Crowell Public Library
This past weekend, I went on a short, 13 minute drive to one of my favorite places in the Pasadena area: Crowell Public Library in San Marino.
The car ride is always a great experience. The most common way to go is through some residential areas of Pasadena where you can see some funky architecture. Each house is built in its own style, from typical California Mission-Style houses to some more French-inspired mansions. The library itself is quite large and fancy. There are nice lounging places both inside and outside, helpful staff, and, of course, a wealth of books. I might try to work a bit here next term.
My boyfriend and I go every few weeks or so to the Book Shoppe, a used bookstore run by the library. Here, we always find a treasure trove of books, all in pretty great condition! I generally look at the cookbooks and fiction. This time, I ended up getting a cookbook on 1001 different cookie recipes, a cookbook on easy, 4-ingredient meals (I’m getting prepared to cook for myself off-campus next year!), Eat This Not That as a fun read about grocery store food,and two fiction books (Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviorand J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy). In total, these books came out to only 8 dollars! This store is definitely a great place for college students on a budget to still keep up on reading. They also have a pretty extensive textbook section. One time, my boyfriend even was able to find a nice copy of the Chemistry 1a/b textbook for only a few dollars (the book sells for around $80 -$100 online).
We also decided to peek in to the actual library itself to see whether they had any books in Japanese, a language that we are both learning. Though they had a complete Chinese section (I think there were at least 20 bookcases filled with books written in Chinese, so if you plan on studying that language, this is definitely the place to go), they only had a few language-learning books in Japanese. We did come across a book written about how to read hieroglyphics, which looked super interesting. Though I have my hands full with Japanese this summer, maybe I can take that book out over winter break… Well, I have something to look forward to!
