The most interesting thing about malls is what you can’t find in them. There’s never a good hardware store in a mall, for example, outside of Sears. For some insane but unspoken reason, almost no mall is connected to a grocery store. And since Borders exploded like a poorly maintained fertilizer silo, taking Waldenbooks with it, it’s increasingly difficult to find a mall bookstore anywhere.
On Alderwood’s large, glowing directories, the only listing for “Books” points to the Papyrus store over in Zone A. Their book selection is familiar to me. Not long after I first got my job as The Stranger‘s books editor, I started collecting review copies of awful “joke” books, many of which are compilations of content from amusing blogs available for free on the internet, into a pile that Stranger editorial director Dan Savage dubbed Hell’s Lending Library. The library now takes up two and a half shelves at The Stranger‘s offices and includes titles like The Man Cave Book, Suburban Haiku, and Honey Badger Don’t Care…