Garfield!!!

Calvin and Hobbes!!!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

A Good Bookstore (rather, the lack of one)

For those of you who are new here, I study in a college near Mangalore, a city in Karnataka. It's a city like any other, with its own peculiarities, merits and demerits. This post is about something that Mangalore lacks. Apart from the "big-city" feel, (Yes, yes, I know, I know - Bangalore is not exactly a very "happening" place but at least it's alive after 9 PM, which is more than I can say for this place - all that it lacks to complete the ghost-town effect is the howling of wolves :D) Mangalore doesn't seem to have a decent bookstore. (Hey, I like to read, a lot in fact - what's wrong with that? Perfectly normal, which would make a first about me :P) The solitary mall is reasonably well stocked with a wide variety of commodities on offer. (chilled sugarcane juice, anyone?) There's a multiplex, for the creatively starved, (although some of the films make the use of this word very, very generous) good scenery for those in need of aesthetics, (:D) and good food for starving stomachs. (as my sister once put it - anything and everything tastes good after the mess)
One thing sorely missing is a decent bookstore. There are a couple of pretenders, but I seriously doubt whether any self-respecting person would venture to call them "bookstores". That description would be equivalent to calling the Grand Canyon a "hole in the ground" or describing the Eiffel tower as "nifty, but an awful waste of steel". The range of books at these stores is quite pathetic. The owners' literary sense ranges from Mills-and-Boons (seriously, two full racks??? Get a life, please!) to what I like to call "Thrash Fiction" - the very latest in "one-man-one-mission-life-or-death-blah-blah" thrillers. Where is the Wodehouse? Where is the Le Carre? Where is the Julian Barnes, the Sebastian Faulks or even the Ian Rankin?
Alright, I get the fact that my literary taste is unique, (a diplomatic way of putting it :D) and most people would rather run a mile in tight shoes than read some of the books that I like. In fact, most people get the impression that I'm slightly cuckoo, primarily because of the stuff that I read. However, it's what I like. All I'm asking for is a bit of choice. That's it. It's hardly difficult, is it?