The Best Of team finds a bookstore to satisfy your literary urges.
In a city so defined by its literary titans, we assumed they’d be handing out copies of Shevchenko’s poetry to us when we got off the plane at Borispil. And, to be sure, bookshops in the capital abound. Sadly, though, we were surprised at the dearth of options when it came to finding titles in the English language. We figured, with all the ex-pats in town (and so many of them with pretensions of erudition), that there’d be numerous places to indulge whatever literary or informational fancy we had. Well, we were wrong. But avid readers, take heart: We were sure there had to be a place or two that could service even the most discriminating reader. And the Best Of team set out to find where.
Bizarre bazaar
Petrivka can be by turns exciting, entertaining, fascinating, frustrating and monstrous, depending on the weather, your mood, how crowded it is and how interested you are in haggling. Though you might be cowed at first by the endless stalls selling everything from bootleg pornography to kitchen utensils, a would-be book buyer will soon notice that no matter how many booths you visit, the same titles seem to reappear endlessly, as if some Twilight-Zone nightmare of repetition. It’s inevitable that at some point you ask yourself the vertiginous “Have I already been down this aisle?” while the faces of the sellers grow eerily similar each time you look. While one stall might have Hardy, Dickens and James, the next booth will have Dickens, Hardy and Wharton while the next contains Dickens, Hardy and Joyce. The plus side, however, is that almost all the English-language fiction are Penguin Classics, meaning they usually cost about Hr 15 (try to get two for Hr 25). The rest is your oddball assortment of cookbooks, religious texts and massage primers. However, and very helpful for the would-be Russophile, are the dual-language titles – reprinting English classics you most likely suffered through in high school with the corresponding Russian on the opposite page (for the record, though, we didn’t see any in Ukrainian).
Dog-eared but well-priced
With a small selection that also includes used titles, frugal readers will enjoy the prices but may be a little stymied by the selection at Baboon. While the ambience is wonderful – and you can relax for an afternoon with a nice cup of coffee and a great little meal while ephemeral jazz music snakes into notice now and then – the book choices are as schizophrenic as they come: 20-year-old hardback biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, pulp detective novels from the ‘80s, and the occasional classic next to manuals on how best to manage your internet business written well before the bursting of the bubble. While you might certainly find something you want (and at a price much cheaper than anything else in town), this is not the place to come with something specific in mind. However, if you’re looking to browse over lunch on a rainy afternoon (and also explore how odd and diverse the tastes of your fellow ex-pats are), this is the place to stop. Sister cafe Kvartira in Podil also has a similar selection, but they focus much more on new titles.
Mallrats
Orfey in the Globus mall has a selection of English-language remainders, creating a very random array of possibilities, though with nowhere near the comic value of some of the things you stumble across at Baboon. A biography of Elton John (humbly titled “Sir Elton”) grins next to the dour cover of Normal Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” while a hardcover about CEO life let’s them both rest comfortably against its solid spine. Again, you might find a winner here by accident, but this is not the place to come if want to find a particular title. What’s more, the store is often annoyingly crowded and, with the weather finally getting nice, why step inside a mall if you can avoid it? Also, many of the chains here, such as Bookva, often have a small selection of English-language books (and I mean “small,” as in half a shelf or so). If there’s one in your neighborhood, call ahead to make sure.
Expanding our library
Our winner was obvious from the moment we walked in. The Globe, an adorable little nook located in the Metrograd shopping center, easily clinched first (the simplest way to find it in the snaking subterranean shoppers’ paradise is to stand next to the Lenin statue’s right side on Shevchenko, face the same direction as the former Soviet leader, and then enter through the steps on the corner of Kreshchatyk to your right). Not only did Globe have a real – and, given the size, surprisingly extensive – selection of English-language literature, but it also had well-chosen titles in other subjects as well: cooking, history, biography, children’s books and engaging ephemera that caused us to constantly stop and rifle through a few pages. The most important aspect of the Globe’s selection, however, is that you can tell there’s a true book-loving mind behind the titles you’re browsing, and that the books were not simply stocked on the shelves because they were the ones that happened to fall of the truck. Add to that the fact that the incredibly helpful staff just happened to be playing what’s possibly our favorite band on the stereo – one we never expected to hear so far from home. Browsing was always one of our most time-consuming hobbies back in the States, and checking out some great literature while listening to the Velvet Underground was, perhaps, a little bit too much to hope for here in Kyiv. But we found it all at the Globe.
Globe Book Store
Metrograd Shopping Complex
From 8 a.m. to 6 a.m. daily, 241-8412
