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Good Reading : June 2009
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reader’s life 3 2 bookshop GPS gr reader DIARNE KRELTSZHEIM has a knack for finding bookshops wherever she is. After moving to the Ukraine, she just had to find one that sold English titles. 1 3 y darling niece once tartly pointed out that when it comes to bookshops, I am a heat-seeking missile. If you cannot identify with this magnetic attraction, then you cannot claim to be a true book addict. It is a simple fact of lifel M b a . It is as natural as night following day, so when you find yourself in a foreign country, you will, after a few days, find yourself gravitating towards a bookshop. I am in Kiev, city of parks, goldendomed Orthodox churches and suicidal drivers. My posting to Kiev was as rapid as it was unexpected. When my company called for someone with my skills to be posted in the Ukraine I put my hand up before my brain kicked in. I was dazzled by the sound of such name as Odessa, Lviv, Kiev and the Carpathian Mountains. d d r c s i n C Kiev turned out to be a breathtaking 1 One of many entrances to the Metrograd Shopping mall 2 The entrance to the Globe Bookstore 3 False alarm. The first bookshop Diarne found in Kiev yielded only a few Agatha Christie novels and a handful of Russian classics. 52 goodreading ı JUNE 2009 city. The main boulevard running through the centre of the city is called Khreshchatyk. On hot summer nights, Khreshchatyk is ‘the’ place to promenade. Once winter settles in, the crowds head for the underground shopping centre that lies underneath this wide boulevard. c t I spent my first two weeks wandering in a daze through the city, trying to navigate the unfamiliar streets and decipher the Cyrillic street signs when I felt that almost imperceptible ghostly tug of my internal ‘bookshop guidance system’. Glory be! There it was – my first bookshop in the city of Kiev. I could just feel the tension leave my body as I floated though a granite archway that framed a set of heavy wooden doors on a bookie’s equivalent of a hash high. The resultant crash was both fast and severe. I felt as if I had been sucker punched. Every single title in this bookshop was either in Russian or Ukrainian. Kiev was to be my home for the next three months and there was not a single English title in sight. I surveyed the packed bookshelves, and then slowly backed out of the bookshop in shock. I found another bookshop, and then another, and the best I could come up with was half a shelf of Agatha Christie novels and a few Russian classics translated into English. Now, please do not misunderstand me. I love Agatha Christie, and I have nothing against
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