Years ago, while I was in Antigua with my family, disaster struck. I ran out of good books. This was before the age of Kindle, so I didn’t have the download option, but even if I’d had it, books via pixels aren’t for me. I need the real thing: a solid slab that I can hold in my hands.
And now I was looking at six days in the tropics without a single decent book and nothing but sand and sea and endless food on the horizon.
Ordinarily, finding myself with the wrong sort of reading material wouldn’t have posed a crisis, but because there wasn’t a real bookstore on the entire island, it wasn’t just a crisis, but an all-out emergency. What was I supposed to do during those long hours on a beach chair? It was like being incarcerated in paradise.
So now, before I travel, I do a little research to make sure I’m never too far from a bookstore. For me, it’s as basic a need as a decent hotel, a hot shower and enough underwear. And because my husband — a law professor who keeps getting invited to academic events in far-off places — invites me to join him, I travel a lot. Weeks before these trips, he searches for restaurants online. If it’s Sydney, Australia, we have to go to Billy Kwong. If Bergen, Norway, it’s the Bare in the Radisson Blu hotel Norge. Don’t even get me started. He talks in his sleep about white-wine reductions. By his side, I dream about books.
While some may think of bookstores simply as purveyors of words printed on bound paper, to me they’re temples of the imagination, places where the collected cultures and dreams of entire civilizations, across time and space, reside. You step into a really good bookstore and the entire world is at your beck and call. All those stories. All those lives. History, biography, nature explained and unfolded, and even if you don’t care two figs about the migratory patterns of the prothonotary warbler, there’s always the next page-turner. At the very least you have something to hold onto, something to enchant during all those in-between times when you’re neither touring nor eating nor sleeping.
But more than that, bookstores are, for me, destinations in and of themselves, little slices of the local culture that are the same, yet somehow different, unique, each with its own local flavor or bias or accent.
Take, for example, Caledonia Books, on the Great Western Road, in Glasgow’s red-and-orange brick West End. I discovered it 14 years ago, when my husband was on sabbatical at the University of Glasgow. While he explored his new digs in the Gothic Revival law building, the children and I huddled, day after day, in our rented house, watching the rain pour down.
The school year finally started, and the kids had some place to go — me, not so much. Finally, I busted out my umbrella, took to the streets and stumbled into a time warp consisting of dust and books. Piles of them. Whole mountain ranges of them. It was a veritable temple devoted to the past two or three centuries of first-rate, secondhand and antiquarian books: the Brontë sisters, the Mitford sisters, George Eliot, James Joyce, James Jones, Henry James.
And then I saw it: a small city, built entirely of the novels of Anthony Trollope, an author I’d never before taken up, though I distinctly remember my mother’s dear friend Jessica saying something like: “At a certain point past youth, if you don’t discover Trollope, there’s basically nothing to live for.” Trollope? You mean that bearded and bespectacled Victorian word-factory with his hemming and hawing and endlessly long sentences? I’d rather be stuck on an elevator. But there it was, beckoning me: “The Eustace Diamonds,” crumbling and stained. As if it were an abandoned dog, I couldn’t resist.
I walked home with it tucked under my arm, this massive Victorian book in this massive Victorian town. And for the rest of the year, whenever I felt low, or just needed to be in a place where the dust itself hinted of adventures, I’d be back at the shop, with its big front windows crammed with (what else?) books and the wonderful smell of dusty old books.
It’s funny, my need for a book I can lose myself in, and the bookstores in which they can be tested, tasted and thumbed-through, because for most of my growing-up years, I wasn’t much of a reader. I preferred comic books, TV and wandering through the wooded hills surrounding my childhood home in Northern Virginia.
In fact, it was wandering — exploring — that I loved the most, and as I got older I went from tramping through the woods, to bicycling into Washington to getting on a train or a plane to go someplace where everything was more thrillingly elegant than it was at home.
I still love to wander, only now I do it, as often as not, through books. Why merely go to Russia, when you can go to 19th-century Russia, which reminds me that it’s probably time I reread “The Brothers Karamazov.”
Last spring, when I was once again joining my husband on his academic adventures, this time in London, I spent many dreamy hours in Waterstones. Books, you say? The Gower Street Waterstones, with its light-drenched reading nooks and cafe, is a castle of books, housed in a fanciful red-brick building of the Franco-Flemish Gothic style. It’s sort of like the Metropolitan Museum of Art — where do you start? — but in this museum you can buy the art.
