Booking the Trend

And so here we are in Portland, up in the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver, just up the road in Canada, feels pretty close now - our massive loop through four very interesting, very different countries will soon be complete.
We're staying with our friend Rusty, a magical man we met in Korea and his housemate, Andy. Time has flown since Korea and aspiring writer Rusty is now on the verge of completing a master's degree - his first novel already in the bag as part of his thesis.

We hit the downtown area for the first time today, and whiled away the afternoon in Powell's City of Books. It claims to be the world's largest independent bookstore, and who am I to argue. Its 38,000 feet of retail floor space cover an entire city block and are jam packed with books old and new.
Powell's entire inventory stands at over four million books, and the City of Books store is a wonderful maze of everything from the latest best sellers to rareties stored behind glass.

The massive store is divided into coloured rooms, a giant board at the entrance explaining what genres are present in which coloured areas.
We spent a lot of time in their great travel section, then wandered from room to room as Lucy hunted for the poetry section.
Once there, she found a lovely little book of poetry for just $1.95 and proceeded to read me all manner of verse as we walked through town to meet Rusty from work (and a date with a large plate of sushi).

Tomorrow we've vowed to head to Portland Zoo. Whether we'll be out of bed in time to get our lift there though is another matter entirely.


On the off chance you were wondering, Hemingway's quote was on a chalk board above one of the bookshelves. Wise words.