You and I both know that it’s incredibly uncommon for me to plant a rogue post into my blog. In fact, I think this very well may be my first one. It comes though at or on an important day. The day which I depart, to Colombia for three weeks away from my blog for the first time since I started posting to it. Ok, I know for a fact that ,while I’m away my blog will be worked on and once I return you will surely hear all about my trip as I continue to review books and tell you what’s happening during the week. But, regardless, I will still be away. I will not be able to religiously track my traffic, work on my reviews daily, do advanced research on events or peruse news sources for information. I will be “off the grid.” Thank f’ing God. It’s about time.

At approximately 230 pm, I will be boarding an airplane headed first for Houston, Texas. From, after several hours of waiting, I will board another plane and take off for Bogota, Colombia where I will land at 456am.

Packing for this trip was no easy task. What do you bring to a country you know very little about. In the end I decided not to bring much at all. After all, the cowboy boots and leather jacket I plan on getting there should get me through the trip right? I’m pretty sure I’ll look sexy as hell wearing only the boots and jacket, kind of porn star esque, no?

The packing actually wasn’t so hard. What was hard for me though was deciding what books to carry with me. In the end, what I decided to do was bring the three longest books I have on my shelves right now. I figured, why lug 8 smaller books around with me when I can just take 3 that equal in length (or are most likely longer) than the alternative of dealing with many titles. The books I’ve chosen to bring with me are David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

To give you a sneak peak I will provide you with completely unbiased and completely bullshit remarks about each book before I even open the first page. I will tell you that I know absolutely nothing about these books (ok, very very little) so this should be entertaining.

There’s more and it’s good…

How I haven’t already reviewed this bookstore I just don’t know. Considering the fact that for over a year I lived within a block and a half from it and was in it at least three times a month. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I never ever bought anything there. Pretty strange right, me walking into a bookstore and not buying anything, but just as “for every thing there is season” for every book store I don’t buy something in, there is a reason.

Located in the Japantown neighborhood of San Francisco (Fillmore and Post) this bookstore is two levels of awesome. Awesome in a non-traditional American book store kind of way. Why non-traditional? Well, for starters most of the books on the shelves in the store are written in Japanese. Therefore making it impossible for me to pick up a book and just start reading but also precluding me from making any purchases. Despite this though, I still love wandering around this store.

Sure I’ve been in bookstores in foreign countries that don’t have any English titles in them but clearly there is something unique about a bookstore in the United States that is more or less the same. I say “more or less” because they do actually have some titles written in English.

It had been sometime since I visited the store when I went there to do my research for this post and I must have spent over an hour in there browsing and having fun.

If you stop now, you’ll miss out on the good stuff and I will be forced to get Sumo on you…

What a gem, what a gem. I suppose calling this a “book store” may be a bit of a misnomer seeing as this place isn’t exactly a “store.” It’s more akin to a library but you just don’t have to return the books. You see, what this place does is giveaway books, a lot of books. To be a little more precise as of 12/20/09 they have given away a total of 31,461 books. And yes, they were all given away for free, to be kept for eternity and ever after. Unless of course once your done with them you choose to re-donate them (I highly recommend this).

The Bay Are Free Book Exchange works like this: Run by a cooperative of book store owners / lovers o books, books are collected from stores and people and then put on shelves. Those books which are donated that the store believes may be worth some money are then listed on e-bay. The others, well they go on the shelves and are given away.

While I was there I must have seen at least 15 boxes of books yet to be sorted. Get this, in order to take home books, you don’t even have to donate any. Just stroll on in, browse, pick out books, take to counter, have them stamped and leave. But wait, there is a limit of the number you can take , you can’t be selfish, you gotta leave some books for the next people. Then again if you reach that number, I’d be mighty impressed. Per visit, you are entitled to take home 50 books, yes that’s a 5 – 0 as in fifty. Yeah, I didn’t come close.

Stopping now would be detrimental to your health, keep reading…

Ok, I’m not actually going to be reviewing a bookstore in this post (hence the use of “quasi” in the title). Or at least a bookstore that just anyone can go to. As far as I’m concerned there are really only 6 or so people out there that have access to this particular “store” because it’s an incredibly private and secure collection. Books are not actually purchased there, instead they are just sort of taken or borrowed and often times replaced by new ones. In fact you could actually call it a library.

