Sunday, September 04, 2005

I did the most sensible thing

to make myself feel at home in Cambridge, which was to walk down Mass Ave to the Harvard Bookstore, which is the model of what an independent bookstore should be, and spend more money than I should have on books by Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Anne Fadiman and Daniel Defoe. This store is literally as well as figuratively my model--coming to Cambridge at age 17 from years spent as chiefly a library-goer plus incursions on the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton bookstores at the Gallery at Market East in Philadelphia, this store was an eye-opener and a money-suck and altogether a delight. It really is excellent--I don't have one in my neighborhood in NY that's this good, Labyrinth is very nice in its way but it's not really a novel-reader's store and it's also got that High Fidelityesque scorn for light reading which makes me end up buying tons of books from Amazon & feeling like a bad person for not supporting my local independent bookseller.

This store is perfect--I always like reading the Bookdwarf blog because of the window it provides into the store as well as many other good things. And I was especially happy to see that they've got Heredity as a staff recommendation, though there weren't any books on the shelf--they say they'll order more.

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