The Last Bookstore in LA

The Southern California stretch of my trip lasted barely more than 24 hours, which left me with some regrets about places I didn’t get to see and things I didn’t get to do (first and foremost, meeting Amy). My friends and I drove from San Francisco to LA on the day of the UK General Election. At the time exit polls were due to be released, we were in Santa Cruz for a lunchtime stop. We went to Marianne’s Icecream for what we believed would be a more or less futile attempt to keep despair at bay, and that’s where we were when the unexpected happened. We spent the rest of the road trip streaming BBC radio while laughing in amazement, and made it to LA just as the initial projections were being confirmed.

Two months down the line the UK is still in a mess, and my own situation as an immigrant is just as uncertain as ever. It isn’t that I expected any different that day, when I embraced the hope and exhilaration that overtook us all — it’s just that I thought they were worth leaning into regardless. The result of the general election was a much needed reminder than I don’t know what’s going to happen, for better or worse. This has been my battle all through this year: to inhabit uncertainty, to embrace possibility, to avoid a paralysing sense of inevitability without crossing the line into facile hope. This goes for small and larger scale matters alike. Some days I manage better than others.

I saw two things on my one morning in LA: the Central Library (of course) and The Last Bookstore in LA. Here’s the gorgeous library building:
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I didn’t mean for over a month to go by before I carried on telling you about my trip. I came back from the West Coast full of joy and energy and hope, and then proceeded to have a very busy month. There was more travelling (home to see my family, and then to Paris for a long weekend, which I’d love to eventually post about), plus the start of summer reading at my library, plus some overtime and shift swaps resulting in ten-day long work marathons. When I finally got the chance to stop for a deep breath, I found that I was anxious and despondent again — that the world seemed scarier than ever, that I didn’t necessarily have any more answers than I did before, that many of the things that have always brought me joy seemed pointless and hollow.

But then I came back to my 什么加速器能进外网 from Adrienne Rich’s “From a Survivor”, which remain among the most powerful I have read this year: “…which I live now / not as a leap / but a succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next”. These few lines alone have done so much to sustain me. They get at something I need reminding of; that I need to come back to from time to time. I don’t need a once and for all solution regarding how to be alive in this world, how to be okay, how to make things better or at the very least not worst. I just need to get through the morning, the afternoon, the day, always doing my best to live by my values. Change is always incremental, and all those brief movements of surviving will add up to a lifetime.

This isn’t much of an answer, but it’s made me feel more grounded. And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that the process of unfucking my life will have to involve coming back here, to this place of communion with writing, to the self-discovery and expression and community that putting my words out into the world has allowed me to enjoy for the past decade. I need to write regularly again; I feel out of kilter otherwise. The good news is that I’ve been reading, which strikes me as step one even if I never go back to reviewing in the way I used to: I’m currently in the middle of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, I finally read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and I finished No is Not Enough the other day. Even just telling you this makes me feel a little more like myself.

This brings me to San Francisco in a very roundabout sort of way: whatever my strategy will be, I know it will also involve dwelling on joy. The few days I spent in the city were full of joy and community, and I’m so glad I got to have this experience this year of all years:
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Powell’s (and Oregon)

I finally made it to Powell’s, and the city of books lived up to its description: it’s without a doubt the best bookshop I’ve ever been to. I think very fondly of my visits to, say, the Strand or Barter Books, but nowhere is quite like Powell’s. At most bookshops I’m excited if I find one or two books by my go-to authors, but Powell’s had pretty much everything. There was a whole shelf worth of Angela Davis, and the Ursula Le Guin section in SFF was three shelves long. Most bookshops have their strong areas; at Powell’s every single section I was interested in — children’s books, comics, poetry, queer literature, feminism, you name it — was amazingly well stocked. Also, as pretty much everyone who visits Powell’s tends to say, I loved that new and used books were kept together, and that I had a choice of prices and editions for whatever I was looking for.

