city lights (san francisco, CA)

of course! a classic! city lights is one of those old hallowed bookstores that just has a certain kind of aura you feel excited... maybe a little awed... to be in, like getting to reach back in time to a city's venerated past (it feels a little like Paris's Shakespeare & Company in that way, City Lights' beat poets and pre-gentrification SF equivalent to Paris's Hemingway and Fitzgerald). sometimes it just feels nice to be a writer hanging out where other writers used to hang out