Today's discovery, a 7-storey palace of books, 上海书城福州路店 Shanghai Book City on Fuzhou Road. Almost all of those books were in Chinese, it's true, and the "foreign and imported books" section at the top was depressing - minor Victorian novels never die, but get reprinted and reprinted by local presses. But on the language learning floor I found bilingual editions of several old and new novels, foreign and domestic, and some aids for foreign learners of Chinese. (I picked up a translation of
A Dream of Red 
Mansions, a bilingual edition of poems of Li Bai,
and an edition of a book I've now seen two survivors of the Cultural
Revolution say blew open their minds, Balzac's
Père Goriot -
albeit English-Chinese!) In fact that whole Fuzhou Road neighborhood feels
bookish - with coffee shops aplenty, too. I'll be back!
