A Season in Hell
The Gold Coast, in my younger days, was not a city that welcomed serious readers. It’s a long, skinny strip of a city pressed up against the South East Queensland coastline, a city predicated on beachfront tourism and theme parks and being a nice place to retire. I often introduce it to American friends as a nightmarish version of Miami that lacks all the class, which is possibly unfair, but I lived there for a very long time and I am very bitter about the experience. In my memory Gold Coast bookstores were characterized by their focus on the holiday read, easily digested books that could be burned through on a one-week getaway. When other serious readers recoil in the face of an airport bookshop, I feel a strange sense of nostalgia for the bookstores of my youth whose approach was startlingly familiar. In my early teens, when my reading tastes focused on the biggest names of the big-name doorstop
