Black people. Gay people. They all look the same to Barnes & Noble, Orange, CA.
I’m not sure when this started. But it’s the first time I’ve noticed it.
Barnes & Noble is a strange bookshop. It isn’t really a bookshop in the sense of a real bookshop, like the awesomeness of Amazon.com, or Bookman on North Tustin Street in Orange, or that place on Roeland Street in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s really just the front end of a warehouse, stocked mostly with disposable non-fiction, aimed at America’s massive “me culture”. 1000 Barbecue Recipes. An entire 10 foot shelf just dedicated to cooking pork. Another dedicated to how to stop eating BBQ pork. Another to the growing co-dependency / drug addiction industry. Another for gun magazines. And another for scams like Mothers’ and Fathers’ days. And pets. Oh my god. Animals are gods in the USA – unless they’re edible. But even then they get a shelf. 1000 Ways to Cook a Chicken that never saw Daylight. Novels? Oh, get a Nook (TM), you nerd. Only that latest 50 big sellers or series with movies coming out can be purchased in print.
I bought a novel by Ann Patchett called State of Wonder (cause I like Orange Prize for Fiction stuff) and a book about psychopaths called The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, and went cycling on home.
Comment /caption removed to avoid confusing my readers. Maybe this is photo is what is confusing the simple folk at B&N, Orange, CA.