Speaking of book-museums, if you ever visit Oxford, go to Blackwell’s, though be warned that once inside, it’s hard to escape. With its cavelike layers and endless rooms, its visiting authors and readings, the place keeps sucking you back in. Blackwell’s also has the advantage of being smack in the middle of what’s perhaps the world’s most famous college town: If you get overwhelmed by titles, you can always pop around the corner for tea and crumpets or, perhaps, a lecture on theoretical physics.
Though for all intents and purposes, and with apologies to Cervantes, the English perfected the novel; the art of universally themed and many-chaptered storytelling got an early start in the Middle East when the Jews composed and codified the Hebrew Bible. It should come as no surprise that the original “People of the Book” live in places where there are seemingly as many bookstores as there are falafel stands — and because I go to Israel often to visit family, I’ve gotten to know my way around them.
In Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods, there are endless hole-in-the-wall bookstores selling religious texts, in Hebrew, German, Aramaic and Yiddish; even if you have no interest in reading the works of the lesser Hasidic rebbes, you can breathe in some weird essence of the long-ago and far away.
Myself, I tend to gravitate to used bookstores that deal in the nonmystical: The Book Gallery, which has rare book and English-language sections, and Sefer Ve Sefel (books and cups) with its staircases and stacks, where, some years ago, I hauled a half-dozen classics of Jewish literature back to my local nest, and didn’t leave until I had to. Both stores are in Jerusalem’s downtown, roughly bounded by King George Street on one side and the Old City on the other, and while the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and other famous Jerusalem sites have their “wow” factor, you can’t snuggle up in bed with them.
Nor can you snuggle up with Tel Aviv’s beaches, though you can bring a book to the beach. My own go-to bookstore in Tel Aviv is Sipur Pashut (Simple Story) on upscale Shabazi Street in the Neve Tzedek district. This small, elegant shop stocks what I think of as “general non-dreck,” meaning everything from yoga guides to literary theory to the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch.
I know they’re heavy and take up space in your suitcase and can sometimes disappoint. But like a passport, books — and the bookstores where you can sample them — let you go where you’ve never been before.
And now I was looking at six days in the tropics without a single decent book and nothing but sand and sea and endless food on the horizon.
Ordinarily, finding myself with the wrong sort of reading material wouldn’t have posed a crisis, but because there wasn’t a real bookstore on the entire island, it wasn’t just a crisis, but an all-out emergency. What was I supposed to do during those long hours on a beach chair? It was like being incarcerated in paradise.
So now, before I travel, I do a little research to make sure I’m never too far from a bookstore. For me, it’s as basic a need as a decent hotel, a hot shower and enough underwear. And because my husband — a law professor who keeps getting invited to academic events in far-off places — invites me to join him, I travel a lot. Weeks before these trips, he searches for restaurants online. If it’s Sydney, Australia, we have to go to Billy Kwong. If Bergen, Norway, it’s the Bare in the Radisson Blu hotel Norge. Don’t even get me started. He talks in his sleep about white-wine reductions. By his side, I dream about books.
While some may think of bookstores simply as purveyors of words printed on bound paper, to me they’re temples of the imagination, places where the collected cultures and dreams of entire civilizations, across time and space, reside. You step into a really good bookstore and the entire world is at your beck and call. All those stories. All those lives. History, biography, nature explained and unfolded, and even if you don’t care two figs about the migratory patterns of the prothonotary warbler, there’s always the next page-turner. At the very least you have something to hold onto, something to enchant during all those in-between times when you’re neither touring nor eating nor sleeping.
But more than that, bookstores are, for me, destinations in and of themselves, little slices of the local culture that are the same, yet somehow different, unique, each with its own local flavor or bias or accent.
Take, for example, Caledonia Books, on the Great Western Road, in Glasgow’s red-and-orange brick West End. I discovered it 14 years ago, when my husband was on sabbatical at the University of Glasgow. While he explored his new digs in the Gothic Revival law building, the children and I huddled, day after day, in our rented house, watching the rain pour down.
