Some people shop for clothes or shoes when they travel. I mostly shop for books. They have become the focus of any trip, partly so I can find books I never see at home and partly to enjoy and to celebrate the remaining bricks and mortar book stores. On trips to Asia I pack my suitcase with toiletries for my son that are either expensive or unavailable there, and then bring books on the flight home.

I don’t pretend to have visited all the book stores in Canada, where I did most of my travelling before buying books became so much of a focus for me. There are certainly fewer than when I was young. Of stores I have visited in the past few years, the McNally Robinson ones in Winnipeg and Saskatoon have been a highlight. I am disappointed that White Cat Books in downtown Saskatoon has hit the dust, glad that Westgate Books seems stronger than ever in its new location.

I was struck by the scarcity of book stores in my last two visits to Vancouver. Perhaps people there are too busy with their outdoor lifestyle to read, too poor from the high cost of living to buy books, only read books from the library, or buy them on-line. On my visit in January of this year I felt that the Book Warehouse on Broadway had improved dramatically since the previous January and that it deserved a more imaginative or more accurately descriptive name.

When my husband and I were in Las Vegas in 2008, we toured a number of second-hand book stores that gave us a totally different view of the place than we got from the casinos and the Strip. He made a map, we took a taxi to the farthest one and then walked back to our hotel, stopping at all the stores along the way. We got a sense of a rooted reading culture, a feeling that people actually lived there.

In my trip to New York City two years ago with some of the Eating and Drinking Women I was thrilled to visit the Strand Bookstore. When I phoned from Edmonton, a live human took my call and my order for Clara`s War by Clara Kramer and Pearl Buck in China by Hillary Spurling (I had previously read library copies). In person I saw that most of the staff were friendly young hipsters, dressed in skinny jeans and black tee shirts. After picking up the books I had requested I went on to buy a half dozen more from the stock in the store. It was thrilling to encounter young people who were enthusiastic about handling actual physical books. A visit to Powell’s in Portland Oregon is another thrill I hope to have soon.

On a recent trip to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, I visited two Kinokinuya stores. They are part of a Japanese chain that specializes in manga yet still manages to have more books in English than any book store I have visited in Canada. Not only did I encounter stacks of The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel in both places and such expected categories as Business and Self-Help, I was blown away by a massive wall of Literature in each store. This section was a book lover’s dream and I did not have time to explore all the riches, although as far as I could tell the books were all or mostly UK editions. The section devoted to Nabokov, for example, appeared to have every book he wrote, fiction and non-fiction, as well as some criticism and biography. I have never seen anything this rich in a store in Canada.

For more than a year I had been looking for a copy of Philip Roth`s The Human Stain. I approached my search as a kind of test of the availability of books in Edmonton. I chose not to request a library copy because I couldn`t know if I would have the time or the inclination to read it when my hold came in. I looked in Audrey’s, Chapters, the Bookseller, the Edmonton Bookstore (I temporarily forgot about Alhambra Books) and all the thrift stores where I find some of my best books. It never turned up. Asking one of these stores to order it for me would have been akin to buying it on-line.

My search for this book was an offshoot of discussions with the Eating and Drinking Women. One member of this group is less than enthusiastic about most of the books we read. She dismisses most of them as `not very interesting` or the characters as `not very engaging.` Ìt was hard to keep reading,`she often says. When I asked her if there was any book she would recommend, she did not hesitate with her answer. `The Human Stain by Philip Roth,`she said, practically swooning. This was such an unequivocal recommendation that I was intrigued and began searching for the book. I wanted to figure out what my book club friend found so appealing about it.
The novel was published in 2000, the year I got divorced, and, as anyone who has ever got divorced will tell you, the experience uses up most of your energy and attention. Thus it is not surprising that the book did not register on my radar at all.

I should also explain there was a period in my twenties when I was such a passionate Canadian nationalist I did not read anything written by contemporary American authors. I went through an even briefer period when I read only women writers. This double narrowness is contrary to my current catholic approach to reading, but explicable in terms of my age and insecurity at the time. Philip Roth was in his heyday when I was in my twenties, so I would have assiduously ignored all of his books, as they were written by an American male. From the point of view of my youthful narrowmindedness, he had two strikes against him.

I was thrilled to find this book in the Kinokinuya store in Kuala Lumpur, lined up in a row with all his others. Not only did I find the book, I paid only the equivalent of about $12 Canadian for it. Here is the price sticker from the back of the cover (there are about three Malaysian ringgit to our dollar):

My visit to the Kinokinuya stores led me to contemplate the meagre stock of books in my own country. By this I mean the meagre stock of books I can pick up and physically handle, where the few remaining stores selling new books mostly stock multiple copies of all the same bestsellers. From my work in libraries I know something about publishing rights and that they may make certain books less rather than more available. I also know that most books, even if published elsewhere, are printed in Asia, and the cost of shipping anything from Asia to Canada is going to raise the price. Another consideration is that an underpaid labour force may lower the price.
However, in both these countries where I saw so many books I have never seen at home, English is one of a number of official languages. It may be a common language of educated people—that is, of people who read—but I can’t believe that Malaysians or Singaporeans read more than me, my friends and family. Of course we may be an abnormal sub-cohort of the population but all my friends and family are passionate readers. (And I believe this will continue into the next generation of my family, as my granddaughter at five months was mesmerized by turning over pages of printed text.)

Seeing so many books in Asia that I could buy in one place both delighted and infuriated me. I was delighted by the riches in front of me while infuriated that I couldn’t find these riches at home.
Of course when a book woman travels she not only buys books, she reads. On this trip I powered my way through Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Master by Colm Toibin, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs. In airports and on airplanes you need books that grab you and don’t let go, and mostly these filled the bill. I may blog about some of them eventually when what I am reading at the moment does not grab me enough to write about it.
When my eyes grew tired of print on paper I tried to read on my tablet. I keep it loaded with long books I hope to read some day, and at home it takes forever to need recharging. Ten hours into the flight from Vancouver to Manila, though, it showed not a flicker of life when I tried to turn it on. This was typical of my experience with electronic technology. In my next, non-corporeal life, I may have a better relationship with virtual media.