A Gift Idea for Father

One of the indulgences of being a bookseller is that you can sell your own books. Ann Patchett does it (Parnassus books in Nashville) Destination: Books does it too. My offering is A Father’s Letters: Connecting Past to Present which is a book I finished writing six months ago.

It’s a short book—like a thick chapbook—but it has relevance at this time of year. The book begins with your narrator at the threshold of retirement and asking myself what should I do next?  Well, retirement did give me the time to look at the hundreds of letters that my father wrote to his parents while he was a combat infantryman in Europe during the winter of 1944 and the letters he wrote to me while I was young man just out of college in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It’s a book about fathers—and the men who served in World War II—and how I gleaned insights into this stage of my life through these letters written decades ago.

Availability

The book is always available at the Destination: Books popup book sales. My next scheduled outing is at the Carter Center's  Freedom Farmer’s Market in Atlanta on Saturday morning, June 8th. (We may be at Pepper Place in Birmingham on Saturday morning, June 1st too in the Bonnybee Designs booth. She's my daughter. It's a a father-daughter thing.)

Also, Destination Books keeps a “permanent popup” booth of about 30 books at the Guild+ Journeyman Bike and Coffee shop on Claremont Avenue just north of the Old Courthouse in downtown Decatur (display shown below).

The book is also available online through Ingram’s Bookshop program or if you must Amazon.

Comments

[James Dillon]

Whenever anyone mentions authors who own bookstores, I compulsively blurt: Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis, owned by Louise Erdrich. It's a wonderful bookshop, full of upper midwest native and nature offerings, always worth a browse. I just finished re-reading Tracks last night so she is at the top of my mind today. The last time I was compelled to blurt this was upon hearing the news that Lauren Groff has opened The Lynx, a bookstore in Gainesville, FL.