We’ve been through this before. Looking for a bookstore in the Houghton Lake area I mean. It was back when the older beach urchin had become an independent reader. This was a kid who couldn’t even endure the one-and-a-half mile ride from the Landfill to the Westgate Kroger [no uscan then] without dragging along a stack of books.

We were up here at Houghton Lake one weekend and she had totally run out of reading material. No books? A crisis! We set off on a bookstore reconnaissance mission and we were in luck! There was a little bookstore, Lighthouse Books or something like that, in the brand-new Glen’s strip mall. It wasn’t Border’s but we did find a few books. I think we bought, among other things, one of the American Girls series books. It was one of her first chapter books and I actually remember wondering if it would be too hard for her. What was I thinking? If my memory is accurate, she devoured it in a matter of hours.

Alas, that little store only lasted a year or two and here we are again, in the 21st century, looking for a bookstore at Houghton Lake. The GG googled bookstores in the area and an unlikely sounding result placed one in “the heights”. Roight. Houghton Lake Heights has the run-down old Turtle Soup Bar (and a couple others) and a post office and something called “Jane’s”. Could that be it? He couldn’t remember the name The Google had dredged up but this place didn’t look likely. It looked more like a typical run-down sinking-into-the-ground lakeside dwelling than a storefront. There was a “closed” sign in the window and a guy who was probably not “Jane” was sitting out in front smoking a cigarette. No, probably not a bookstore.

Well, maybe he had the location wrong, he thought. Maybe it’s over on 55. Just past Federal. We hung a left onto 55 and slowly moseyed along for a couple of miles looking for possibilities. Seedy looking bars. Abandoned antique stores. Go-kart tracks. Bart’s Fruit Market. A Shell station where we paid $4.09 to fill ‘er up. Bookstore? Not.

Now, we have Kmart and Walmart here and they both probably have a book rack where you can get the latest paperback bestseller or romance novel or maybe a nice self-help book. Or a book with a numeral in the title. And the GG has been known to read a few books with numerals in the titles. But he wanted something specific today. I’m not sure what. He’s *been* reading Horatio Hornblower all weekend, for the second or third time. Anyway, whatever he was looking for was probably not available at Walmart and after hiking in the woods at Beaver Creek all morning, we didn’t have the psychic stamina to join the rest of middle-America there on a Saturday afternoon. Sorry but I don’t need any dog Halloween costumes today.

So what is it with this area? Doesn’t anybody around here read?

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