Libros

Well, I've been working close to 50 hours each week, though some weeks more and others less. As it turns out though, when you don't have any homework or any other obligations upon leaving work other than sitting on the porch with your co-workers (which I do a fair amount of too--my life is hard, huh?), there's still a surprising amount of time left. And, if you know me at all, you can probably guess what a crippled me who still can't run or anything might do with all this free time when it's dark out (which it always is after work--due to this Southern-Hemisphere-Winter thing). Yep. I read. But this is somewhat problematic, since I'm hardly more than halfway through my trip and I've already finished all the books I brought with me, as well as several books other people brought with them. Oops. Miscalculated on that one.

So, I wandered into a bookstore the other day that I had seen while walking to a café to try to find a new book that I could read in Spanish. Well, nearly all of them were either translated Tom Clancy novels or the like, or....ready? In English. Which is not what I was looking for. Also, it was a used book store in which the books cost, on average, about $10. There's a used bookstore close to my home in Boulder in which I could have gotten similar books for $2. This is the one thing I've encountered thus far that actually costs more than it would in the States. When I asked around about this, everyone gave me the same reason: People just don't read around here, so in order to make any money at all, book stores need to charge high prices for the books they do sell. It's pretty basic economics, I guess, but I wonder if people would read more if the books were more affordable? Either way, it's a pretty unfortunate phenomenon.