If you should find yourself having to spend a few days in Omaha, Nebraska, and find yourself running out of things to do besides eating a lot, which should happen fairly quickly, and if you enjoy a good used/antiquarian book store, you are in luck. On Jackson Street, right in the middle of the old market area, you will find a vast, magical place called Jackson Street Books. Unassuming and easy to pass by from the outside; but once you walk in, BOOM!! You will be mesmerized. Prepare to spend hours.
While there, I was drawn to the photograph of the author as a young man on the cover of a copy of Winter Journal, a memoir by Paul Auster, an infuriatingly self absorbed, self referential, hypnotically self obsessed (I use the word self a lot here for a reason), one of a kind Jewish middle class meta-existentialist born 11 days before me in 1947, into the tedium of a suburban middle class childhood which should have consigned him to the stifling mediocrity I struggle against but instead, morphed him into an award winning international phenomena/ literary enigma who has grabbed my by the soul dragged me into the rabbit hole of his perverse imagination and won't let go. I have now bought 3 of his books, am hooked and I don't know why. But I digress.
You can't tell a bookstore by it's cover. It would be easy to walk by this place and not even know what you are missing. You will thank me for the recommendation.
Pablo
