Independent Bookstores: City Lights

The kindle has changed my book buying experience irrevocably.  

Gone are the days when I would wander through the shelves of the "big book store", and you know who you are. In fact, since I started using my kindle, I'm ashamed to say I haven't even walked inside a library.  

There are too many free books to be had for this e-reader to use what little time I do have in the pursuit of what may or may not be a decent book.

All this changed two weeks ago in San Francisco.

I went inside the veritably hallowed ground of City Lights Bookstore for the first time in years and remembered something about what a book store is and why I should take myself into them.


 For the young or the underexposed, City Lights began as a periodical and became a book store when poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin joined together to publish small works, by little known and at the time very unpopular authors, unpopular with the police in particular.

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac are two of the most commonly known of the group, but their attitude defined and inspired a generation of young people who were tired ( beat , thus beatnik ) with the status quo. 

I do not, in any way miss the "big book store", but I truly do miss places like City Lights.  

It even motivated me to buy an actual bound three dimensional paper book and in the future I'll be talking about more of them, the books and the places that love them as much as we do.