I spent three hours there and didn’t see half of it. Let me give you a glimpse of my visit:

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Seattle in Libraries and Bookshops

Seattle was the first stop of my West Coast trip, and the place where I stayed the longest. I was very lucky: in a notoriously rainy city, I got blue cloudless skies for all but one day, and also the warmest Memorial Day Weekend in over forty years. I got to see and do a lot: I hiked on Mount Rainer, had amazing food, wandered around Capitol Hill and took photos of the many protest posters and stickers, visit Ballard and Freemont, climbed many hills with stunning views of the city, walked along the waterfront, spent time with people I love — and of course, visited many libraries and bookshops.

You might be unsurprised to hear that my very first stop was the Seattle Central Library. I knew it was housed in an amazing building, and it didn’t disappoint in person:

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My Bookshop and Ice Cream Tour of the Pacific Northwest

Hello, friends. Once again I went silent on here for much longer than I had intended. 2017 has been eventful to say the least, in ways I didn’t always have the right words for. I didn’t stop writing over the past few months; not exactly. But as I said last time, most of what I wrote took the form of long, meandering letters to friends, as I tried to make sense of myself and the world around me in dialogue with others. Part of what I’ve always loved about blogging is that it’s essentially an extension of that process — I’m starting to feel ready to carry on doing it in a more public fashion again. We’ll see how that goes, I guess.

I’ve recently returned from what amounted to an ice cream and bookshop tour of the West Coast of the United States, all the way from Seattle to LA. This trip did a lot to restore my sense of hope, a process no doubt greatly aided by hearing the UK election results come in as I drove down California from Santa Cruz to LA. Things are still in a pretty dire state — I have no illusions about that. But just a few days ago, on the anniversary of Jo Cox’s assassination, I was thinking that this is the most political hope I’ve had all year. Nothing is inevitable. I needed to be reminded of that, both when it comes to my life and to the world at large.

Anyway, I’m hoping to tell you more about my trip in the coming weeks, particularly about all the excellent bookshops I visited (Powell’s is real, it turns out, and even better than I was led to believe). Travel posts have always been among my favourites to put together, and I thought that might be a nice way to ease myself back into regular blogging. Also, I’ve missed you all. When I was in Seattle I had the chance to met my old blogging friends Kristen, Robin and Lena; I only wish I hadn’t missed Amy and all the other West Coast friends I didn’t have the chance to get in touch with. I’ll do my very best to make sure there is a next time.

Other trip highlights include getting my first glimpse of the open Pacific during a perfectly timed but entirely accidental musical moment; Earl Grey ice cream at Bi-Rite; Land’s End in San Francisco, the highlight of a perfect sunset tour; hiking on Mount Rainer National Park; getting to see sea lions; buying a copy of Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer for a friend; finally getting to try Ethiopian food; wandering around the Castro the year I came out as a queer woman to most people in my life, surrounded by friends I feel seen by; having a picnic by the sea on my last full day; apple fritter donuts from Blue Star; all the road trip singalongs; City Lights; and of course all the books I got:

In case you can’t read the titles, they are:

手机加速器下载_加速器app有哪些_加速器app推荐:2021-11-16 · 手机加速器app有哪些呢？哪些加速器app好用呢？网络卡顿，游戏闪退等问题都让很多小伙伴很是烦恼，下面小编整理的加速器app的合集相信能够帮助到大家，也值得大家信赖，这里为您提供了加速器app大全，加速器app推荐，加速器app排行榜，有 ... by Ursula Le Guin (because I couldn’t leave Portland without a Le Guin book)

The Girls of Peculiar by Catherine Pierce (because my friend 什么加速器能进外网 sent me this tweet)

The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet (my City Lights acquisition; the Angela Davis blurb sealed the deal)

The Moon Is Always Female by Marge Piercy (because 蚂蚁vp(永久免费))

Crush by Richard Siken

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (finally!)

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag (likewise; these two have been hard to find)

Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks

Graceling, Fire and Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore

Everfair by Nisi Shawl (signed!)

Princess, Princess Ever After by Katie O’Neill (also signed!)

Everfair and 什么加速器能进外网 were presents from the lovely Lena; the Cashore trilogy was long overdue (I don’t like the UK covers, so I really wanted to get the US editions); and most of the rest came from Powell’s – I was doing so well until I got there.

More soon, I hope! How have you all been doing?

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