North of Wrigley

Local bookstores mean local culture- that's my justification and I'm sticking to it. When I was at the cartoonist signing in Evanston last night, I overheard someone mention a bookstore called Women and Children First. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued- bookstores with interesting names probably have interesting books for sale. This logic was good enough for me today, so I got on a northbound bus up Clark, past Wrigley Field, darn near to Canada, until I came to the block with the bookstore. I'd never been to a feminist bookstore, and I couldn't name another, but this was a nice store in general. They've judiciously collected a selection of books ranging from a little bit if general interest to the sort of women's studies books that remind me how very little I know about how the other half lives, so to speak. To their credit, they have a small comics section with titles like Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, and Alias. And, of course, a couple selections by Art Spiegelman- you can't have an independent bookstore without at least one copy of Maus.

Here's what I did after the bookstore. Moroccan eggplant with couscous from Andie's Restaurant, a Mediterranean place on the same block. I've eaten at the Vatican City snack bar, and this beats the hell out of that. The neighborhood is full of people from all different parts of the world, and the food reflects that.

I took the bus back to the Wrigley area to walk down to Chicago Comics to buy a few of my weekly titles and peruse a few of the local retailers. I don't shop, I peruse. The difference lies in my ability to view cool local merchandise from an academic perspective, like how I could carry books about interactivity in the cool messenger bag I saw.

At 7:00 I went to Sheffield's, a bar on N. Sheffield, for Reading Under the Influence; a monthly gathering of local authors and bookworms. Anyone can sign up to read original or published work, and must do a shot before and after reading. After someone reads a well-known work, they ask the crowd trivia questions and award the person with the most correct answers with some kind of prize, usually a book. It was a fun time.