I will never forget that American family I once saw in a European bookstore. The bookstore was located inside some grand old railway station and, by the looks and the sound of it, the four Americans were seriously late for their morning train. Which, admittedly, made little sense as they were currently inside this huge bookstore, erratically groping for books.
It took me seconds to realise that despite Noam Chomsky's slim but heavy-going treatise on anarchism I was currently holding in my hands (I was not going to buy it, but my train was some fifty minutes away), I was, in fact, carefully following the hilarious predicament of the American family. As you would, in a quiet European bookstore.
The predicament was such: the girl, who was about 16 years of age, was not leaving without a book. The train? Fuck the train. Cajolingly, her mother was suggesting various novels while the father was fuming by the entrance and the little brother did not much care for any of it. The girl was rejecting everything that was coming her way, until at some point the clearly desperate mom grabbed George Orwell and shoved him into her daughter's face.
"1984?!?" the girl exclaimed. "I hated that thing. Animal Farm was so much better".
At which point I put Chomsky back on the book shelf and moved further down the alphabet, though not as far as to not hear the rest of it. I'd had enough anarchy for one morning... but the best part was that all of a sudden - I was very much enjoying it.
