A “Church Home” For Books

Last week Amy and I tried to find a good bookstore. Let me explain what I mean by that. When most Christians relocate they have to find a new church, a new “church home” they call it, where they can feel comfortable worshipping, socializing, and being preached to.

I guess if you follow the analogy through it's like we kinda worship books. We don't really, though we have a healthy fetish for them. To be clear, our fetish is more for the contents of books, not the objects themselves. We’re pretty conservative about how many books we buy and keep in the house.

Mainly, we love to browse, scope out the reading market, or just soak up the literary vibes while we work on our writing projects.

The Salt Lake City Borders store was our favorite haunt in Utah, but the one here turned out to be pretty different.

When I lived here before I used to spend a lot of time at the Borders. There, books were King. The coffee shop was nice with live music on Friday nights. The CDs and DVDs were tucked away under the mezzanine, and the store itself was set apart from the mall and the teeny-bopper crowd.

Not anymore.


The store’s been relocated to the heart of the mall, recently rennovated and expanded. Everything is now catered to the teeny-boppers with over-priced DVDs and swimsuit calenders everywhere you turn.

To coin a phrase, it sucked.

The nearby Barnes and Noble was okay, but only just. Set apart from the mall, it felt a lot better in there, but we’re still searching for the best place to go.

Seattle is a reading town with plenty of hole-in-the-wall places to check out, so we’ll see how it goes as we explore some of our other options.

-Tom.