Random bookshops

This is my fairy godchild. She loves books. I know she is eagerly looking forward to doing a bookshop crawl this coming school holiday. 

OG Book Exchange

To counteract the popular notion that readers are sloths, I walked 12km today to check out this bookshop. I arrived 10 minutes before closing time. I was fortunate that there were several customers still hanging around the shop that I got an additional half hour of wandering around. 

Krell has been running this shop the last 35 years. I will call him a hero in keeping alive the glorious, wondrous, and magical tradition of reading. Almost everything is priced at AU$10 and if you return a book, you get an AU$5 exchange. 

OG Bookshop
80 OG Road, Klemzig, South Australia 5087
Shop hours:
Wednesday-Friday and Monday: 10am - 5pm
Saturday: 10am - 4pm
Sunday - CLOSED

Bibliotheca Bar and Book Exchange (redux)

I have brought several friends to this place, and it never fails to amaze folks that there is this jewel tucked in a narrow alley in our sweet Adelaide. 

Bibliotheca Bar and Book Exchange
1/27 Gresham St., Adelaide SA 5000
Shop hours:
Monday-Wednesday 5pm - 11pm
Thursday-Saturday 5pm - 2am
https://bibliotheca.com.au/

Dymocks at Sydney

We are in Sydney this Anzac Day weekend to see the Rameses exhibition at the Australian Museum. One can easily arrive at the conclusion that Ramses II was a master of spin way before the social media era. More than 3000 years after, we can still see and feel the reverberations of his media campaign.   He was victorious in all the wars he waged; he built colossal monuments. He was the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful ruler. So, he claimed. 

Viewing almost 200 ancient artifacts and a virtual reality show made us hungry.  We walked for about a kilometer and a half to the cafe at 428 George St. You do know where we're going with this little story, right?

Dymocks Sydney
Dymocks Cafe
424-430 George Street
Sydney, NSW Australia 2000
Dymocks - Dymocks Sydney bookstore in New South Wales (NSW)

Orchard Bookshop (now at the Adelaide Arcade)

Orchard Bookshop moved from the Adelaide Central Market to Adelaide Arcade about two years ago. Not too long after, I moved jobs and found myself a hop and a skip from the bookshop. My morning route to the office these days invariably includes looking at Orchard's window display and dropping in at lunchbreaks. I love their curated collection especially on the ancients and philosophy.

Today, I found a young lovely lady minding the shop and she told me her parents were away. "Goodness," I said to her. "Do you know you have the best job in the woooooorld?"

Orchard Bookshop 
https://orchardbookshop.com.au/
Adelaide Arcade, Shop 26, 112/118
Grenfell St., Adelaide, South Australia 5000

Happy International Women's Day!

Happy International Women's Day! Here's to strong women: May we know them, may we be them, may we raise them (sharing my March TBR pile).

Natalie Haynes and Greek mythology

There, just finished Natalie Haynes’s “Divine Might”, released last 28 September.  “Beguiled” is my state at the moment after going through her seven books the last three months.

“Classics” and “entertainment” are juxtaposing terms, but Natalie Haynes has managed to meld these two in her writing. You’d think that someone who is steeped in ancient history would be stuck in her ivory tower looking down on the heathen population. But no, Haynes, with aplomb and humour,  joins the dots between the ancients and popular culture while injecting her staunch feminist position and political opinions.

It is tempting to stalk Haynes (she also does shows!), invite her to tea, and talk about the fantastic things she has written about. She must be prescient and aware of her powers as she's issued a veiled warning in “Amber Fury” to those who fall hopelessly in love with her and her work.  

Natalie Haynes is a rockstar and a goddess reincarnate.