Updated Store Hours March 16th - 22nd (10 am - 6 pm)

Dear Reader,

We share your concerns about the Covid-19 pandemic and how to respond to these concerns in our day-to-day lives.  At the store, we are doing all the recommended actions to keep the store and ourselves clean and healthy.  

We are leaving it up to our authors whether to continue with their events over the next weeks and months.  Some who are travelling a distance or have other concerns, have already cancelled or postponed events (you can see those on our website).    

We are continuing to provide books and book recommendations every day and there is no change to the quality of services we provide.  In that spirit, we are now offering curbside pickup and free local delivery, so that you can more easily get your books.  You can call us when you arrive curbside and we can bring your books out to you, or we can deliver to your home with free local delivery.  As you know, you can always also order either online or over the phone and we can ship to you, wherever you live.  Ebooks and streaming audio are available through our website as well.  

Through reading we can continue to feed our imaginations, our hearts, and our minds.  Whatever we can do to facilitate this for you, let us know.  We appreciate your support.    

Healthy Reading!
John, Alison & all DIESELfolk

Now that the holidays are over, we've pulled our Top 50 bestselling titles of 2019 from the shelves to make space for some great new books we've been reading this winter. Here is just a small sample of a bevy of new books we can't stop thinking about. (Click through to read more)

Alex recommends Weather, by Jenny Offill: 

"Climate change encroaches upon daily life -- Offill explores optimism in the face of impermanence, social dissolution, class conflict, and the incredulity response, but the real beauty of this work is the energetic & profound prose. 

Diane recommends Preservation, by Jock Serong:

What characters! What adventures! Based on a real event in 1797, this novel explores parts of Australia we'd never know. The villain is villainous but there's a heroine too!" 

Marc recommends Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener:

Our new Del Mar staff poses with their first customer!

The store opened October 31st and is already a big hit. 

We hope to serve you and yours well-- keep in touch by following us on social media, won't you? 

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By KAREN BILLING Via Del Mar Times

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies...The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

Readers rejoice: A book store is returning to Del Mar Highlands Town Center with DIESEL, A Bookstore.

It’s been five years since Barnes & Noble closed after 21 years when the center renovations began, a heartbreaker for both the community and the center owner. Donahue Schriber Realty Group pledged to bring back a book store when the expansion was complete and they are delivering on that promise with DIESEL, a longtime California indie book store that also has a location in Brentwood.

“A bookstore has been the number one request from our customers for a number of years. We are thrilled to have a long-established independent bookstore join the center”, said Patrick Donahue, chairman and CEO of Donahue Schriber Realty Group. “Diesel’s new Del Mar Highlands location will be a great addition to the community.”

Owners John Evans and Allison Reid bring 40 years of experience in the book business, opening their first independent book store in Emeryville in the Bay Area 30 years ago in 1989. On Oct. 28 they will be one of the first tenants to open in the new Collection at Del Mar Highlands Town Center expansion.

Inside the store there will be tall ceilings, wood floors and Evans states the obvious: “There will be a lot of books.” DIESEL will have best sellers and staff recommendations, a children’s book nook in the back of the store and a plethora of art books about design, fashion, music and film. He likes to say his titles cater to readers with a wide variety of interests, from an entertaining Judith Kranz romance to a thought-provoking Julia Kristeva book on French critical theory.

Evans said he is a sucker for community that is desperate for a bookstore, “I really think every community and neighborhood should have an independent book store,” Evans said.

In the independent book store, the shopping experience is personalized by a staff of omnivorous and voracious readers, people who truly love books and can help customers find books they might not even know they want yet.

Diesel, A Bookstore plans to open a new location in San Diego this November, just as the California indie bookseller marks its 30th anniversary. The new bookstore will have 2,200-sq.-ft. retail footprint, tall ceilings, and what co-owner John Evans calls “a beachy vibe.” The booksellers signed the lease in December 2018, but waited to announce the opening. According to Evans, they are currently “looking for good booksellers.”

The new bookstore is one part of a $120 million expansion project at the Del Mar Highlands Town Center in Carmel Valley. The San Diego shopping center housed a Barnes & Noble for more than 20 years, but the location closed in 2014. “The owners had never gotten more flack from customers than when the bookstore closed,” said Evans, who cofounded Diesel with Alison Reid in 1989. “So they were eager to find a bookstore. And the bookstore that they wanted was us, because they were fans of our Malibu and Brentwood stores.”

Diesel began with a bookstore in Emeryville, Calif., but Evan and Reid relocated the bookstore to Oakland after an earthquake. During the next few decades, the booksellers expanded to include three more California locations in Brentwood, Malibu, and Larkspur.

