A friend; came into town and we spent most of our time going through all the used bookstores in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I love used bookstores.
My ode to the used bookstore:
I always found it too easy to go to big bookstores that had all the books you could ask for and to just look it up in the computer or to just remember the name of the author and go directly to where it is, pick it up, look at it, consider it, then buy it. It just didn’t complete the experience of a book to me. A book is an object that requires investment, a blind faith that where you will be led will be somewhere you’re okay with.
When you go to a used bookstore, they don’t always have what you want, and yeah, you ask the employee if they have the book you’re looking for and it’s similar to the experience I mentioned above, but it’s different. But I am not going to get into that. Most of the time used bookstores are a visual chaotic mess, spines from different years, sometimes terribly organized, and the best thing to do is just surrender. You start at one place, going through the titles, spotting authors you recognize, setting off ideas about this and that, and pretty soon the spines are carrying you and you end up with this stack, a stack that is an interesting combination, that shows a thought process, that shows how time was spent.
You let go, get lost, and end up with something that makes you realize that hey, nothing was lost, in fact, I’ve got somewhere to go.
And I think it’s going to be pretty good.
Oh and here’s the stack I ended up with:
Love in A Fallen City by Eileen Chang
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
In Pursuit of Flavor by Edna Lewis
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
Godspeed!
