Book ‘Em Dann-o

Despite the fact that books are one of the heaviest things that you can pack, we brought a few along with us from the States to tie us over until we could find a good Hong Kong bookstore. Hong Kong has a couple of very good bookstores and they carry most of the titles - including new-releases- that you would find at Barnes and Nobles. The only problem is the books are expensive -about 50% more that what we would pay at Borders.

In the staff lunchroom at school is a large bookshelf with dozens of books that staff members have donated. Books are free for the borrowing; just return them when finished. It’s a great resource, but you have to be willing to work with what they have on hand. It’s very hit or miss.

I used to think that I read pretty broadly but I must say, that pulling books from the freecycle shelf has greatly expanded my reading repertoire. There have been some pleasant suprises. I must confess that I enjoyed Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper.” Back in The States with 100,000 titles to pick from at Barnes and Nobels, I never, ever would have picked that book of my own accord.

But courtesy of the teacher paperback exchange, I have also opened up some real duds. After 25 pages I finally gave up on a book by an Australian humorist. Between his excessive use of Aussie slang and endless local references, I had no idea what he was talking about. For a humorist, he wasn’t very humorous.

Also, Christian-romance-murder mystery: not a good sub-genre. Rule #27 of clean, efficient prose: never use “for” when you mean “because” as in “I decided to vacation in Provence, for I had never been to France.” What? Nobody talks like that; why write like that?

But, alas, I digress.

Last fall, a colleague tipped me off about Flow a used book store on The Island. I tucked that information deep in the recesses of my mind and then promptly forgot about it.

Then this past Sunday, the family and I were tramping around Hong Kong and -low and behold- there was Flow nestled above a nondescript Chinese restaurant. A person could walk past it every day for a month and never notice it. It took us a minute to figure out how to get up there (around to the right, take the stairs next to Ivan the Kozak restaurant). But once we found our way in, we were in book heaven. Flow is only half the size of my classroom. The shelves are chocked full of books. Books are stacked on the floor. Books are stacked in front of other books.

The four of us spent the next hour squeezing past other customers and browsing the over-packed shelves of Flow. The books still weren’t what I would call cheap, but for $40 we walked out with a bag full of books that should keep us busy until the end of the school year.

Now I can finally abandon Starship Troopers and begin reading the memoir by the Last British Governor of Hong Kong.

I’m glad to finally have some good books, for I love to read.

-Jack