The Bookcases

If I close my eyes right now, I can still smell them. Three or four bookcases, full of books, all cheap wood-pulp paperbacks. The kind of paperback that when you pick it up, you wonder how something with so many pages could weigh so little. Coffee- and curry-stained books, purchased in airports all around the world. Many of them had familiar pricing stickers on them, still, in Kroner. But there were others. Some had a strange-looking L before the price. Others had an S with a line through it. Others again were bought in Singapore, Sydney, or Seoul. The books were all in English.