity to look at all the rocks that had formed inside you, as you forced yourself right through it.  

Book Two

I am almost terrified to publish the book I have sitting on my desk. It is the first thing I've written, and even though I want it “out there”, the main thing that chains me from doing it is that I will absorb everything that comes from it being out in the world, when I sit to write my second one. If I write a second one. Oh no, I think my manuscript just winked at me.

This fear has been confirmed, everyone was quick to heap on Book Two. 

If Book One was about the aftermath of the universal turmoil, Book Two is about being haunted before something terrible even happens. That’s not what people expect from a second book, they want what accompanies the personality of a sequel - better, stronger, forward, smarter. 

Instead, Book Two went backwards. It built a world with much more in it, more space to walk around, to get lost. The introduction of ‘more’ separated it from what Book One gave. Instead, it asked you to step inside ‘the somewhere else’ - somewhere you didn’t know. The form that came with this was more expansive, more urgent, and much more tied to the specifics of each character that The Author had built. And I suppose, that was what came across to a lot of people - that they were constructed, rather than the thousand year old comet that Book One rode, demolishing as it did, in its wake a torn sky. 

Book Two was presented as a book about listening. Most second novels ask this, and I think that’s a valid enough ledge to sit on. 

The success of Book One, and the volume of people that read it, all came with their own opinions. With opinions, comes sharing them, and we have built ourselves a panoramic and endlessly interactable arena where we can throw them where we like. Binocular vision? 

No! 

We made fire—surely we can fix our eyes!

A voice mists in from the distance:

Please listen, if you could? 

That English writer tremble. Always veiling a well-thought out need to assert.

Like any debut novelist, I’m sure they read the opinions, some at least. So, like us all, was subjected to the back and forth that comes with the tide of “takes” on something that was unknowable to others - a personal experience, an homage to reading, and entering the ring with a their own take on the universal. 

Even when I first started reading Book Two, I was a little disappointed. Oh, people discussed the form so much in Book One, now it is their thing. The Author thought about it too much. It’s going to be a device now. I see what people are saying, this has been constructed with a goal in mind. The end was known before the beginning was written. 

It took me a little while before the silence came, but then it shrugged over, coating me with a new kind of blanket. One that fit better, was matched for the setting, and then I began to drift into Book Two and fell into a haunted sleep. 

The eruption of new forms, more people, a specific setting - all of that had started to settle like ash, but the story continued. Walking through Book Two’s village, unable to brush off the silt that keeps falling, falling, falling onto your eyes and your clothes and inevitably filling your mouth. Choking, the sketches drawn in the beginning become caricatures, each character and event unfolding, you fall into its uncanny valley. Some people call the surreal of a village like this “folklore”, but forget where folklore comes from in the first place. 

Monsters are built and folklore isn’t nostalgia—it’s a warning system. Frankenstein is a message, not a zany man made from found flesh in the name of new design. We build monsters not to scare us, but to remind us what we should fear. We design them to remind us of the parts of ourselves that we need to remember, in order not to betray, harm, frighten the people around us. Or, ourselves. They reflect us, our scenery, our traditions, hopes and dreams. Monsters change shape as we grow, we might not worry about them so much, but they’re always there, always waiting for the day you might fall down the well and disappear. 

One of the things that I always remember to provide as a caveat for people who ask to borrow this book from me, is that they should just temperature check that they are okay to be dragged through the feeling that comes with not knowing where someone is. 

That unique, horrifying, infinite feeling, like being tied to the back of a horse that drags you through a forest - your face pointed towards the canopy - a mosaic of branches and light and leaves - you don’t know where you’re going and you don’t know what will make it stop. If it will ever stop. 

The Author wrote something to be listened to, and knew no one ever hears the same thing. 

But,

you don’t want to listen when you’re becoming dirtier and dirtier with silt, being dragged through a forest by a horse with no control - you want to be told what to do to get you out of there, to understand what’s happening. The fact that their story gives the illusion of resolve, of some sort of relief at its finish, is one that hasn’t shaken off the fact you’ve felt things and heard things you didn’t want to. 

I think that’s why this book was a failure in so many people’s eyes. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be at first. It still isn’t. I’ve read it again since, but it is not a book that has the same effect, or shows your growth on revision - instead, it reminds you that some things just stay the same forever. You’re still covered in dirt and have scars from being dragged. 

The relief is fake. The feeling isn’t. And now, you carry it forever.

Reading isn’t always “fun”, like stock photo librarians assure us it is. 

Book Three

I waited for this book like I was dehydrated and nothing else would quench me. I was like a poor dog led to The Author—if you will, the English spine in every Australian, our hat-tilt a pun.

