My independent bookstore crawl continues: the Librería Francesa occupies one of the pleasant corners in San José, on a street lined with tall trees and across from the Parque Francia. While Spanish and French speakers will find the most browsing material, most anyone can enjoy the bookstore’s strongest suit: its beautiful children’s books, including many from Costa Rica.
Drop by during your visit to Barrio Escalante, leaf through books as wind ruffles the trees outside, and then read in the park or in one of the surrounding cafés. Perfection.
One of the best possible ways to spend a long, breezy San José afternoon in December is to wander through the city’s prettiest parks, nestled together just east of the city center: Parque Nacional, Parque Morazan and especially Parque España. And now there’s a delightful spot to stop, browse and read amidst the green.
Librería Duluoz is just off the Parque España’s northeast corner, across a narrow street from the beautiful Casa Amarilla. On a recent visit, I could have plopped down in the cozy, inviting kids’ section for hours. The English-language selection is limited, but readers of Spanish will be in heaven, and honestly, it’s worth a visit just for its gorgeous location. Robust feminist and LGBTQ sections and more provide a chance to take in the scope of the country’s and region’s progressive authors, and independent publishers are the stars of the show.
I’m glad Librería Duluoz has joined Librería Andante on the extremely nascent independent bookstore crawl I started as part of the Daily Boost. Do you have other favorites I should visit? Tell me all about them! And don’t forget to enter my Costa Rican holiday care package giveaway!holiday care package giveaway!
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
Remember when the Scholastic Book Club flyers would arrive at your classroom and you would pore over them at your desk when you were supposed to be doing other things and circle the books you wished you could have? I’m not sure when that started or if it ended, but for a book nerd at elementary school in the 80s, it was like Christmas. I think of that sometimes in this day and age where the internet is a vast, infinite Scholastic Book Club at my fingertips at any time, with no one to tell me not to buy a given book except my own budget.
Despite that abundance, my book-reading muscles have atrophied substantially in recent years, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I attribute it to a variety of factors: part decision fatigue, part decreased attention speed because of the brevity of social media posts, part feeling like we’ve read because we spend so much time skimming emails or think pieces or news. I know that whenever I do crack a book – especially an actual book with actual pages and an actual cover – my mood and state of mind are immeasurably improved. As we enter what I always think of as the reading season, with cozy nights and vacation days approaching, I like to get as much inspiration as possible to line my nightstand or Kindle with recommendations.
Will you give me a recommendation? I obviously have a soft spot for books from and about Costa Rica, Latin America, immigration, women and women’s rights, and the theme of the Daily Boost, which is finding inspiration amidst chaos… but I’m wide open, honestly. I’d love to hear what you’re reading now or books that pop to your mind that you might have read long ago but that NO ONE SHOULD GO ANOTHER SECOND WITHOUT READING, and actually now that you think of it you don’t understand why you aren’t rereading it yourself right at this very moment. (“The Incredible Lightness of Being,” “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” and “A Confederacy of Dunces” come to mind, off the top.)
Happy reading…
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
Though school starts in February in Costa Rica, I still think of September with that back-to-school fondness, aided by the fact that this cool, rainy month does give me some autumn vibes. And what better place to celebrate back to school than a cozy independent bookstore?
If you’re reading this, you almost assuredly love bookstores. You might even own one, and if not, you’ve definitely imagined yourself owning one, probably in a picturesque fishing village where you would wear hand-knitted sweaters and gaze out at the storm-tossed sea in between customers (right? I’m not the only one, am I?). So I’m not convincing anyone here. But this is a love that had gotten away from me, and when I wandered into La Librería Andante for the first time in a long while – it’s a gorgeous, lovingly curated little bookstore in the university district near my house – I felt so many knots inside me come loose. In a world of noise, it’s a quiet place; in a fast world, it encourages you to move slowly and to browse, which is such a lovely, relaxing and somnolent word, browwwwse; in a world of technology, it is timeless; in a world of foolishness, it is an oasis of wisdom and beauty. As I wandered through its offerings, I set myself the second challenge of this year (the first being to get to know more artists): to visit all the local bookstores I can find, and to redirect as much of my shopping to them as I possibly can.
Why is the bookstore or the library more magical than being surrounded by our own bookshelves at home? I think it’s the sense of possibility. If books have altered the course of the life or the way you see the world in the past, then standing in a bookstore makes your nerves tingle, because you know that the next game-changer might be within your reach at this very moment. It could be behind that beautiful, glossy cover over there. It could be wedged into an undignified corner of the used book stacks. You might find it today – you might not. You might walk right past it, not knowing. But it’s there, and that’s such a comfort. As the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes put it (oh yeah, I’m just nerding all the way out today – it’s that bookstore air), there’s “something holy in the darkness… and as rich moonlight may be to the blind, unconsciously consoling.”
If you can, go to a bookstore or a library this week and bask in that consolation, that knowledge that whether you read them today or this year or not, there are wise words waiting for us. There’s something holy in the darkness. Tucked away, bound and covered but ready to break free at any moment – there is light.
(If you’re a sucker for an incredible library story, check out “The Gift of a Public Library” by Deborah Fallows in The Atlantic, featuring beautiful libraries doing the impossible to keep their doors open in small towns including my mother’s: Eastport, Maine.)
Katherine Stanley Obando
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!
katherine stanley obando 