Sara: Thinking of how publishing works while traveling

For this spring break, I came to San Francisco to visit a friend and explore the city. On Monday, I had to do some solo tourism, and I ended up walking around with no real direction. That is one of my favorite feelings, being in a new city and having that need to soak up every little corner that is full of the unknown. Around 4 pm that day, I found myself walking down a nice street that went straight to that pointy building that is really characteristic of the SF skyline - I just looked up the name of the building, and it is called the Transamerica Pyramid! Suddenly, I see this really cool bookstore and I just had to enter and explore. It looked unique and just like a place where you can lose yourself in books. I had two hours to kill, so I spent at least one hour just looking at the books, admiring covers and trying to restrain the need to buy at least 20 of them.
The place is called City Lights, and it is a bookstore and independent publisher! How amazing is that?! I thought it was a delightful coincidence and made me think of our discussions from class. Something that before this class would have had no real significance for me now is something that makes me think beyond the final product that is the book and appreciate the publication process that is way more intricate than I imagined.
I ended up buying a book and I'm not going to lie, the first thing that made me go for it to read what it is about was the cover. The book is called "All my puny sorrows" by a Canadian writer called Miriam Toews. I thought the cover of the book looked cute so I picked it up and read the blurb. It is about two sisters, one who seems to have a perfect life and the other is struggling one day after the other, but the put together sister wants to end her own life. It caught my interest, and also I wanted my choice to be as random as possible. I didn't want to check Goodreads until after buying whatever book I decided to buy, and here I am, looking forward to starting my new acquisition. Covers are so important, and after watching the TED talk by the cover designer men, I'm appreciating more and more how some covers are designed to be the perfect representation for the story inside the pages.
The whole experience was lovely, and I cannot deny that in a Barnes & Nobles it would not have been the same. Bookstores like this remind me how amazing it is that humans translate emotions into words and anyone around the world can read them and feel less alone knowing someone somewhere is feeling the same way. It is an art, and I don't mind sounding cheesy, but I think art makes this whole experience of living on Earth so much worth it.
Anyways, I had an amazing day and the unexpected trip to the City Lights bookstore made it memorable. I hope the book is good, and if not at least it will look amazing in my bookshelf and it will always remind me of my amazing trip to SF!
Hope whoever is reading this had an amazing spring break full of awesome memories too!