The school year finally started, and the kids had some place to go — me, not so much. Finally, I busted out my umbrella, took to the streets and stumbled into a time warp consisting of dust and books. Piles of them. Whole mountain ranges of them. It was a veritable temple devoted to the past two or three centuries of first-rate, secondhand and antiquarian books: the Brontë sisters, the Mitford sisters, George Eliot, James Joyce, James Jones, Henry James.
And then I saw it: a small city, built entirely of the novels of Anthony Trollope, an author I’d never before taken up, though I distinctly remember my mother’s dear friend Jessica saying something like: “At a certain point past youth, if you don’t discover Trollope, there’s basically nothing to live for.” Trollope? You mean that bearded and bespectacled Victorian word-factory with his hemming and hawing and endlessly long sentences? I’d rather be stuck on an elevator. But there it was, beckoning me: “The Eustace Diamonds,” crumbling and stained. As if it were an abandoned dog, I couldn’t resist.
I walked home with it tucked under my arm, this massive Victorian book in this massive Victorian town. And for the rest of the year, whenever I felt low, or just needed to be in a place where the dust itself hinted of adventures, I’d be back at the shop, with its big front windows crammed with (what else?) books and the wonderful smell of dusty old books.
It’s funny, my need for a book I can lose myself in, and the bookstores in which they can be tested, tasted and thumbed-through, because for most of my growing-up years, I wasn’t much of a reader. I preferred comic books, TV and wandering through the wooded hills surrounding my childhood home in Northern Virginia.
In fact, it was wandering — exploring — that I loved the most, and as I got older I went from tramping through the woods, to bicycling into Washington to getting on a train or a plane to go someplace where everything was more thrillingly elegant than it was at home.
I still love to wander, only now I do it, as often as not, through books. Why merely go to Russia, when you can go to 19th-century Russia, which reminds me that it’s probably time I reread “The Brothers Karamazov.”
Last spring, when I was once again joining my husband on his academic adventures, this time in London, I spent many dreamy hours in Waterstones. Books, you say? The Gower Street Waterstones, with its light-drenched reading nooks and cafe, is a castle of books, housed in a fanciful red-brick building of the Franco-Flemish Gothic style. It’s sort of like the Metropolitan Museum of Art — where do you start? — but in this museum you can buy the art.
Speaking of book-museums, if you ever visit Oxford, go to Blackwell’s, though be warned that once inside, it’s hard to escape. With its cavelike layers and endless rooms, its visiting authors and readings, the place keeps sucking you back in. Blackwell’s also has the advantage of being smack in the middle of what’s perhaps the world’s most famous college town: If you get overwhelmed by titles, you can always pop around the corner for tea and crumpets or, perhaps, a lecture on theoretical physics.
Though for all intents and purposes, and with apologies to Cervantes, the English perfected the novel; the art of universally themed and many-chaptered storytelling got an early start in the Middle East when the Jews composed and codified the Hebrew Bible. It should come as no surprise that the original “People of the Book” live in places where there are seemingly as many bookstores as there are falafel stands — and because I go to Israel often to visit family, I’ve gotten to know my way around them.
In Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods, there are endless hole-in-the-wall bookstores selling religious texts, in Hebrew, German, Aramaic and Yiddish; even if you have no interest in reading the works of the lesser Hasidic rebbes, you can breathe in some weird essence of the long-ago and far away.
Myself, I tend to gravitate to used bookstores that deal in the nonmystical: The Book Gallery, which has rare book and English-language sections, and Sefer Ve Sefel (books and cups) with its staircases and stacks, where, some years ago, I hauled a half-dozen classics of Jewish literature back to my local nest, and didn’t leave until I had to. Both stores are in Jerusalem’s downtown, roughly bounded by King George Street on one side and the Old City on the other, and while the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and other famous Jerusalem sites have their “wow” factor, you can’t snuggle up in bed with them.
Nor can you snuggle up with Tel Aviv’s beaches, though you can bring a book to the beach. My own go-to bookstore in Tel Aviv is Sipur Pashut (Simple Story) on upscale Shabazi Street in the Neve Tzedek district. This small, elegant shop stocks what I think of as “general non-dreck,” meaning everything from yoga guides to literary theory to the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch.
I know they’re heavy and take up space in your suitcase and can sometimes disappoint. But like a passport, books — and the bookstores where you can sample them — let you go where you’ve never been before.
