Amazing! An Airport Bookstore with Great-Sounding Books!

Maybe there’s hope for our society. I stopped into Simply Books in the C concourse of Atlanta’s massive Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, not expecting much. After all, most airport bookstores, and even a lot of chain-owned downtown and mall stores lately, cram their shelves with trashy mass-market novels by the likes of Danielle Steel.

I don’t mind a good yarn; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, Kite Runner, and even the occasional Stephen King–but when I dragged myself through one of Steel’s, I found it one of the most uninteresting and poorly written novels I’d ever encountered.

This bookstore, despite its very limited shelf space, was great. I saw literally dozens of books I’d have been happy to read–including some you may eventually read about in my monthly review column. In my brief foray, I saw these among others:

• Giving, by Bill Clinton
• Gary Hirshberg, founding CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, writing about socially/environmentally conscious companies
• The Zookeeper’s Wife, a novelized account of a true family that risked their own lives to hide dozens of Jews in the zoo during the Nazi era
• About five of Jeffrey Gitomer’s entertaining and acerbic sales books
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, sequel to Kite Runner
• Meatball Sundae–the latest unconventional marketing rant from mega-guru Seth Godin

It is soooo refreshing to see an ariport store whose buyer values intelligent discourse! (And don’t worry, there were plenty of beach novels, too.