I have one major complaint about Singapore. Two complaints if you count that "Strangers Touching My Child Thing", but ignoring that for a moment, my major complaint is....

BOOK STORES

Specifically there are no book stores in Singapore. And, the ones that do exist hardly count as book stores. Singapore's largest mall, VivoCity, has one small bookstore. I wouldn't have called it a book store. But it's pretty standard here. More than half the floor space is stationary and such supplies, one quarter is children's workbooks (seriously), and the remaining quarter is books. I'm pretty sure I have as many books in my house already, as they have for sale.

There are also no Used Books Stores. Instead we get pop up markets of used books in our "cheaper" malls. I frantically rush the kids to buy children's chapter books when these markets occur. $4 for a used book instead of $12 for a new one. Everyone gives you a heads up when the Used Books are for sale.

There are some boutique bookstores around. They are lovely and small, but actual bookstores - old shop houses stuffed full of books. There I've been able to find the odd book set in Singapore or written by Singaporean authors.

We heard rumors that there was a large bookstore in the Orchard Road area of high end malls. After lunch on Saturday, Jonathan and I decided to give it a try. Our wildest dreams were that it might be as good as a Chapters back in Canada.

We were shocked when we walked in. The escalator had dropped us in the middle of Books Kinokuniya - a mega bookstore. It was the whole floor of the mall. We couldn't see across it. We walked in about 20 feet together, and realizing our find, split up without a backwards glance. Good thing for Smart phones and also the fact that each bookshelf has a section number on it. I'm not sure we ever would have found each other again.

It looks like they have 3 locations, although we went to the largest one. Books Kinokuniya's websites says just this one location has 38,000 sq. ft. of retail space and more than 500,000 books. Most books were in English, but there were large Japanese and Chinese sections too.

I was standing in the Asian Authors section which was about 9 ft wide of floor to ceiling books, when a Chinese woman finally couldn't resist pointing out to me that this was the Asian section. She looked even more confused when I nodded and smiled and said "Yes, I know."  

To be fair, I did end up buying a book called "Travails of a Trailing Spouse" which is about an expat wife living in Singapore. But the last book I read is Totto Chan - a famous autobiographical memoir written by a Japanese author about her school days. I was definitely in the right section!

I had found a book and Jonathan had found me, but I said I'd just like to pop in to the children's section for a second. A 10 minute walk later, and we entered the children section. It is larger than our library's children's section - which I thought was a giant space before.

Needless to say, we really lost track of time at this bookstore. It was so busy, we couldn't get a cab and so we took the MRT with our giant bag of books. We were really late getting home, but I will be back the first chance I get.