As you can see, my expectations were high. I had waited a long time for it. I didn’t know anything about it before I bought it. I wanted to see where The Author was going with their writing, only with the two other books in the back of my mind. Upon finishing their book, I finally realised why they all meant so much to me. How they threw me into silence. 

The Author was walking through my mind, taking books off my shelves, asking me if I’d read them. When I finished Book Three, I finally heard them speaking to me, in a voice I could understand. 

I read this essay on Substack, the writer is Anthony Marigold. They wrote: 

“I have a theory, I call it the Friendship Theory of Fiction, that our favorite writers feel like our closest friends. Sometimes it feels like they’re perched on the blue dendrites of our brains—drinking from our emotions, diligently noting our thoughts—until we know, beyond any doubt, that at the core of our perspectives the red we see is the exact same color.”

As soon as I read this, I screenshotted it. I then printed it. I found some tape and stuck it to my wall. It’s there, I can see it as I write this.

I took a moment from writing this to read it once more. When I read it, it feels the same. There’s a reason I stuck it somewhere I could see every day. It’s the everything of the interior, everything that sits in the grooves, the corners, the sky of our minds, and how that is trapped in there no matter what, no matter the sound we make outside. 

It’s what Book Three did to me, but only because I’d read the two before. 

It’s The Author and yourself, sitting by the cage - chatting about the animal inside. It’s the feeling of your body talking to your mind.

People want to be fixed. They want the universal to stop, the horse to stop, the mind to stop. What The Author wants to write is not an ode to anything the reviews say it was about. If it were, The Author would’ve tried a little to help the poor bastard protagonist in the end. Instead, Book Three shows the power of great writing, which is that they let those bastards keep living. 

It’s an onslaught of the characteristics that accompany you as you grow up , where your mind and your body start to fight one another. We can trace the feelings and how they showed themselves in our photos, our letters to one another, the things we used to read, the ones piled next to us now. 

We may argue about anything that makes up our identities, in order to express how we each work through the relentless pitch black of life. Writing gives you a vignette, one you’re desperate to pin to something, something you can identify. Anything to distance yourself from that mind/body battle and take a moment to clean the mud and the blood off your shoes. But vignettes are intangible, much like our identities. 

It’s one of the easiest things to do: blame who you are. Anything can be simple enough to generalise, to keep vague enough to make sure you can use them as a weapon when you encounter it.

People are all the same.

No, they are not. 

The pressures that come with identity and circumstances are not optional for anyone. They are given, and with what you’re given, you use them as tools to survive. That’s what being a person is—moving through textures, moods, pathways, and taking the tools you were handed, whether they were what you wanted or not.

The washing machine of life is a cycle of survival mechanics and responses, and it doesn’t end. You don’t have the opportunity to forget to hang them out, because they just prefer to spin.

The cycle never stops, that “beep” we hear to know our clothes are clean. That sound only comes once, the beep is when we die.

People are all the same

This phrase is only for those that need to protect themselves from their own patchworks of what was given, to safeguard them from the world’s extraction. Book Three shows that no one ever had a shield. All we were and will be is raw skin, pulled through the world’s expectations of what he should be.

I don’t know if Book Three will sit with me in the same way that Book One or Book Two have, but I don’t think it has to. That’s the thing about The Author (if you think that the author is the same throughout)—their writing is not a straight line. It does not make steps towards a single, more perfected version of themselves. They exist as different rooms in the same house, and depending on when you enter, what time of day it is, or how the light hits the walls, you’ll experience them differently. 

I think about Book One, lost somewhere in the chaos of my shelves, waiting for me before I even knew I needed it. I think about the way Book Two unsettled me, how I had to learn to listen to it before I could fully hear it. And I think about Book Three, the way it made me pause, how I held my breath while reading it without realising. None of these tell you what to think. None give you neat endings or moral resolutions. All they are, simply is. 

What I’ve come to understand—through all of this, through my own writing; all the expectations and hesitations that come with being in the world—is that some things are meant to sit inside you without being explained. Not everything needs to be pinned down, resolved, or made sense of in order to matter. 

Reading is something I will always do. It doesn’t matter how. It is the only safe bet that I will keep learning, and not fight my body and mind in a way that rubs me red or makes my shoes too dirty to clean.

I will always come back to the bookseller. I’ll carry my books home to my bunker. 

I’m always on the search for ones that don’t offer answers; instead they offer space. It keeps my world panoramic, Art Deco, the light on my face and not my eyes. It hands me a bandage for the head wound that horse and forest made. 

They remind me that silence is as important as sound. That not everything can be fixed. And that sometimes, the most powerful thing you can hear, is nothing at all. 

*(at the time of writing that is, someone liked my smarm, eventually).