I’m talking about the one place where I can go, grab a book and walk out the door so long as my mother or father are not currently reading said book. Yes, I’m talking about my parents book collection in their house in San Diego. I’m willing to bet that some of you out there have bigger libraries or will claim to have “better” libraries at your homes, but I could care less. I’m not bragging here, I’m just letting you know where much of what I read comes from.

One thing that will make this library stand out though is the plethora of childrens books. Considering I am the youngest adult in my family and my parents have no grandchildren to date (at least that I am aware of) it would seem bizarre to have so many childrens books. But, if you had read my previous post, Post Mortem Book Store Review, you would understand. Now a days most of these books aren’t even out on the shelves they actually live in an underground storage room in the house in boxes and crates (pictures below).

Pshaw, keep reading

Clearly visiting a book store wherever I go is in the cards. My last couple of trips to San Diego have been pretty short and I haven’t had the opportunity to get to any. Alas, Thanksgiving weekend gave me just that chance. Rather than going to laugh and gawk at the morons who chose to shop at the big box retailers on black Friday, I opted to go to La Jolla and watch all the fancy pants San Diegans do their shopping at overpriced boutiques. Ok, that wasn’t the real drive behind my visit to La Jolla. My main objective was visiting Warwicks which is located on Girard Ave. in the heart of La Jolla.

Having grown up in San Diego I’ve pretty much blanked on what and where the independent booksellers are in San Diego. I mean as a kid I remember always going to Barnes & Noble to look at the magazines but I really can’t remember going to any independents, besides my mothers store of course. And frankly, back then, going to a bookstore to look at books was pretty much the last thing I had on my mind. Unless I knew there was a cute girl working there or something. When I got home (SD) on this mini-vacation I asked my mom and the only one she came up with was Warwicks. My dad mentioned a mystery book store and maybe one of these days I’ll get around to reviewing that shop as well.

Warwicks, aside from being a fairly large bookseller is also a stationary, gift and office supply shop. It’s more or less broken in half, with half the shop being books and the other half being the other stuff. Honestly, I spent about 4.37965 seconds on the stationary side, frankly I wasn’t interested. It looked a bit kitschy, with glass cases protecting expensive chotskies and who knows whats. I did however spend a good amount of time on the book side. Personally, I think they should abandon the other stuff and just enlarge the book store, just my two cents.

Oh, I know you want the pictures, keep going…

It’s now been nearly 6 weeks since I’ve let my readers know what my reading list looks like. What gives right? Well, nothing actually. I guess I just haven’t felt the need to justify my reading list with you folks out there. Ok, that was a joke, please don’t take that the wrong way. I love sharing my reading with list with you!

A lot has happened since I last put up my list. Let’s see I’ve read 17 books since then which equals nearly 3 books a week. Would you believe that I actually have a social life too? Amazing, I know. Between my books, I had a high school reunion, we all had Halloween, the company I work for was sold, I figured out where I want to work next, I spent time with many friends, made new friends, possibly lost some friends, was told by some that they no longer want to be my friend, drank a lot of coffee, was burned, scorned and let down, rode a tricycle, crashed a tricycle, rode a bike, crashed a bike, ate eel, developed a plan to take over the world, watered my plants (numerous times), replaced the alternator in my car, lost a few days and nights, grew a beard, shaved said beard so I could have a kick ass stache, ate some cheese, drank some wine, possibly (ok, I did) engage in a few illegal activities and drum roll please… bet you’re expecting something really big now right… well… here goes… ate three bowls of cereal in a single day! Now that’s astonishing.

If only you knew what some of that cryptic stuff actually meant, muahahahaha (that’s an evil laugh for those of you unfamiliar). But back to the list, you’ll actually see that some of the books that are currently on the list have been there since I first started this blog. I guess I have to concede that some of these books may never actually be read. Some are kind of hard to find while others just don’t seem as interesting as some of the newer ones that pop up. That said, it actually seems like every time I go into a book store I end up buying one book from the list and three that weren’t on it. The newest additions to the list aren’t exactly new books, most of them are in fact books that have been recommended to me by random people on the street, in bars (yes, I do talk shop in bars, yep “that guy”) or wherever I may be.

