Get to know your booksellers: An interview with Diane Grenkow

Diane Grenkow has been a customer of The Galaxy Bookshop since the beginning, or close to it. Now, as a member of our crack team of booksellers, she can be found behind the counter on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. Here's a little more about Diane, in her own words:

On your nightstand now: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, Smouldering by Mark Cox, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Searching for the Sound by Phil Lesh, Wild Delicate Seconds by Charles Finn, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison, The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton… this is a small selection of the books teetering on the nightstand right now.

 

Favorite book when you were a child: Mandy by Julie Andrews Edwards.  I wanted to find a garden like the one in the story more than anything.

 

Book that changed your life: On the Road.  I was already living on a school bus and traveling around and then I read On the Road.  Maybe it didn't change my life so much as reinforce it.

 

Person who had the biggest influence on your literary life: Place that had the biggest influence:  Goddard College 1989-1993.

 

Five books you would want with you on a desert island: The River Why by David James Duncan, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Secrets of the Universe by Scott Russell Sanders, Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter.

 

Biggest literary crush:  I can't give this away.  It would be too embarrassing.

 

Book you can't live without: How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.  I must look in there at least once a day for something or other.

 

Best thing about being a bookseller: When the books come!  Opening the boxes of new books for the store or the ones that people have special ordered or the advanced reader copies -- it's like Christmas every single time!

 

Is there anything else you would like us to know about you? I really don't mind when you come in and you say, "I'm looking for this book?  I don't remember the name of it.  Or the author.  It sounded really interesting though…" and then I say, "Can you give me anything else to go on?"  and you say, "Um, I think there was an H in either the title or the author's name or maybe the name of the person that interviewed them on NPR?  Do you think you could find it for me?"  I LOVE THIS.