10 million things in Portland: reading edition

I like Portland. Some people have never been. Visit Portland! Here are four of the ten million reasons you should.

Powell’s
I feel like most bookstores just have Moleskine notebooks. Powells is actually filled with books. It’s like a giant library where you can keep anything forever, you just have to pay a few dollars. AND they have Moleskine notebooks!

Reading Frenzy
Reading Frenzy is a supposedly great "zine" shop that I have been told to visit about thirty times. Then a few weeks ago someone told me they were out of business and then last week someone told me there was a Kickstarter to get them back in business. I'm sure they will go back in then out of business thirty times until one day my grandchildren are too busy teleporting and feeding asteroid bits to feral space cats to ever find out what a zine is. I hear they are amazing.

Central Library
My Multnomah County library card was the fifth library card I’d registered for in three years, and the process gets so much easier each time that I’m probably going start signing up for library cards on accident. I literally can’t find any books in this library. I don’t mean I can’t find the books I want, I meant I can’t find any objects that have a lot of printed pages bound together. There are several bathrooms and staircases. The library card was free.

The Bus
Reading on the bus seems like a great idea, but I usually ride the bus for such a short amount of time that I can only read about a page, and it takes a quarter of a page to remember what was going on when I was last reading. If you want to read on the bus for that length of time I recommend haikus, or one page of words you really love reading. Most people’s favorite word is their own name so my advice is the next time you wear a name tag, save it, and read it whenever you have a spare minute on the bus.