Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a fun weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. 

This week's theme:  Bookstores & Libraries I've Always Wanted to Visit.

How could I resist a theme like that?

At the top of my list is Powells Books in Portland, Oregon, a place I've long wanted to visit:

Next on my list is Hay-on-Wye ... a town in Wales chock full of bookshops:

But after that, the bookstores and libraries I most want to visit are all fictional.

Like Flourish and Blotts from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone:

"a shop ... where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk; books full of peculiar symbols and a few books with nothing in them at all."

Then there's the library in Robin McKinley's Beauty:

"This single room of the library was as large as our whole house in the city had been, and I could see more book-filled rooms through open doors in all directions, including a balcony overhead, all built from floor to high ceiling with bookshelves. ... The rows of books tugged unrepentantly at the edges of my sight. I walked like one bewitched. 'I didn't know there were so many books in the world,' I said, and the Beast's answer was heard only in my ear and did not register in my brain: 'Well, in fact, there aren't.'"

And who wouldn't want to visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books from Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind:

       "A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled and winked at me.

      "'This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. ... When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands.'"

(The Aedificium)

Last on my list is the Aedificium, that labyrinth of a library from Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose:

"Our library is not like others ... The library was laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the centuries, and which none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librarian has received the secret, from the librarian who preceded him ... Only the librarian has the right to move through the labyrinth of the books .... No one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium. No one should. No one can. The library defends itself .... a spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge."

Who wouldn't want to visit all of these fabulous places 

and check out the amazing books that reside inside?

Happy Reading!