Taylor Rose Berry on Books Worth Sharing

This summer, Taylor Rose Berry finally finished “White Noise” by Don DeLillo. While not earth-shattering news to most, it will be of interest to her friends, patrons, and those who attended the PechaKucha night at the Parrish Art Museum in June. During her talk that evening, Ms. Berry detailed her struggles with that book and how it led to her first and only failing grade on a term paper.

She has always loved books, she said more recently at Harbor Books, her store in Sag Harbor. “There’s some great pictures of me as a kid on the couch with my mom and my dad on each side of me, all reading.”

But she is also a procrastinator, in the habit of waiting until the last minute to do most anything. “It worked for me my entire life except for this time,” as a freshman in Philip Baruth’s postmodern literature class at the University of Vermont. “I got by really well, because I was a reader. I would say, ‘I’m not coming to class,’ because if they were only teaching the text book, I would just read it.”

She began the paper the day before it was due, still expecting to receive a good grade. When she got it back, “it looked like a crime scene.” She spent 20 minutes after class trying to talk him out of his red-inked observations such as “you use fillers for a lack of knowledge” and “your comprehension of the English language is juvenile at best,” but to no avail.

Years later, she ran into him and they revisited that discussion. “He told me he failed me because he knew I could do better. He didn’t think anyone else had told me that, and he thought it was his job to do so.”

“And I told him it was absolutely not his job, but here I am all these years later still talking about it” and finally reading the book a few weeks after the Parrish talk. She said she liked some of Mr. DeLillo’s other books better, but none of them are on her favorites list. “I can see why it’s considered a masterpiece,” but for her, given all she had been through, it was more like homework. She said she preferred James Tadd Adcox’s “Does Not Love,” a novel that borrows from DeLillo and was published last year, as something more approachable. “I loved it so much more.”

After a long passage in “White Noise” where a character runs the stadium stairs, “I thought, ‘Why did I just read that?’ ” It reminded her “of Steinbeck’s turtle crossing a road for 10 pages” in “The Grapes of Wrath,” which she had to read in high school. “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ A lot of writers you read in school do that to you.”

“I read ‘Gone With the Wind’ in seventh grade. It is still one of my favorite books. After that, my mother wanted me to read ‘Anna Karenina’ and then ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ which was not the right jump,” she said. “Now I love them, but those books didn’t mean anything to me when I first read them. I just read them to finish, which is not the way anyone should read.”

To help her organize the children’s section at Harbor Books, she consulted Diane Frankenstein, an expert on children’s and adult literacy who seeks to instill love of reading in all ages. Her selection was “really thoughtful, not just the darlings you see everywhere. It’s things you haven’t seen in 15 years, or new things that are extraordinary.”

It’s important to her that the children she serves learn to love books — the objects themselves and the content within — as much as she does. For her, digital interface is a poor substitute. She understands the convenience of e-books and offers them on her website, but she prefers the feel of turning pages, the look of the printed word.

Her mother flew out to California for a recent two-week vacation with 20 titles of books loaded into her iPad. In contrast, when she went on a road trip from Seattle to San Diego, one of the early stops was Powell’s Books (Portland’s version of the Strand in New York City, but even larger). “I was like a kid in a candy store and had to buy a new piece of luggage just for the books I bought,” paying an extra $100 to fly them back home with her.

“The millennial generation has an odd reverence for nostalgia.” When she found her mother’s old vinyl records, she took them over to her grandfather’s house so he could show her how to play them on his stereo. “Now vinyl is everywhere. We were the generation that brought it back.”

The day she received her failed paper, she went to the Crow Bookshop in Burlington to decompress. As he was known to do, Mr. Crow walked over and handed her a book. “He always picked the book that was right book for you at that very moment. Whether you loved it or hated it, there would be something in it that spoke to you,” she said. He gave her “White Noise.”

In that moment she said she knew she wanted “to make people feel the way I did when he handed me that book.” Mr. Crow “had a magic touch. Someday I hope to have that skill. He gave me some of my favorite books in the entire world.”

Nine years later, she has made that dream come true in a storefront at the north end of Sag Harbor’s Main Street with wide paned windows and window seats, and lots of dark wood and finishes mingled with pops of color: red-shaded goose neck and overhead lamps, mini beanbag chairs in the children’s section, and wide cozy leather chairs in the center of the room.

Seated under a large black-and-white photo of Ernest Hemingway, one of her heroes, she says she doesn’t believe in finishing books she hates. When she does, though, she always finds something redeeming, “even if it’s just a line” or what Hemingway might call “one true sentence.”

At 14, she read Jill A. Davis’s “Girls’ Poker Night.” The first line was “ ‘Happy endings aren’t for cowards.’ Then, the book itself meant nothing to me, but 15 years later that line still sticks. When you read a book, something can change you or imprint on you that might come back.”

Ms. Berry will put “The Tender Bar” by J.R. Moehringer in anyone’s hands who asks her for a recommendation. At the Parrish talk, she shared a passage describing why the bar of his title was his community’s “safe place” and concluded with this: “We went there for love, for sex, for trouble, or someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.” It’s what she wants for her store, and why she imbued it with a “dark and cozy Old English” ambiance.

“You will never hear me tell somebody to put down a coffee, an ice cream, or a bottle of wine, or whatever their heart fancies.” Further, it’s perfectly fine to come in, pick up a book, “and read the whole damn book for all I care. To me it’s an investment. If you come in and enjoy your time here, you’ll remember my store when there’s a book you need.”

Mr. Crow “didn’t expect you to pay for things ever. His philosophy was that you could pay what you had, you could bring it back when you were done, or you could pay it forward.” Tearing up, she said, “I will always remember the books he gave me, and it wasn’t because I did or didn’t have the money, it was that he thought it was important enough to share them.”