The Malibu store closed in 2014. The founders sold the Oakland branch in 2016, it is has since been renamed East Bay Booksellers. The Larkspur branch closed in 2018. The Brentwood branch is still a popular location is Los Angeles, and Evans and Reid repainted the store this year to celebrate the 30^th anniversary. “We opened up when things got very challenging for a lot of bookstores across the country,” Evans said. “We toughed it joyously through that whole thing. It's still super challenging, but we're still going strong.”

Evans and Reid are not from the area, but found a home in San Diego as they prepared the for the new bookstore. Earlier this year, they volunteered to help staff Book Catapult in San Diego when the bookstore’s co-owner Seth Marko had a medical emergency. “There's a great community of booksellers in San Diego,” said Evans. “They've been extremely welcoming.”

Who said indie bookstores are dying? Not in the Bay Area, thank you!

By Barbara Lane for Datebook

For years the death knell was clanging for the independent bookstores. First, they would be killed off by the chain stores — Borders, Barnes & Noble, et al. We all know how that turned out. Then the predator was Amazon. Then e-books.

But while there’s no doubt that Amazon has had a major effect on our book-buying habits, I’m happy to report that here in the Bay Area, the indies are thriving. And better still, a new crop of young, passionate booksellers has sprung up, ensuring that the future looks bright for those of us who love nothing better than to get lost for hours in a well-curated bookstore.

Part of this happy trend is thanks to the foresight and wisdom of what I’ll call bookstore elders. Kate Levinson and Steve Costa out at Point Reyes Books and John Evans and Allison Reid, who owned Diesel in Rockridge, handpicked their successors, making it possible for their beloved stores to both endure and change with the times.

The proud next-generation owners of Point Reyes Books, Stephen Sparks and Molly Parent, have been running the store for more than two years. The pair met while doing what could be called a residency at Green Apple, the venerable San Francisco indie. When Levinson and Costa decided it was time to sell Point Reyes, there were over 30 interested parties, and Sparks and Parent were deemed the best fit — they actually won an essay contest — for carrying on the store’s legacy.

The most important thing the former owners did to help the new owners was to create favorable terms for the purchase. Then it was up to Sparks and Parent to find investors. Happily, it wasn’t too difficult: They got financial support from Point Reyes locals who wanted to keep their beloved bookstore open and book-loving angels from outside the area.

Point Reyes Books is a hub for the West Marin community. The store reflects the glory of the natural surroundings with a strong environmental and nature section, one Sparks aspires to make “the best in the country.” Prominently displayed as one enters the store are Peter Wolleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees,” “Horizon” by Barry Lopez, Robert Macfarlane’s “The Old Ways” and Obi Kaufmann’s “California Field Atlas.”

“People want to live their best life up here,” says Sparks, adding there’s lots of “aspirational purchasing.”

The trailer for this remarkable book features a quote from our own John Evans! 

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic, New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade.

His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on twelve-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”

After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tucson to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the west. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels—from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence—it is a miracle he is still alive.

The Light Years is a prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey signposted with broken and extraordinary people. It transcends one boy’s story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. This is a riveting, heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation, as Rush faces his lost childhood and, finally, himself. 

More Poetry! 

One of DIESEL's favorite poets -- Layli Long Soldier -- whose stunning book of poems, Whereas, is an instant classic, was interviewed by Krista Tippett in this moving issue of the On Being podcast.  Take some time away from the news and turn to poetry since "Literature is news that STAYS news." (Ezra Pound)

Layli Long Soldier — The Freedom of Real Apologies - The On Being ...

DIESEL has always been a welcoming home for poetry and a site for poetry's exuberance!  This month we are going to either introduce you or reintroduce you to poetry that has made its way onto our website over the years and that has entered our ears over the past months via various podcasts that you may have missed. 

As you may know, audio streaming from DIESEL's partnership with Librofm has made audiobooks available for download on your user-friendly phones, tablets, and computers.  There are a plethora of sources for poetry on the internet, which is one big part of the current surge in interest in poetry.  Social media, social dislocation, global challenges, cultural flux have each foregrounded some of the virtues of poetry as part of our coping, our thriving, and our connecting with ourselves, our relationships, and with the world.

We hope this helps, by turning you on to poets and their work, and encouraging you to seek out more in our store. 

Here is our first taste, to get Poetry Month 2019 started:

Teju Cole — Sitting Together in the Dark - The On Being Project

Have a wonderful month of poetry!
John & all DIESELfolk