(I’ve also decided not to go the “poll” route this time. It just wasn’t really working out, maybe one of these days I’ll try again)

Ain’t nothing free, click, click, click!!

So, the Yellow Book Road isn’t actually dead. There is still a children’s book store that goes by this name but I can tell you it is most definitely not the Yellow Book Road that I have fond memories of.

Yes, it is bizarre that I’m reviewing a store that in my mind no longer exists but there is a perfectly good reason for my doing so. Mostly for the memories and secondly for my mother and Susie. You see, my mother and one of her best friends, Susie, first opened the store in La Mesa, California in 1986. The first location was above a pediatricians office (obviously ideal for a children’s bookstore), next door to a Mexican restaurant and very close to Aquarius Roller Rink (that place was rad). I have fond memories of that upstairs location but the bulk of my memories are of the store when it moved to it’s much much larger location on La Mesa Blvd. in downtown La Mesa.

Being owned by my mom, and still being rather young, you can probably imagine the amount of time I spent there. Looking back on it now I would like to remember it as being similar to a giant playground full of the written word. Unfortunately, at the time, I wasn’t so interested in that. Regardless, it was always cool to be there (although my mom will probably tell you I wasn’t always so pleased).

The store was constantly having authors in the store, whole classes of students and who knows what else. I mean there was always something going on. Back in the day I can remember a 10, possibly more, page newsletter, I mean seriously, this was for a children’s book store. My mom and Susie worked with school districts all over the country helping to make sure that schools got just the books they needed and wanted. It’s really quite amazing to look back and reflect on that. They worked incredibly hard and ran a very successful, well known and very well respected business.

But of course there’s more, and pictures too!

Due to the fact that I’ve been overly busy with work recently I haven’t had nearly as much time to read as I usually like. Hence, you may have noticed that I neglected to post anything on Wednesday and really had no intention of posting anything today. But…

I got into work this morning and as usual the first thing I do is go through my google reader and look at the posts from the blogs I follow, seriously i’m addicted to reader. The most exciting of which was my brother’s post on his blog J-Tris , he wrote a book review! Looks like he really just wants to give me a run for my money, but he’s family. He’s a big fitness fanatic and loves running, cycling, swimming and all that jazz. So, after recently finishing Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and then having the chance to see him in Los Angeles he took it upon himself to write a review. Check out his review here!

I’m always willing to share the limelight (yes I know, there is no limelight, but don’t tell him that).

So, if you recall I posted a poll (a link to a poll actually) along with my last reading list asking you to help me decide what to read next. Winning, with a whopping three votes, was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. For those of you who would like to read my review of it stay tuned and expect to see it sometime next week.

It is time once again for me to ask for your help. Of course I could just choose a book but it’s more fun to see what you all think I should be reading or what you’d like to see me review. I’ve limited my reading list/poll to 20 titles, which is actually quite a lot, and have also eliminated from it some of the longer behemoth books such as Infinite Jest cause I’m kind of tired of lugging around 5 pound books (The Power Broker and The Fountainhead). I’ve also made it easy for you to vote, no more clicking on a link, instead the poll is right here on the post! Pretty exciting huh? I think so, cause it took me awhile to figure out how to do it. Anyways, check out the poll below and help me decide what to read. The poll will run for one week, from Friday to Friday (ending at 8am PST) and I’ll be sure to announce the winning book that day. Vote away!

In attempts to continue with the theme of reviewing non-traditional book stores, this week I paid a visit to Chronicle Books on Second Street in San Francisco. The Second Street location is their corporate headquarters where they also have a beautiful store. There are also stores in the Metreon as well as on Union Street which both have a larger selection of Chronicle published books, the store on Union having the largest selection.

I’ve visited all three stores but for the review I thought the HQ store would be the most fun, although I did stop by the Metreon store on my way back to work just cause I could.

If you don’t already know about Chronicle they “are an independent publisher of distinctive books and gifts.” Their titles range from Art & Design, Cooking, Literature, Pop Culture and Travel to be pretty broad about it. They also have an impressive selection of children’s books and gifts. You may have at one time received a book titled The Worst Case Scenario… yeah, those are published by Chronicle just to give you an idea of their books.

Yes, there’s more, you didn’t real think I’d stop there did you?