on Belgrade bookstores

For my early evening walk, I went past the Che Guevara-themed restaurant (named Revolucion!) to the pedestrian promenade. I decided to investigate the two bookstores.

It was my first bookstore visit in my post-Portland life that did not involve a sighed "it's not Powell's." It's kind of sad that I have to leave the hemisphere for that to happen.

These stores were fascinating. They both had surprisingly large English language sections, although I was sad to see that the their English options are primarily chick lit and thrillers. I spent a while in the children's section. The spot books, which I remember my brother loving when he was very young, were prominently displayed in each store. There were also a lot of Disney books.

On a completely unrelated note, both bookstores had disproportionately large sections on ancient Egypt.

I was drawn to the translated books. There was a section that was all Serbian versions of books that had been made into American movies. There were translated comics and novels. It was all fascinating to see. I think of American music & visual media infiltrating all corners of the world, but I had never thought that books do. The Da Vinci Code is a best-selling novel in Belgrade, too.

The authors names were all transliterated which looks strange, but was a good test of my ability to read Serbian. A few that I remember:
Nil Geymen = Neil Gaiman
Margaret Atvud = Margaret Atwood
K.C. Levic = C.S. Lewis

And one of the stores had an atlas section. I spent a lot of time looking at the maps. I had to force myself not to buy a cyrillic world atlas. I was proud of myself for being able to read it.
And it just looked really cool.