Allow me a moment to sing the praises of Waldenbooks—yes, Waldenbooks, the Borders subsidiary that privileged grab-and-go buying ahead of casual browsing. It was the kind of place you went when you needed to buy a book but didn’t particularly care for bookstores. But as a teenager growing up in an industrial Chicago suburb, I practically lived in the store’s narrow music-book section, which is where I first discovered Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, a book that hit 16-year-old me like a thunderbolt.1 Any bookstore that encourages you to punch above your intellectual weight is a good bookstore. Tucked between the JCPenney and the Casual Corner, the North Riverside Park Mall Waldenbooks was a good bookstore.
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