Bookstore bliss

It finally happened: I found not just one, but two large bookstores here in Dublin. I saw them from the Aircoach on the way to the airport on Friday, but didn't go until today.

As always, I brought a book to read while on the plane, the tram or just being bored in the apartment, and again I was in the situation of having brought a book that just isn't catchy enough. Books for me are a bit like portable sanctuaries; a place to escape to, to get away from reality in a way. A normal day includes so many different sights, sounds, impressions, demands, ideas all mixed up at the same time, so reading a book becomes something calm and soothing, simply by just concentrating on one media/input at a time. The problem is that if a book isn't captive enough or too complex, like The Child Garden, I loose focus and my mind start to wander. Once this happens there isn't much calm about trying to read a book, as I sometimes have to go back half a page or so to catch up to what I thought I had read.

Anyway, this started to happen again, this time with a book called Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and I had to get a replacement. To be fair to the book, I've only read the first part so far, which is about 70-odd pages, and it could still turn out to be a very interesting and catchy book. I just haven't got the patience for waiting at the moment.

I started out going to Hodges Figgis, which I take is a local store/Irish chain. It had three floors filled with books, and what looked like a very nice selection of travel books. The main problem at the time though, was that I could not find a toilet anywhere, and they didn't have a cafe or something where you could sit down with a cup of coffee and look through the books that you considered buying. Not really a good point to judge a store, but at the time those two things were something I vitally needed. Combine a good book with a decent cup of coffee and a quiet and hopefully comfy place to sit, and that makes the sanctuary ten times more efficient.

Just across the street from Hodges Figgis was the other large book store I've found: a regular looking Waterstones. I was very pleasantly surprised when I entered though. The main feature in the store is a huge staircase connecting the ground floor with a mezzanine, on which is a cafe, an onwards to other floors above. I think there are three floors plus the mezzanine in total. Going up the stairs to the first floor, you walk into a huge room with high ceilings and a massive tainted window. I'm not sure what the building have been before, as i didn't look that closely at the outside of it, but it could very well have been a church or something similar.

After having visited their toilet and looked through their fairly sized selection of sci-fi books, I found a few books I wanted to look closer at, got a cup of coffee and sat down to have a closer look at the books. Unfortunately I only got to look at two of the books before a woman came into the cafe and announced that they were now closing. At 7pm! that was way too early for my taste, and I still had two more books to look at in the current batch of books. However, I couldn't do anything but pick a book and head for the cashier. I just hope this book is better than the Perdido one, or I might have to back there again tomorrow. Not that that's a scary thought, but I shouldn't really buy more books before I've read the ones I've got at home :)