“Books of Park Slope” is an Unintentional Parody of Brooklyn’s Crunchiest Neighborhood

By Carey Dunne

screen shot via Books of Park Slope Instagram

What do Park Slope residents read about? Books of Park Slope, a new Instagram account, shares photographs of books found on the streets of the city’s Number One Neighborhood, as New York Magazine dubbed the Brooklyn enclave in 2010. It’s a cute, very Park Slope-y idea. And what’s most striking about this collection of found books is that their titles and covers do nothing but reinforce stereotypes of the People’s Republic of Park Slope as the borough’s foremost destination for the kale chip-munching, rescue dog humble-bragging stroller mafia.

It’s admittedly a small sample size (31 photos), but the selections seem curated by a satirist. If you were to judge by the books featured on the account, things Park Slopers read about can be broken down into five basic categories: babies and parenting (How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk); healthy cooking (The Book of Miso); a combination of the two (Your Vegetarian Pregnancy); self-empowerment and personal growth (Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self , Do You Want to Be Healed?, Goddess in the Bedroom); yoga (So You Want to Open a Yoga Studio); and weed (Understanding Marijuana). Of course, there are a few outliers (like Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, but he still gets pretty yoga teacher-esque with his mind-body connection stuff).

So now you have the keys to the Republic: Go read all about how to talk to your baby before your baby can talk and how to excavate your authentic self and how to understand marijuana, then buy a stroller (put your rescue dog in it if you don’t have a baby yet), and you’ll be living in Park Slope in no time, dropping books all over the sidewalk in a kombucha-induced reverie.