Note: This post is part of an ongoing blog series called #costamesa365 where the author is striving to shop only* in her city of Costa Mesa, for a year.
Over the holidays, my husband and I got totally hooked on the Orphan X series by author Gregg Hurwitz.
Very “spy-thriller” genre – with clean, punchy writing, good suspense and refreshing character depth and development.
So we collectively blew through books one through three and were so excited when we heard book four, Out Of The Dark, was coming out in late January.
That’s when we remembered, oh shoot! We have to #costamesa365 that book purchase. No Kindle impulse-shopping for us.
SIDE NOTE: Can I just ask… when are we going to stop being shocked and surprised by Costa Mesa-only shopping? It’s weird. My family has been doing this for a while, now, and we still struggle to even remember that these little purchases are a no-go. It’s like our brains actively resist the process. Strange.
No biggie, right? It’s a really popular series, so we’ll just pop over to our local, Costa Mesa bookstore and…
Oh wait.
We don’t have any Costa Mesa bookstores anymore!
Well, we do technically have one – Book Off – but it’s strictly used books. (We know. We called.)
We asked the OCC Bookstore on campus to ask if they could order it for us. (They can’t.)
The Barnes & Noble at Metro Pointe closed down in late 2016.
This is bad. Really bad!
I’m having a bookmergency!
How will I know if Evan can overcome his training and rediscover his humanity?
How high does the conspiracy really go?
Will we ever see Joey again?
And most importantly, will Evan just hook up with Mia already?
I’m at the point where I’m getting desperate. I’ve been trolling local, grocery-strore book aisles. This is me at Vons recently:
No luck so far at the grocery store.
Although it is heartening to see they have Orphan X book three, Hellbent, on the shelf. Maybe someday book 4 will show up?
Also, can we pause for a moment to acknowledge America’s totally random taste in books? That shelf, I mean…
I am sure Out Of The Dark will eventually make it’s way to our local libraries, our supermarkets, even, someday, to Book Off.
But what if I wanted to read a less-than-bestseller series? Has browsing Amazon really become my only option to discover brand new authors? Have books become truly dematerialized, stripped down to just their data?
It’s one thing to read about these cultural changes and ponder them theoretically. It’s another thing to live it.
What do you do when you just want to buy a book… and you’d like to support someone local to get it?
It just doesn’t seem possible anymore.
You don’t need to read between the lines to realize we’ve likely turned the page on local bookstores, forever. ♥
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*We will always start by shopping / looking in Costa Mesa, first. But if we really need something and an alternative is nowhere to be found in Costa Mesa, we’ll stray. Also, as parents, we’ve decided that certain kid-related things (mainly educational) will need to remain baked in.
