A young man is in here looking for books for his road trip around Australia.
His girlfriend is in the car and he has to be fast. He is kneeling in front of the classics and he calls out that he wants the big jobs…like Moby Dick etc. This is because he wants to be in the outback with Moby Dick. He wants to look at the stars with the stars.
He shows me a list of the books that has been recommended to him, a list of all the Big Jobs and from these he has chosen Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. He says: this is sweet. I always wanted to read Ken K and here he is! I must go… I’ve got the fam in the car.
But he doesn’t go. He wants a book on snakes: he tells me that there are patterns to everything and you know this just by looking at a snake.
Now he thinks he might try Catch 22 and The Count of Monte Cristo. He also might try Ray Bradbury. He also might try Middlemarch even though that one was for women. He confesses that he has been thinking about reading War and Peace. Then he looked out of the window toward his car where his furious girlfriend is looking back at him and tells me that he must go and that there is a pattern to everything and don’t forget to look at snakes as closely as possible because that’s what he always does.
Photography by Sebastian Spindle
The Book Keeper Book Shop 