Books
Thursday,
January 5
Portland is known to be a very literate city, in terms of both
readers--even the branch libraries are open 7 days a week--and writers--during
National Novel Writing Month in
November, we placed 11th. In the world! (Ahead of New York, Boston, San
Francisco, Germany and Austria combined, England, and Naperville!)
So for today's expedition I head out to that legendary, mother-of-all
independent bookstores, Powell's City
of Books. On the way, though, I stop in at the neighborhood used book
store at Flanders and 21st, Deadalus Books. It is small, neat, well-stocked,
and devoid of customers at 11 am on a Thursday morning. Two employees
on hand, neither pays any attention and after a few loops around and a
stop at the bargain bin, I leave empty-handed and walk down Burnside Av--a
main Portland thoroughfare: lively, noisy, slightly unkempt in relation
to the adjacent neighborhood.
Entering Powell's I feel vaguely depressed. It is a huge store--they hand
out maps as you come in. But it's not the space that is overwhelming,
as it is separated neatly into a dozen or so color-coded rooms (Red: Foreign
Language and Metaphysics; Purple: History and Anthropology). No, it's
all the books! They are endless and my eyes glaze over as I stroll through
and I notice I'm not really looking at anything. Then I realize why it's
depressing. It's because I'm not feeling the emotion I should be feeling,
which is guilt, because this is only the second time I've visited, the
first of which was is when I first came to Portland, which was last summer.
I've read a total of one novel since I've been here and I am about to
walk away without even considering buying something. I tell myself this
is because I am about to move again and I am starting to get rid of things,
but this is not the truth. The truth is I've fallen off in my reading
over the years and the thing that once ignited my imagination and provided
inspiration for my being a wanderer through life, has now become a "sometime
food*."
Determined to buy
something I walk slowly through the stacks and pick up a book
by an unknown (to me) author, Anthony Doerr, titled About Grace, more
because I like the title than anything else. It's $10.50, used and I check
out at the counter and Ieave the store, happier now, and stop in at the
Blossoming
Lotus for a bowl of miso soup, sit by the water fountain and read
the first chapter of the book as I watch the students, from the yoga studio
that shares this space, come and go. It's a very good book, so far...
* The producers
of Sesame Street have been trying to retrain Cookie Monster with the message
that cookies are now a sometime food. For all our sakes, I hope they fail!
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