Places

Portland is awash is places away from libraries and bookstores to read in the company of strangers. City of Readers: The Book Lover's Guide to Portland recommends twenty-five of them, including when to go and how to get there. Pick up a copy of City of Readers in September 2006 at your neighborhood library or independent bookstore, and then catch TriMet or ride your bike or walk to a new haunt. However you get there, don't drive. Driving is just bad on so many different levels.

Grab your book or local literary journal and test out a reading spot for a morning or an afternoon in an entirely different neighborhood than your routine. If you live east, go west to Village Coffee, 7781 SW Capitol Highway in Multnomah Village. The organic coffee and delicious baked goods in this tiny shop will change your attitude toward the West Side. Drop by Annie Bloom's while you?re on the block.

If you live west, head east, and if you haven't spent hours at Stumptown Coffee Roasters on Southeast Belmont at 33rd already, you're missing one of Portland most idiosyncratic neighborhood culures. If you live southeast, head north to Peninsula Park, and take your cell phone, because once you get there, you?ll want to call a Realtor and start looking for a huge four-bedroom house within walking distance of this amazing Rose Gardens where you can read outdoors for hours through the summer and fall.

And here's a really big leap: If you live north, head due south and keep going until to run into the Reed College campus, at which point you'll think you?ve been transported along with novelist Geoffrey Wolff by transcontinental railroad to an Ivy League campus in the East. There are so many tantalizing indoor and outdoor spots for reading on the Reed Campus that you could take your entire family and not see each other for hours. Caution: Someone might start reading philosophy while you're there.