bookstore travelling

27 Jan click for flickr view

Visiting emporium-like bookstores is a little like travelling. You either visit the sites you have obvious interest with the hope of deepening your knowledge and acquiring more of what you love, or you escape to the towns where you cannot entirely navigate the street signs and have no expectation of what you may encounter. For the latter, your eye scans the shelves and you pick up whatever it is that triggers a memory, a latent question, a curiosity. With little background in that field, the links are sometimes tenuous but the views almost always expansive.

I've been doing a lot more of the latter - escapist bookstore travel - in the nature and science shelves of Kinokuniya. Admittedly, the pop science and coffeetable books make easy the approach for subjects like water, lobotomy, stars...and sea turtles.