I've made the pilgrimage to Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon. I entered the temple and I paid my respects by buying a book by Patrick Modiano I'd been eying for a while and which sat in my Amazon cart for years -- how wonderful that I instead bought it at an incredible independent bookstore!
I was visiting Portland for the American Literary Translators Association annual conference so of course it was fitting to visit a bookstore and to buy a book in translation.
Powell's is enormous! Supposedly the largest bookstore in the whole world. I only had a short time to spend there, unfortunately, but it made a big impression on me, as did Portland, and I hope to return (downtown is laid out on a grid, splayed across two banks of the Willamette River and a walker's paradise).
What I love about a bookstore like Powell's: the inventory is so vast that you can go ahead and search for a book you won't find every day, such as the Modiano book (even most independent bookstores won't have Family Record -- far likelier you'll find one of the more recent titles like Ballerina or one of his better-known such as Suspended Sentences.)
It enters the pantheon of great bookstores that I've visited, which includes Rizzoli, I AM Books, Commonwealth Books and Il Libraccio.
Happy reading, book-lovers, and may you have a bookstore pilgrimage of your own soon!
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