My latest acquisition :

I saw some reviews in the forum here, so I decided to see if the book was available in Singapore. There are two big bookstores here, Borders and its rival, Kinokuniya. Besides a large collection of books, Borders has comfy chairs, a music section with a good selection of CDs, and a cafe. Kinokuniya has a convenient delivery service where you can order your books online and have them delivered the very next day. Moreover, if you order more than S$50 worth of books, there is no delivery charge.

I checked both bookstores' websites and both appeared to have the weather book, plus another by CS Lewis (Mere Christianity) which I'd been thinking about getting for some time. The weather book had a different cover to that mentioned on the forum, though. The edition with the tropical cyclone was nicer; there are so many beautiful weather phenomena that could have been featured & they had to choose an umbrella.

I went to Borders first. There were plenty of books in the religion section, but they didn't seem to be in alphabetical or any sort of order. After searching for a while, I gave up and went to the information counter. The staff member went off to look but returned & informed me that the book was out of stock. Then I asked about the weather book. At first, he couldn't find it in the database. For one thing, I wasn't sure if the title was just "Weather" or "Collins Gem Weather". Then I wasn't sure if Storm Dunlop was the author or if that referred to something else (I mean, what sort of name is that?). Finally he got it on his computer screen & went off to look for it. He returned, saying that it, too, was out of stock.

After that I went to Kinokuniya. This time I went straight to the service staff at the information counter. Mere Christianity? In a short while she came back with it. Then we had some confusion finding the weather book in the database again, but once she'd located it, she went off & retrieved it in a jiffy.

Final score : Kinokuniya 1 Borders 0