84, Charing Cross Road

This book is wholesome. This book is the definition of wholesome. I'd recommend this to just about anyone, but especially those who has a passion for books and English literature. I'd even say, keep this book for a bit of a rainy day, when you're feeling like you're sliding into or already in a book slump, this book will lift you right out of it. It's so short but so impactful at the same time.

The premise of this book is exceedingly simple. Helene Hanff, an American writer, writes to a bookseller in London specialising in second-hand antique books, and so strikes up a correspondence with Frank Doel, the staff at the bookseller's in charge of responding to her, which lasts for 20 years. You could easily spoil yourself if you tried to Google anything about this book or about the author because this is a story about a part of her real life, so I'd suggest going in completely blind if you can.

Helene's casual witticisms and affectionate jibes at Frank were just such a delight to read, especially when contrasted with Frank's classic British reserve, which took a much longer time to thaw out. By her warm generosity with him and the rest of the staff at the bookshop, Helene also begins correspondences with other staff there and even with Frank's wife, though her primary correspondent is still Frank. Their relationship is all the more wholesome because there's nothing illicit or romantic about their genuine affection for one another, they both clearly held each other in very warm and platonic regard.

I suppose it's also because we're reading about real people writing real letters to each other, but Helene and Frank's personalities just really jumped out of the page for me. This book is so short and we see comparatively so little of them compared to regular fiction books, but they have so much more life and vividness to them than most other books I've read. It didn't take me many pages to get very much attached to both Helene and Frank, as well as their friends and family.

Ultimately, this book really highlighted how beautiful it is to find people who share the same interests as you do, even if your only contact with them was sending each other letters and parcels across thousands of miles, and maybe seeing the occasional photograph. This justified Internet friends before the Internet existed. I feel like this book also showed how important it is to be kind to customer service staff because even though your relationship with them may start off as being transactional, they are ultimately human beings with their own thoughts, interests, friends, and family and I think even nowadays so many people forget that when they're the customers. Helene's beautiful friendship with Frank, his family, and the rest of the staff at the bookstore only really started because she saw Frank as a human being first, sending him and all the staff generous food parcels that she could barely afford, even when Frank was trying to maintain that polite distance between staff and customer.

The ending: I had a great feeling through most of the book that it would end with one or the other dying. I didn't know which because I went into this book completely blind as I usually like to do. Frank's death certainly came out of nowhere and it was all the more tragic because it was so sudden and unexpected. He had been meaning to send Helene the Austens at Christmas, but he died before then. I had to really stop myself from crying because once I start, I know I won't be able to stop. I felt so so so sad for Helene that she didn't even manage to meet Frank in person before he died, and according to one of the epilogues, when she did eventually manage to make a trip to England, even the bookstore was gone. At the very least, I'm glad that she probably managed to meet Nora and the kids. Ugh, so sad. To me, that really highlighted the importance of not putting things off because you just never know whether they'll still be there by the time you get round to doing it.

In summary - just read this book, especially if you love reading in general. Read it when you're feeling down, or just read it whenever. You won't regret it.