About books n beans

One of my favourite places in Birmingham, AL where I have spent the maximum time (ofcourse other than work and home) in last 2 years is this. Its the barnes and noble book store which brews starbucks coffee!  The warmth of coffee, the smell of Mocha and crisp and colorful books,  siting in a comfy chair, by the window, with a friend beside. Perfect! for everything else there is Master card. A little wind chill or rain would be a icing to the ambiance. Since, a sunny day would usually call out to play or walk.

As I look through the well defined isles in the book store and read fiction and classics I am reminded of the summer vacation which would mean get up in the morning, play badminton and then read read read all day.

'The cherry tree' a story in gulmohar in std 5, made such an impression by its simplicity that since then I fell in love with the writing style of Ruskin Bond and still wish to go to see him and the places described in this book like foothills of Nilgiri, Missouri and Shimla.  Enid Blyton's -  famous five's treasure island, smugglers top, kirrin island and sea were the places that really existed and which I did visit every summer vacation. Chilling with the my dog on the beach, When I was young I still wanted to go to UK to actually see if the picture in my mind really did match anything up there...

The lilac inn and the Nancy drew from River Heights....were real people and places created after years of following her through her growing age and solving mysteries with her dad every other month and driving down to every mysterious cottage with her cousins george and bess...
Similar are my attachments to "baker street", Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and the joy of much cheered Dr. Watson is equally shared with the comeback of sherlock holmes after his fake death....

For shools I did say I like Malory towers and Hogwarts any day over mine.
"Alice in wonderland" is by far the most random instance of imagination I have ever seen. It is a book rightly made for children keeping in mind their attention span and hence the events in the book happen quickly and randomly. I am amazed at the skill of the author to capture such randomness in one small book.
"The little prince" is a book which does total justice to the word " a child's imagination". Its published in 180 languages across the world. That tells how many more children could visualize their dreams...
"Little Women" was the first classic I ever read and a story of 4 sisters by Louisa May Alcott still is fresh in my mind.
On the similar lines, One day I came across "sense and sensibility" and with the potrayal of strong women charachters in all novels of Jane Austen, I also came to admire her simple but old english style of writing.

I will always love a book for the crisp sound of the pages, the scent of a new book, the details of the cover, the beauty of heartfelt acknowledgements, the random page of the book written as preface and the book itself.

Coffee

Well, to my tea gang and all my tea loving friends I have grown up drinking tea made with fresh milk, so I am still faithful to it. But as I enter the bookstore I have to break my vow and succumb to the warm hot chocolate bundt cake and coffee (since they don't server that good a tea there). I can as never imagined now distinguish between the taste of nescafe and starbucks as oppossed to any other. So much is the addiction is that I wish to visit the first starbucks coffee shop (started:1970) in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Well, maybe also due to the fact that that is another city in US I have so much wished but somehow never visited while many of my friends made their random trips and brought along coffee beans as token.

While I have more than 4 times visited the west coast, Peet's still has the mark there. To all those who wonder, Peet's is where starbucks came from.  The three founders of Starbucks knew Alfred Peet personally, founded Starbucks and bought the coffee beans for Starbucks directly from Peet's during their first year of business in 1971. In 1987, Baldwin and Peet's owners sold the Starbucks chain to focus on Peet's, and Baldwin and Howard Schultz, Starbucks' new owner, entered into a no-compete agreement for a period of 10 years in the Bay Area. Hence, Starbucks did not probably come into existence till 1997 in Bay area.


Peet's has been much slower to expand than Starbucks, and has maintained more of its focus as a coffee and tea retailer, rather than a coffee bar, a distinction that has long separated Peet's from Starbucks. Peet's is still primarily a California operation, while for starbucks as we all know has more than 10,000 stores all over US and is a part of many book store chains providing the speciality coffee!

So, all my dear friends, you see how mesmerizing times get and how easily we get driven to another world of memories. Here is my humble attempt to put in words the imaginations and writing of these inspirational authors with coffee on the side. Lets do it!