And I'm finished...

Well, my pocket at least. Or to be even more precise, the money in it.

This is the thing. If I say "I love books", that would be a serious understatement. Well I could have typed it like "I LOVE BOOKS", using caps, to give it a bit more emphasis, but still it wouldn't be sufficient. I just wanted to say... err... I LOVE BOOKS! Well, I just repeated myself, but you get the drift right.

Ever since I came here to Japan I couldn't find a decent place where I could buy books. English books that is. Because there are numerous bookshops here, but very few had English books. Need not say that it is pointless to look for Sinhala stuff. So my only option so far was Amazon. Not the jungle, that site you know. But it isn't the same as you're going to a bookshop is it? I LOVE this smell of new books. The feeling you get when you walk among them... it's simply awesome. I just love it. When I was back in Sri Lanka I used to go to many bookshops like Sarasavi or Vijitha Yapa at least once a month. Not necessarily to buy them, I just wanted to be among them. Sometimes I didn't have a penny in my pocket (well, I should have said rupee, but whatever) but still I'd go to them and just spend the time. Two or three hours straight, sometimes.

Yesterday evening I rang Solomon, a good friend who work here with me. Previously he had done the mistake of informing me about a good bookshop nearby. We were half drunk at that time, but I don't usually forget that kind of thing. Well, never. Maybe he thought I'd forget everything the next day. You wish, mate! So I asked him whether if we can visit it, of course in that polite manner. You know, you put the question forward, then say something like "only if you aren't busy... it's OK if you are, we can go some other time...." knowing perfectly well that he wouldn't refuse. And he didn't. (Thanks bro!) I'm a cunning person, you know...

Off we went to the place, and boy wasn't I in awe! It was like a six story building and almost an entire floor was allocated for English books! There were all sorts of books. Fiction, science fiction, fantasy, classics, history, biographies... you name it, they have it. I was like going crazy! It was better than finding cryptonite, though I have no idea what I can do if I find cryptonite.

So I browsed through the book shelves, enjoying that smell of new books... oh it was heaven! Spent like an hour there and found a couple of books I so wanted to read. One was "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, which many who read it speaks highly of and the other one is very well known "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens. Now don't say that if you're that crazy for books you must have read it before this. Hey, at least I am going to read it now OK? And there's a first time for everything. Ha!

The problem is, being the book freak I am, and the above mentioned bookshop is located near my workplace, I am pretty sure that I will visit it every month at least. No. I'm dead sure I will visit it more often that that. And Japan being Japan, books are goddamn expensive as anything else. I'm just going to waste a lot of money.

But I can't help it.