Pride and profundity* aside, the weirdness I failed to realize for a month or two (I've had conversations about this when I just got here) is that book shops in the Philippines are really weird. Most bookshops I have walked into mostly sell office supplies and educational textbooks. And bibles obviously, but I categorize that as an educational textbook. At face value that sounds pretty useful, but I don't really see the point of buying "MS Office '95 for dummies" at this point. Although now that I think about it, I wouldn't be incredibly surprised if some government institution somewhere is still using Office '95. I've seen and heard more disturbing things.
At the chain bookstores they do have novels, about two shoulder-high racks worth of novels in the store I checked out. That's on a total store size of 1.5 floors of around 75 square meters. Incredible, I know, but the real gem is the selection. I don't know what the acquisition-philosophy is exactly, but here's my interpretation on the categories (in ascending order of amount of books):
- Books that high-schoolers might need to read in school, e.g. Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Twain. It's not all useless.
- Books that have been made into movies and novelizations of movie scripts, e.g. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Bourne whatever, Godzilla.
- Romance novels about men without shirts and women in stables or whatever.
The last category fills one of the two racks.
So how did I not realize this was weird for two consecutive months? AM I BECOMING ONE OF THEM?
p.s. We can buy real books at a second-hand bookstore in town. They also have a book called Gynomite, and I think that's wonderful.
* I'm copyrighting that. It's an amazing book title. How do you copyright stuff?
