Greetings everyone. I’ve back from a very long and rather physically exhausting trip to South America, though I have the stories and Mrs. BookFox has the pictures to prove we had a good time (I will link to Flickr once we upload). Many thanks to my wonderful guest posters who held down the fort and injected their literary acumen into BookFox. I’m a bit jetlagged, and feel far off from the swift current of the blogosphere (funny how just a month and a half can really throw you out of the flow of the industry), but I’m ready to swim back into the rapids. I’ve missed so many blogs, and am reading them with renewed interest, trying to catch up on all that I’ve missed out on during the summer.
I’m also ready to get back into reading. I read a fair bit at the beginning of the trip, but as the summer progressed, it was difficult to find English language books while up Uruguayan rivers and crossing Bolivian salt flats. It was also rather difficult to find them even in the capitols (curse you, Buenos Aires, land of bookstores as plentiful as Starbucks and yet not even any Lonely Planets guidebooks!). And when I managed to finally score a book (Jorge Luis Borges – Brodie’s Report), it cost $20 for a Penguin paperback that ran $7 new in the states. But I was so hungry for some appropriate reading other than the lingua of guidebooks that I coughed it up. On a side note, South East Asia, where I traveled last year, is much friendly to English readers – actually, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are wonderful at providing massive selections of cheap books and allowing you to trade in your old ones. But for those of you planning to go to anywhere in South America, especially South-South America, you better carry everything you want to read.
Speaking of finding books, I am happy to report that there is a corner of the Planet where Harry Potter does not reign. Yes, that’s right, the global phenomenon has not spread to every corner of humanity. In Paraguay, even the capitol Asuncion, which, granted, is one of the least visited, least touristy and least Westernized cities in South America, there was not a single copy of Harry Potter. We know because Mrs. BookFox looked through more than ten bookstores (I was the unwilling accomplice). However, this paucity of H. P. fever only existed in this isolated Paraguayan pocket. In the airport in Santiago, Chile had crates upon crates, every thick book selling for $45. A glut, if you will, just like everywhere else.
I’ll jump back into the posting fray next week. Until then, enjoy your weekend, and make sure to read a short story before you go to bed.
