Best of London: Books

The other day I took a pen and notebook and sat down to write. I sat down on the couch, bereft of computer and Pandora playlist and tried to write out my thoughts deliberately in quietude. But, it was hard.

I saw that my handwriting was not my handwriting. Or at least what I remembered it to be. It was some ugly scrawl, that looked like footprints you might find in a chicken coop where it has pooped and then proceeded to waddle through said poop.

I had become uncomfortable writing with a pen because there had been so few occasions in the past month that called for me to write with a pen. Do you remember that awkward feeling you had between your fingers when you first learned how to write? Like that.

This experience is emblematic of the times we live in. We live in a world where you can be a writer and not use paper and pen. No more of that Truman Capote fetish for writing the entire first draft longhand.

Writing longhand has become a cliché just like drinking scotch with your typewriter became cliché, probably in the 1980s when young adults started to realize that their father, who’d spent the whole of the 60s assiduously pouring over his oeuvre, had never shared one page with anybody. Instead, he had had to draw up a pretty long list of  Amends and Apologies on his personal journey to stop crying whenever he saw someone drinking Coke without Rum.

These days I read the newspapers on my iphone. My mother comments on my personal blog to let me what she thinks of my writing. I just found a childhood friend from Haiti on Facebook. And, I read novels on something that looks like the blackboard tablet on which I learned {with great pains when it came to the letter five; mine always looked like S’s} to write when I was 5.

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Yet it remains my pleasure, my glee to visit the old fashioned ink-on-paper bookstore. I wrote about the best bookstores, from Turkey to Argentina, that I’ve ever visited. I am surprised that though the majority of my books are now on the iPad, I still squeal – well, not literally, I have some self-control – at books piled up on a table.

What I love about this scene is the thrill of discovery. What makes reading and consequently bookstores magical is that you may find something that breaks open your heart and expands it.

You may find a mind just like yours who understands you perfectly though it lived 3,000 years ago. Or a mind greater than yours who blows yours up and forces you to reconsider, rediscover, what you had been convinced you knew. Discovery!

It is the same thrill I imagine the geographical explorer feels. Discovery is second only to Creation.

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While I was in London, I stumbled on walls of books and then mountains of books…

You can sift through hundreds of books at the Saturday Portebello Market in Notting Hill for treasures. But if it’s Wednesday and you leave town on Friday, be merry for there are plenty of good book shops around London.

If you want the oldies, get thee to Leceister Square’s Any Amount of Books. It is tiny shop brimming with goodies. I scored a beautiful pocket-sized 1927 edition of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (my favorite book!). I read this book when I was 15 and it changed my soul. It’s about the desire to live fully. You can tell this blog does not fall far from this theme. So the pursuit of a life well lived began.

This edition of The Dubliners tiny enough to carry around for two months, if that’s what it takes me to read and understand this much boasted classic.  And I threw in a relatively fresh {1959 print} of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and a 1984 copy Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, one of the loves of my reading life. Until now I only owed a digital copy of Out of Africa. Now I can underline and lend it to friends in need of soul-searching prose with rich travelogue imagery!

To wit, every one of these books cost 4 British pounds.

At Henry Pordes Books I bought The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing,  a book about women and the way the world views them that is still relevant today.

Daunt Books is the best looking of the lot. It is spacious and has enough corners for the reader to pause and just start reading if she cannot wait to get home. They also have a great collection of travel books so it is the place to go if you’re on your way to another destination.